The Anchor Stone had been carved into the basalt a hundred years before Cassian's grandfather was born. The back wall was the wall of the harbor itself, and the rest of the building was older than most of the ships it had been salvaged from.
The knocking woke him. Not the polite kind — the Watch kind, slow and heavy, with a palm flat against the hull. Cassian had slept in his clothes. The oiled cloth was pressed flat against his ribs through his shirt. That was the first piece of luck he had earned in two months.
Veren was on the pier before Cassian saw him, which meant Cassian had already lost. A broken captain on a broken ship, watching the wrong man. A woman he had not seen in twelve years walking toward his deck. A chart fragment with two words written on it in a hand he knew.
