Chapter 4: Contract 7-Bravo: The Hive Proxy

Culver's seawall had a reputation.

Every Tidehunter who worked the southern Arks knew the Culver seawall the way they knew bad rebreather valves and Compact contract language — as a thing that would eventually become someone's specific problem. It had been repaired seventeen times in eight years according to Thresh's registry, each repair documented in the handwriting of whichever salvage crew the council could afford that season, and each repair addressing the symptom rather than the underlying structural fatigue that made the wall, at its northeastern corner, essentially a suggestion.

Karev read this on the ferry from Sunder, standing at the bow rail with the contract brief on a laminated sheet and the cold case in his kit and the protein block sitting in his stomach like compressed sand. The ferry ran seven hours. He spent five of them on the rail and two of them horizontal in the crew hold, not sleeping but achieving the horizontal rest that served the same function, his modified biochemistry conducting its private inventory of his systems the way it always did when he let it — the slow internal accounting of a body built to specifications that its occupant had not been consulted on.