Page 3

DRAEVEN

The contract reaches me at Halvic Station three days after the theft, which tells me more about the client than the file does.

Three days is fast. Three days means somebody already had the site under watch, already knew what came out of it, and already understood that a Precursor relic put on the open market disappears inside a week and never surfaces again. Most clients spend three days deciding whether to be embarrassed.

The file itself is thin. One artifact, unclassified, crystalline, recovered from an unregistered cache on Castus and taken by force the same day. A location reference accurate to nine kilometers. A recovery fee generous enough that I stop reading it and start reading the parts nobody wrote down.

Nine kilometers of marsh is not a location. It's an apology.

I take the contract because of the name attached to the land. Garrick Marlow. Human, deceased, four months. Forty years on Castus with no licence, no institutional backing, and no recorded finds, which in my profession describes exactly two kinds of person. The first kind never finds anything.

Mountmend has no landing field, so I come in by water from the south and walk the last stretch, and by the time the village is in sight I have stopped being visible.

It isn't invisibility. Humans always want it to be. My skin takes the color of what surrounds it, and in a marsh that means I am a great deal of green and brown standing very still, which works until I move badly. So I don't move badly. My tail stays out of the reeds. My spines drink what light the overcast gives me, storing it against the possibility that today turns into the kind of day where I need to cross forty meters faster than anyone can track.

I spend six hours in the water before I go anywhere near a person.

What I find in those six hours is this. There are eleven sites within a morning's travel of the village where the ground has been worked and put back, all of them old, all of them careful. Marlow dug his caches shut again. He replaced the turf. He weighted the sod with stones so the marsh wouldn't tell on him. A man does not do that for treasure. A man does that for a secret he intends to outlive.

And one site, on a grass hummock north of the village, has been opened twice.

The first opening was done by somebody who had never dug anything in her life. Knife marks in the root mat. A trench widened four times because it was started too narrow. Boot prints small enough that I take a moment to be certain there was only one of her.

The second was done by six men with cutting tools and no interest in the ground surviving them.

Underneath both, the mechanism is still there, still functional, and the mechanism is what matters. It's a keyed seal. It doesn't respond to force, which is why the six men left it and took only what the first digger had already exposed. It responds to a sequence, and the sequence was pressed into the metal ten thousand years before anything on this planet had a name.

Somebody opened it correctly. Somebody with small hands and no experience knew which mark the seal wanted.

That is not luck. That is instruction.

I am still crouched over the seal when a motor coughs somewhere east of me.

She comes up the eastern channel too fast for the water she's in, hits the reed bank, and swears at the motor with real feeling. Human female. Small. Dark curls escaping a tie that has clearly stopped trying. A satchel across her chest that she keeps one hand on even while the other fights the tiller, which tells me where the artifact is before she's finished tying off.

She doesn't see me. She walks within two meters of me and doesn't see me, and drops to her knees beside the opened seal with an expression I don't have a category for. Not greed. I know what greed does to a face.

“Okay,” she says to the empty island. “Okay. They took it. Fine. Fine.”

“They took one.”

To her credit, she doesn't scream. She goes backward hard, lands on her hip in the mud, and looks up at approximately the height of my chest before she finds my face, and she stays where she is instead of running, which is either courage or shock. Both get people killed at similar rates.

“Oh,” she says.

“Stand up.”

“I'd rather not, actually. Everything about this is going better from down here.”

I let the color come back. It's easier for humans if they can see where I begin. She watches it happen without looking away once, and I file that.

“You're a relic hunter,” I say.

“I'm a teacher.”

“You opened a Precursor seal this morning.”

“I opened a—” She stops. Recalculates. Gets to her feet without help and brushes marsh off her knees in a way that accomplishes nothing. “Who are you?”