“Adjacent is fine. I didn’t sleep until after two.” She’d promised herself bed after Shale left, but the silver poems lingered in her mind. And then, being too tired for cause-and-effect thoughts like “I have to get up in the morning,” she’d read her mother’s letter, or tried, and when that didn’t work she read her student loan statement again, and then her balance book, and decided that if she ate instant noodles for the next month maybe she could pay down the principle. She had planned to sail straight for the church archives this morning but ran aground instead on the message Cat left with her office doorman. “What can I do for you?” Four Blacksuits stood on the ship’s deck, immobile and faceless as unfinished statues.

Cat led her into the hold; once she saw the refrigeration wards, she understood. “Indentures. Zombie traders. They docked here?”

“Not their idea,” she said. “Raz knew that the captain, Varg, was involved in the trade, but she never docked with us, just anchored out of port and ferried in. We caught her in a dreamglass deal in the city, which gave us grounds to search and seize the ship.”

“Clever.” Tara tugged the door open. Icy air vented into the hold. Row upon row of bodies lay in the cold dark, clad in rough canvas, immobile. Men and women from the Gleb, by the look of it. Tara’s shiver had nothing to do with the temperature. “Gods.”

Cat propped the door open and followed Tara inside. Her coffee started to steam again. “I hoped you could wake them up. We tried dragging one out of the freezer but he started…” She shook her head. “It looked like a seizure. We put him back.”

Tara paced the hold. Bodies lay four deep on either side. “What do you normally do when you catch a zombie trader?”

“They don’t pass through here often, since Kos forbids indefinite indentures and debt slavery. Most of the time indentures just wake up when they’re brought in. It’s traumatic, but I’ve never seen anything like this. I figured you could help. If not, we can hire someone, but I know Craftsmen aren’t wild about property seizures.”

Tara frowned. “They’re not property. That’s the problem. The Craft depends on freedom of contract: people can trade away whatever they want, except their ability to agree to trades. But they can offer labor as collateral.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Not technically,” she said. “But practice is the problem.” She searched the room. There were many ways to cool a space: elementals were the most common, but none lived here. This ship’s owners must have used unshielded Craft to suck heat from this space to power something else. But what?