Chapter 6: What the Three Silent Hunters Knew

The ferry from Tessaly took eleven hours and the water was bad the whole way — a southeastern chop that made the hull work harder than it should, metal groaning at the joins in a way that suggested the maintenance schedule was aspirational rather than actual. Karev spent most of the crossing in the forward hold, away from the passenger compartment's smell of damp wool and recycled air, with his kit bag wedged between a cargo strut and his spine and Thresh's contact frequency open on the secondary unit he kept separate from his Compact-registered equipment.

He didn't use it yet. He let the frequency stay open and silent and watched the water through the hold's lower porthole — green-black, running deep, nothing visible below the surface chop. Whatever was down there was staying down there. That was usually the problem with whatever was down there.

He had Maren's contract register number memorized. He had Tamsin's and Ber's too, though he'd only looked them up in Thresh's secondary ledger, not from any prior familiarity. Tamsin he'd known — not well, the way Forge graduates knew each other, which was to say they recognized each other's augmentation tells without having to discuss them. The slightly widened peripheral response. The way the head moved when processing ambient sound, a fraction too deliberate to be natural. The economy of the hands. He'd worked adjacent to Tamsin on two contracts, shared a resupply connection on Ark Pellas, never had a conversation that wasn't operational. Now she was three letters in Thresh's ledger. LIA/CE. The entry had been made six weeks ago.