Paj was barreling through the doors a moment later. He made his way to the booth where we’d set up and dropped the maps haphazardly on the table. He didn’t bother looking at me. In fact, none of them had so much as glanced in my direction all day.

West ignored Paj’s display of indignation, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. “All right. What have we got?”

“Look for yourself,” Paj grunted.

“Paj,” Auster warned, raising an eyebrow.

Beside him, Willa looked as if she approved of Paj’s protest. She huffed, stirring another cube of sugar into her cold tea.

Paj relented under Auster’s reproach, opening the maps on top of the ship log Holland had given me. “The midnight was found in Yuri’s Constellation. It had to be. According to the logs, Holland’s crew had been dredging the islands for over a month when Isolde found it, and they continued in that spot for weeks after.” He set a finger on the broken cluster of land masses. “Since then, Holland’s crew has dredged the hell out of those reefs. First from the north, working their way south. Then from the south, working north.”

“But they haven’t found anything,” I said under my breath.

“Obviously,” Paj answered sharply. “They’ve been working at it almost twenty years and they’ve covered every reef that Holland’s crew was working at the time Isolde found the midnight. To say this is a fool’s errand is putting it lightly.”

I sat on the edge of the table. “Where are the geological and topographical charts?”

He sifted through the corners of the maps until he found the one he was looking for, and pulled it free. “Here.”

The diagrams unrolled before me. The stretch of Unnamed Sea was labeled in different colors and thicknesses of lines identifying the types of rocks and depths of water. Most of the reefs were encircled by basalt, slate, and sandstone—prime locations to find most of the stones that ran the gem trade. But if my mother had only found midnight in one place and Holland had been unable to find it since, we were looking for something different.

“What is this?” I pointed to two islands at the corner of the map marked with the symbol for quartz.

When Paj only stared at me, Auster snatched the log from his hand. He dragged his finger down the page until he found it. “Sphene Sisters.”

I’d heard of it before. It was a pair of reefs in Yuri’s Constellation where most of the yellow and green sphene was dredged, known for its wedge shape in the rock.

“Looks like there’s also an active cache of blue agate there, but the serpentine is gone. It’s all been dredged,” Auster added.

“Any others?”

“Just some onyx here and there.”

I squinted, thinking. “When was the last time Holland’s crew dredged here?”