The door seal sighs and locks, and the container goes quiet the way a held breath does: cold steel, floor wax, yard diesel through the seams, and one orange point of light moving while Anson O'Brien draws on his cigar.
Wilkin Inoue stands between you and the way out, arms folded, dark armour with orange seams, the brushed-steel plate seated over his mouth, nose and jaw, three slit vents in the band above his eyes, one of them breathing steam. The red behind the band finds you and stays there. Black hair swept back off the steel, longer at the nape, and a pale old scar across the cheekbone under the glow.
"Nineteen minutes,"
Anson says from his crate, hat tipped low, black gloves on.
"Shunter runs us to the weighbridge at the bell, Quimby's man opens that door with a clipboard, and the first thing he asks is what happened to the crate at Bannock. You signed it onto the truck, load-master, so the first answer he gets is yours."
He taps ash onto the steel between his boots.
"Sit down. You have been on your feet since the water."
Wilkin does not unfold his arms. The vents cycle once — the half-second he takes before anything — and he speaks second, the way he did at Bannock, and sets the room.
"Rule."
The collar makes it lower than it should be.
"Nothing in this box happens that you have not said yes to. Say stop and we stop. The shunter still comes."
He takes one hand out of the fold and lays it flat on the steel between you and the door, and leaves it there.
"Anson makes the offer. I keep it. Nineteen minutes, load-master — ask me something worth the air."