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“It's circumstantial,” she says.

“It's eleven years of circumstantial,” Clara says. “At some point that's just a shape.”

“It is. I agree with you. I'm telling you what a tribunal says.” Selka sets the ledger down carefully. “Cassian Vane has funded my department's field season twice. He has a preservation medal from a body I report to. If I file this tomorrow, the file goes to a desk he has bought lunch for, and then it goes nowhere, and then he knows.”

“So we don't file it,” Clara says. “We make it impossible to bury instead.”

That's roughly when I decide no argument in this room is winnable, and I go out onto the boardwalk to have the one I've been avoiding.

Selka joins me after a while. The marsh is doing the thing it does at dusk, going from brown to silver and pretending it was always going to.

“Ask,” I say.

“I don't need to. I watched you hand her the ledger.” She leans on the rail. “How long?”

“It was there on the first day. I've had twenty-four to be sensible about it.”

“And the word?”

“Not said.”

Selka makes a sound of grudging approval that I choose not to examine. “Good. That's the correct order and almost nobody manages it.” Then, differently: “Draeven. Do you understand what you're standing in?”

“Tell me your version.”

“My version is that in nine days a recovery specialist with a bonded licence will be asked, in writing, by a bonded client, to deliver an artifact he no longer intends to deliver.” She turns. “You will lose the licence. That isn't a risk, it's arithmetic. And without it you don't work the frontier, because nobody insures an unbonded tracker, and the only people who hire one are the people you've spent nineteen years taking things away from.”

“I know.”

“You don't. You're thirty-seven and you've never had a month without a contract. You have no idea what you're like when the work stops.” She lets that sit. “I'm not telling you to walk away. I'm telling you that the thing you're about to give up is not the licence. It's the version of yourself you built so you wouldn't have to be anything else.”

There is a considerable silence.

“I stood over a Precursor counting shaft eleven days ago,” I say, “and let a schoolteacher go down it alone, because the mechanism only opens for one and she was the only one who could read it. And I have run that four minutes back perhaps two hundred times looking for the version where I go instead, and there isn't one, because there is no version of this where I am useful to her by being larger.”

“That isn't an answer about the licence.”

“It's the entire answer to that question.” I watch the water go silver. “Fourteen years I've taken work that ends because a thing with an end can't be lost. Vane has spent eleven years buying a marsh out from under people who live in it and killing anyone who noticed. I could recover his artifact and file my report and be at Halvic Station inside a fortnight with my bond intact.”

“And?”

“And I would be a man who once knew a woman on Castus.”

Selka is quiet for a moment.

“I'll draft the authentication tonight,” she says. “Independent, sealed, and duplicated to two colleagues who don't like Vane and can't be reached through him. It won't protect you. It means that if this goes badly, the record exists somewhere he can't buy.”

“That's more than I asked for.”

“It’s considerably less than you’re about to need.” She pushes off the rail. “A last thing, and then I sleep. The observatory. If it is what she says it is, then whatever happens to your licence and whatever happens to Vane, that site cannot end up as a claim. Not his, not the Authority’s, and not mine.”

“Then whose?”

“That's the question your schoolteacher will have to answer,” Selka says, “and I would very much like to be standing there when she does.”

CHAPTER 15

CLARA