Chapter 21: Serrath's Offer to Karev

Thresh's locked locker turned out to contain paper.

Not data chips, not specimen samples, not anything that required explanation before you could hold it. Just paper — actual sheets, pre-Inundation stock, the dense cream-colored kind that had stopped being manufactured somewhere around Year Fourteen of the Inundation's second peak, when the last functioning pulp facility on what had been the Scandinavian ridge went under. Karev had seen paper like this maybe four times in his life. He'd touched it twice. The third time he'd been underwater and it hadn't counted.

Thresh set the stack on the diagnostic bench beside the rebreather cold case. Six centimeters thick, bound with a braided cable tie that had been opened and re-closed so many times the ratchet was nearly stripped. He didn't say anything. He just moved the cable tie and put his palm flat on the top sheet to stop it curling in the depot's cross-draft, and waited.