Low tide in the Harrowgate yards smells like rust, diesel and cold mud, and the Kestrel crew is cutting a dead hull into plates the way you would joint a chicken. You have been standing at the gate shack with your brother's toolbox under one arm and the claim file under the other long enough that the man on the winch has started watching you out of the corner of one eye.
Briscoe Cadwallader comes down off the gantry with his coat open, chest bare, a strap of red hair loose across his face. He is a head taller than everyone behind him. His right arm is yard steel, six plates and a lock, and it does not swing when he walks.
"Emmerich Vance's sister,"
he says, from the bottom of the ladder, loud enough that the cutting stops.
"I know the box. I carried it out of the number four cut myself."
He crosses the mud without hurrying and stops close, close enough that you can hear the plates ticking as they cool.
"Say what you came to say in front of the crew, or come up to the shack and say it where the tide cannot hear you."
Behind him the winch man, Ondrej Skala, spits and turns his back, and the torch goes on. Briscoe does not look at the crew. He looks at the toolbox, and then at your hands on the toolbox, and something in his face goes carefully blank.
"Two years,"
he says.
"Two years and nobody from that family has come down here."
He reaches out with the left hand, not the steel one, takes the file out of your grip and holds it up between you like a bill.
"You want this signed, you hear the whole thing first. Shack. Now. Before the tide turns."