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“Draeven. I recover stolen artifacts. Yours is currently four days from a private vault on a world neither of us will ever be invited to.”

“It isn't mine.”

“It's in your bag.”

That lands. She goes very still, and I watch her decide to lie, and then watch her decide not to, which takes about a second and a half and is the most interesting thing that has happened to me this month.

“There were two,” she says.

“There were two.”

“They didn't find the second one. It was under the first, in a lower cradle. You'd have to reach in past your elbow.” She lifts her chin. “They were in a hurry.”

Six professionals with cutting gear missed a second cradle because a schoolteacher wasn't afraid to put her arm in a hole. I keep my opinion of that off my face and mostly succeed.

“I'll need it,” I say. “And whatever told you which mark to press.”

“No.”

“The artifact is evidence in a licensed recovery.”

“The journals belonged to my uncle.” She says it without heat, which is worse than shouting, because there's nothing in it for me to push against. “He left them to me. He hid them under a floor for me. Someone drowned him in a marsh he'd walked for forty years, and you want me to hand you the only part of him nobody else could read.”

Four months, no licence, no recorded finds. Drowned in water he had charted for four decades.

I had assumed the client was chasing a stolen object. Standing on this island, I stop assuming that.

“Show me the journals,” I say.

She takes one out of the satchel and holds it open at arm's length, and I look at half a page of tight, wordless notation, and understand within four seconds that it is a personal cipher with no repeating structure I can attack, no linguistic anchor, and no key.

“How much of this can you read?”

“Some.”

“How much.”

“Enough to find the island.”

Eleven worked sites within a morning of the village. Six paid hands who knew exactly where to stand. And one small, stubborn human who is the only living thing in the galaxy that can tell me where the rest of them are.

I have spent nineteen years keeping civilians out of recoveries. It has kept a number of them alive.

“Pack for six days,” I say, and start toward the skiff.

“I'm sorry — pack?”

“You wanted the journals. Congratulations. They come with the rest of it.”

CHAPTER 3

CLARA

He tries to leave without me twice before breakfast.

The first time I catch him untying the skiff in the dark. The second time he has the decency to wait until I'm inside the house before he starts the motor, which I counter by standing on the end of the boardwalk holding the oilcloth bundle over the water.

“That's childish,” he says, from ten meters out.