“So,” the captain says, clapping her hands with a flourish. “The news is out. An unregulated Reckoner is escorting the Minnow and Cassandra Leung is training it. It’s time to move our operation into its next stages.” She sweeps over to the door controls and jams down the button. As the doors wheel up to let the sunlight in, a prickling sensation creeps over the back of my neck.

Chained to the back of the Minnow is a decommissioned tug.

“I trust you know how to make the most of this,” Santa Elena says, gesturing at the smaller ship. “And there’s one more thing.” She lifts a duffle bag from the counter and lobs it at my chest.

I catch it with a grunt and unzip it. Lying there, waiting for me, is a pair of Otachi. Wrist-mounted laser projectors with blazing beams a hundred times more powerful than the flashing lights of beacons. The tools of a real Reckoner trainer.

I used to dream about using them in battle. Watching my dad throw beams across the waves was like watching a swordsman at his craft, and I’d stand at his side, counting the seconds until the day that I would get to do the same. But in my fantasies, it was always Durga who followed me as I slashed the lights across her targets.

And it was always pirates at the other end.

I turn on the captain. Something’s broken loose inside me, and as I meet her narrowed eyes, I finally ask the question that’s been burning in me for three months. “Where are you getting this shit?” I snap, throwing the duffle at her feet. “These tools are only sold to Reckoner trainers. The cull serum, Bao—how the hell are you—”

Santa Elena raises an eyebrow. “You have all of the pieces, Cassandra. Put them together.”

“What pieces?” I sputter. There’s no rational explanation for why high-end Reckoner gear and a Reckoner itself ended up on a pirate ship. Even if the pirates were willing to pay through the nose. Even if the broker had access to every facet of the industry. Even if—

Cold gray eyes. A man who had no reason to be on the Flotilla. Unless …

“Fabian Murphy,” I spit through gritted teeth, fists clenched at my sides. The pieces fall into place.

“When you want to run counter to an imbalanced system, you have two options,” the captain says, her voice grave. “Either you find the pure of heart willing to fight for your cause, or you find the most corrupt willing to forsake their own. Fabian Murphy is the latter.” She says it with a note of bitterness, as if she’d hoped for better things from him.

“Money?” I hazard.

“The only reason men of his mold do anything,” she says with a nod. “Murphy is willing to sell his industry for a cut from ours.”