The underbelly of Bleak-Water Station is dark and close and the black water is six inches below the walkway planks.
I move through it with the LeMat uncocked and my boots quiet. The light from above filters through the boards in thin yellow strips. Everything else is dark and dripping.
Twenty minutes of navigating the support structure I find the smuggling dock. Just like I knew it would be. Hidden in the hull of a sunken paddleboat, chained down, wrapped in oiled canvas.
A brass marine engine. About three hundred pounds.
The three things that crawl out of the water don't announce themselves.
They just rise, webbed hands on the hull edge, bodies following, no sound. Pale and wrong. Gills opening and closing on their necks. Needle teeth. Bone-claws where fingernails should be.
The Ledger brands me fast: BLEAK-WATER BILGE-RATS. 24 HOURS. 400 BLOOD-IRON.
The first one goes for my chest. The bone-claws find my pectoral, hit the muscle underneath, and snap. Just snap, like they hit something made of the wrong material.
The mutant freezes for half a second.
I grab its throat and squeeze. Done.
The second one I catch with the LeMat grip, heavy brass across its skull. It drops.
The third jumps on my back. I throw myself backward into the iron boiler of the sunken hull. The impact is heavy and final.
Twenty seconds. I stand in the dark and the spectral coins dissolve through my sleeve and I look at the marine engine.
I crouch. Get both hands under it. Stand.
Three hundred pounds. My back objects loudly. My mutated spine absorbs it. I start moving toward the ladder.
* * *
I come up through the trapdoor with the engine on my shoulder.
I drop it on the platform and it hits with a crash that shakes the whole station.
Clementine drops her wrench.
Harrow turns around with his rifle half-raised.
I stand there, breathing normally, three hundred pounds at my feet.
Harrow walks over slowly. He looks at the engine. He looks at my torn shirt where the claws got the canvas but not the skin. He looks at the claw marks, which are scratches on the surface of something that should have been wounds.
"Arthur," he says, very quietly.
"I know," I say.
"Tonight," he says. Same word I gave him. Giving it back.
"Tonight," I agree.
He nods once, turns around, goes back to work.
Clementine has been watching from across the platform.
"That went better than I expected," she says.
"He's a reasonable man."
"He's a scared man trying very hard to be a reasonable one." She picks up her wrench. "That's rarer than reasonable."
I look at her.
She shrugs. "Help me bolt this engine in. We're burning dark."