Turn 6 of 7

Ask the registry clerk to pull the berthing records for Rusch and Sons lighters

The clerk behind the counter is a thin man with spectacles and a cough that sounds like it has been with him longer than the job. He looks up when you approach, takes in your coat and your wind-chapped face, and sets his pen down with the air of someone who has been interrupted before and will be interrupted again. The office smells of paper dust and lamp oil, and the pigeonholes behind him stretch from floor to ceiling, each one stuffed with rolled berthing entries and carbon-copied receipts. A clock on the wall reads half past eight.

"I need the berthing records for any lighter registered to Rusch and Sons," you say. "Third-tier dockings in the last month."

The clerk blinks. He pushes his spectacles up his nose with one finger.

"Public record," he says, and turns to the wall of pigeonholes without argument. His fingers walk across the labels — R, Ru, and there. He pulls three slips of paper, carbon copies of berthing entries, and lays them on the counter. Each one is a small rectangle of cheap grey paper, filled out in handwriting that varies from entry to entry, the kind of forms that get stamped and filed and never looked at again.

The entries are sparse. Three dockings in the last month, all third-tier, all between the hours of midnight and three in the morning. The lighter's name is the *Eel*, registered to Rusch and Sons, contact name on the first two entries: M. Rusch. But the third entry — the most recent, dated three days ago, the night the aetherite moved — has a different hand on the contact line. The name is not Rusch. It reads D. Ferran.

You stare at it. The letters sit on the grey paper in blue ink, steady and unhurried, nothing like Vos's scrawl. D. Ferran. You know one Ferran on this ship. The clock on the wall ticks. The clerk coughs politely behind you, and you can feel the stone floor through your boots, cold and solid and very specific about what it will and will not hold up.

"Can I get a copy of this entry?" you ask.

"Two marks," the clerk says. You have forty-two. You pay him, and he produces a carbon press and lays the entry under it with the care of a man who treats every piece of paper as if it might one day be evidence. The copy comes out faint but legible — the name, the date, the lighter, the berth number. You fold it and put it inside your coat, and your hand is steady because it has to be. The bench sits at the tenth bell. Captain Ferran is on the deck of your ship, talking to the Court's clerk. And the name on the lighter that took the aetherite is hers.