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“In a minute.”

“Clara. Now.”

Something in my voice reaches her. She turns the crystal back and the stars go out, and the gallery comes back smaller and darker and much worse than it was, and in the flat gray afterward we both hear it.

An engine, throttled down, close in. It has been sitting there for some time.

I put her behind a roof post and go out along the platform, and I find exactly what I expect: a skiff in the reeds forty meters off, one man, a long-lens scope, and a transmitter with its indicator still warm.

He goes into the water and I let him swim, because he's nothing and because a corpse tells the client more than a soaked man with an empty scope.

But he saw it. He saw four meters of the galaxy hanging in a ruin, and by tonight so will whoever pays him.

“How much did he get?” Clara asks, when I come back.

“All of it.”

She takes that in. I watch her take it in, and I brace for the part where the schoolteacher from a small town outside Portland finally does the arithmetic on how far this is from her life and asks me, reasonably, to put her on a transport.

“Then they know it's a chart,” she says. “But they don't know it's a route, because you can't see the line until the fifth piece goes in, and the fifth piece was under a roof they dropped on us.” She's already reaching for the journals. “We've got maybe a day of advantage. Let's not waste it being upset.”

“You should return to Mountmend.”

“You should say that like you believe it.”

“Clara.”

“Draeven.” She looks up, and nothing is left of the woman who sat down in the rain and needed two minutes. “He left the last three buried for someone. Not for the frontier authority, not for a museum, and definitely not for the man who drowned him. For someone who'd sit up all night with his terrible handwriting because they loved him enough to bother.” She holds my eye. “That's me. There's nobody else. So no, I'm not going back to the village.”

Nineteen years, and every contract I have taken had an edge on it. You recover the object, you deliver the object, you leave, and nothing follows you off the world.

I stand in a ruin, in the dark, in a village that died before her grandmother was born, and watch a woman I have known for fourteen days sort her uncle's papers by lamplight with a bandaged hand, and everything in me that has spent two decades keeping its distance is quietly, comprehensively, being reassigned.

“Three in the ground,” I say.

“Three,” she agrees, and doesn't look up.

I keep watching her anyway. I have stopped trying to work out when that became the thing I do.

CHAPTER 9

CLARA

Garrick had a name for the place the seventh bearing points to, and it isn't on any chart Tilda can find.

He calls it the Long Quiet. He uses the phrase eleven times across two journals, always in plain script, never in cipher, which I've come to understand is his way of underlining something. Once he writes: three days in the Long Quiet and the birds stopped following me at the second bend.

“That's the deep marsh,” Joren says, when I read it to him. “South and east past the old weirs. Nobody fishes it.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing to catch.” He scratches his jaw. “And it eats boats.”

So of course that's where we're going, and so of course I have to stand in front of the village council to say so.

The council room is the upper floor of the meeting house, which has forty chairs and, this evening, eleven people in them. Elder Harlan Moss sits at the front with a marshwood staff across his knees, and he lets me speak for four uninterrupted minutes, which I'm told is unprecedented.

“No,” he says, when I finish.