Chapter 10: What Ysolde's Reassignment Actually Meant

The charter docked at Tessaly's secondary slip at 0340, which meant the primary moorings were clear and the harbor watch was on its third hour of the overnight rotation — the precise window when attention degraded fastest. Karev had not planned this. It was simply how the transit times worked out. He noted it anyway.

Tessaly's field station occupied the northeastern corner of a ridge-shelf settlement built on what the old maps called the Alps' southern foothills, before the foothills became coastal terracing and the coastal terracing became the only habitable surface on this section of the water. The station itself was unremarkable from outside: a converted prefab structure with reinforced salt-weathering on the seaward walls and a Compact biotech designation plate beside the door that someone had wiped clean recently, the bracket screws still bright where the original had been swapped. He stood outside it for a moment in the dark, cataloguing that detail without particular conclusion, and then knocked.

Ysolde opened the door on the second knock. She was awake and dressed. There was dried reagent on her left cuff.