The Wolf Who Dove Alone

Red. Yellow. Blue.

Red for the medical clearances, yellow for the dive logs, blue for the discrepancies, the folder that didn't exist five days ago and is now the thickest of the three.

I count them at the desk. Then I count them again, because the first count is reflex and the second one is real.

"Dani."

Iliana is in the doorway of the portacabin with a peach in her hand and a strap of sunburn across her nose, and she has been standing there long enough to have watched me do it twice.

"Twenty two minutes," I say. "The harbormaster closes for μεσημέρι (early afternoon)."

"I know what time it is." She comes in. She doesn't sit. "Somebody told me you stopped asking for the infirmary log."

"I stopped asking. I didn't stop wanting it." I sling the case across my body. Red, yellow, blue, once more at the door, because a door is a threshold and thresholds are where things get left behind. "Tuesday, the equipment logs came to me with pages missing. Administrative error, apparently, from a man who held eye contact the whole time he said it. Thursday, the medical cabinet grew a new lock and the key went for a walk. That's five days of your yard being delighted to have me."

"Ask me. I'll have that cabinet open in four minutes."

"I know you would." I take the peach out of her hand. Some rituals predate the tabs; she's been handing me fruit out of a pocket since we were eleven and it was her mother's orchard. "That's the problem, Ilia. You'd open it for me and then it's your cabinet and my signature, and there's a word for that, and the word isn't independent."

She lets that sit. Iliana has never once in twenty years asked me a question she hadn't already half verified. It's why she trusts me. It's why she summoned me. It's about to make this considerably worse.

"The Aegaeon motion," she says. "Tell me it's today."

"It isn't."

"Dani.."

"The cargo discrepancy is real. The recovered section doesn't match its own manifest, the weight receipts are wrong, the seals were recrimped. Somebody touched that hull between seabed and shore and it was not your crew." I say it fast, because it's the part she wants and the part that's true and I need her holding it when the rest lands. "It needs one more chain of custody document before it's a weapon instead of a theory. I'm filing something else first."

"What are you filing?"

I could go around it. Twenty years and I have never once managed to go around it.

"A motion to freeze the fleet's diving licences. All of them, on stamp, pending independent medical review."

She doesn't explode. That's the terrible thing about her, the deeper the hit, the quieter she goes.

"I brought you here to take Aegaeon apart."

"You brought me here as surveyor of record. The record includes your medical logs, and your medical logs are wrong." The peach is warm in my hand. I'm eleven and thirty one at once and both of us keep talking. "Not sloppy wrong. Not understaffed fleet wrong. Patterned. Fitness clearances issued at intervals that ignore your own exposure tables. Symptoms opened and struck through in the same hand. Men logging bottom times that should have half of them in a chamber, all of them signed off by one medical officer, including, five days ago, in the middle of the worst of it, a fitness clearance he wrote for himself."

"You've been here five days."

"And it took five days to be sure. It usually takes me two." Out before I can stop it. Flat. True. Her mouth does something complicated. "That's how hard someone is working at this."

The wrist timer ticks against the quiet. Fourteen minutes.

"Eleven names on tomorrow's roster," I say. "If one of them dies down there, it isn't Aegaeon's lawyers who bury you. It's mine. My licence is on this operation now."

Iliana looks past me at the water, at the barge, at the whole salt and steel kingdom she bled nine days in May to keep. When she looks back there's no anger in it, which is worse.

There's arithmetic.

"File it," she says. "And God help you if you're right."

Outside, the cicadas are already sawing at the heat.

The yard smells of diesel and hot rope and that iron breath the sea gives off when something enormous is being pulled out of it in pieces. Down at the water the crane barge squats over the dive site like a patient animal, and under sixty metres of blue that goes black, the Ionic lies on her ledge.

Twelve minutes. Gravel. Red, yellow, blue, stamp before μεσημέρι, chain of custody Thursday, who locked the cabinet, who strikes a symptom in the same hand that wrote it..

The speakers crackle overhead. The sonar watch, flat and bored, the way men sound reading numbers they've decided not to be afraid of.

Advisory. Seismic acoustic contact, wreck site. Hull settlement confirmed against retrieval baseline. Cumulative list three degrees. Monitoring continues.

Three degrees.

I keep walking, and the file opens itself anyway, and I let it, because the alternative is closing it and I have never once managed that either.

Eleven names. Three degrees. One signature on all of it, and the last one he wrote was his own.

A man steps into my path.

Not near it, into it. Placed. Filling the gravel lane between the last container and the harbormaster's steps the way a hull section fills a crane sling. I stop, because the alternative is walking into a wall that breathes.

He's big. That registers first and matters least, because my eyes are already doing what they do. Sclera shot red, capillaries burst at both corners, the way they burst on a man who has been coughing at depth. Skin gone grey under the tan, the specific grey I have seen in exposure injury photographs and never once in a living face standing in the sun. And in his right hand a tremor, fine and fast and constant, parked flat against his thigh with the practised stillness of a man who has rehearsed hiding it.

He looks the way the wreck sounds. Something enormous, groaning on its ledge, three degrees past where it should be and announcing over a loudspeaker that monitoring continues.

I've seen this face already this morning. In miniature, in blue ink, at the bottom of a fitness clearance dated five days ago.

Signed by the patient.

"Miss Vasileiou." His voice is nothing like his hands. His voice is a scalpel laid flat on a tray, level, clean, cold enough to fog. "Before you climb those steps. We should talk about what you think you're about to file."

Eleven minutes.

And every thread I have opens a new file with his name on it.