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“The ninth,” I say. “The one they took off the island on my second day.”

“It holds the approach.”

“It holds the door.” I let the projection close and the front room comes back, small and yellow and full of people. “We can find the site. We can stand on top of it. Without the ninth we can't get in, and the man who has the ninth doesn't know what it's for, or he'd have used it eight months ago.”

“He'll work it out,” Draeven says.

“He will, the moment somebody tells him what the other eight do.”

And a scout with a long lens watched us leave a ranger post four days ago, and filed a report, and I am painfully aware of a sentence somebody else wrote.

CHAPTER 14

DRAEVEN

The Rell Crossing depot keeps paper, because frontier depots always keep paper, and paper is the only thing on this planet that has never once lied to me.

It takes two days and a bribe I will not be itemizing. What comes back is a shipping ledger, and in the ledger is a standing account that has paid for expedited freight into this basin for eleven years, and the account is held under a preservation trust registered on a world four jumps from here.

The trust has a patron. The patron endows museums. He has funded chairs in frontier archaeology at two universities and a wing at Halvic Station carries his name over the door, and I have walked under it.

Cassian Vane.

I let that settle a while, because it is less a shock than a rearrangement. Everything I have found in this marsh has had money underneath it and patience laid over it, and there is exactly one profile that produces both, and it is never a criminal. Criminals are impatient. It is always a collector.

Selka comes in on the morning tide, three days after I send for her, in a survey launch with Frontier Historical Authority markings that make half of Mountmend stand up on their boardwalks to look.

We've worked six recoveries together. She is the only archaeologist I've met who has never once asked me to be quiet while she thought.

“You look terrible,” she says, by way of greeting.

“I've been in a well.”

“You've been in something.” Her amber eyes go past me, up the boardwalk, to where Clara is arguing amiably with Tilda about a boat. Selka's spines lift a fraction and settle. She offers nothing at all, which from her is a paragraph.

I give her the artifacts first, because that's the professional order, and she goes through all eight without speaking for ninety minutes.

“These aren't from one site,” she says finally.

“Nine sites. Two more held instructions and no object.”

“And the ninth?”

“Taken. Eight months ago, by a six-man crew with cutters, from a cradle on an island four kilometers from where you're sitting.”

Selka sits back. “Draeven, I have documented Precursor material on this world for nine years. I have four confirmed caches, and one is a wall.” She gestures at the table. “This is more assembled Precursor mechanism than exists in every catalogued collection in the sector. Combined.”

“I'm aware.”

“I don't think you are. This isn't a find. This is a rewrite.”

Clara comes in around midday with the ledger and does not leave the table for six hours, and by evening she has done to Vane what she did to her uncle's handwriting.

She matches the trust's freight dates against Garrick's journals. Every consignment into the basin lands inside nine weeks of a Marlow excavation. She matches them against the four vanished surveys, and three of the four filed their intent within a month of a trust shipment. She sets them beside the assessor's report on Garrick's death and finds a freight manifest into Rell Crossing dated eleven days before he drowned, carrying two passengers and no cargo at all.

“That's not a supply run,” she says. “Nobody ships two men and an empty hold across four jumps to look at a swamp.”

Selka reads it twice.