Chapter 230: Renna
He returned to Renna’s shopfront two days later, the refined vector saved carefully to his data slate, and found her exactly where he’d left her, cataloguing a fresh shipment of data cores with the same brisk efficiency she seemed to apply to everything.
"Back already," she observed, not looking up. "Either you found what you were looking for faster than I expected, or you’re about to ask me for something considerably more expensive than a star chart."
"Little of both," Rohan admitted. "I’ve narrowed the search. Not to a single system, but to a region — a handful of systems clustered together near the edge of what your survey actually covers. I need to know what it takes to get out there, and what I should expect to find once I do."
Renna set down the data core she’d been handling and gave him her full attention for the first time since he’d walked in.
"Now that," she said, "is a considerably more interesting question." She gestured him toward the narrow counter, pulling up a fresh display. "Show me."
Rohan transferred the relevant section of his refined map across, and Renna studied it in silence for a long moment, her expression shifting from professional curiosity into something more careful.
"The Wraithfall Fringe," she said eventually, tapping the cluster of systems his line passed nearest to. "That’s what most traders call that stretch, when they bother calling it anything at all. You picked an interesting direction to go looking for whatever it is you’re chasing."
"Bad interesting, or just remote interesting?"
"Both, if I’m honest." Renna leaned back, arms crossed. "It’s not lawless, exactly — there’s no single authority out there willing to claim it, which in practice means it operates by whatever rules the loudest ship in any given system happens to be enforcing that week. Independent colonies, mostly.
A few old survey outposts nobody bothered decommissioning. The occasional settlement that went dark years ago and nobody’s had reason enough to check on since." She tapped the display again. "Merchant traffic out there is thin and irregular. You won’t find a comfortable passenger liner willing to make that run on a fixed schedule. You’ll find independent captains, salvage crews, the occasional survey contract looking for cheap labour willing to go somewhere nobody sensible wants to go."
"That sounds like exactly the kind of ship that might take on a passenger without asking too many questions about documentation."
Renna’s mouth twitched, somewhere between amusement and genuine concern. "It also sounds like exactly the kind of ship that might decide a passenger with no documentation, no local standing, and no one who’d come looking for him is worth considerably more as cargo than as company. I’m not telling you not to go. Something tells me you’d go regardless of what I said. I’m telling you to be considerably more careful about whose ship you board next than you apparently were about the last one."
Rohan thought of Odris’s parting warning, of Kessa’s grudging respect, of how close that particular gamble had come to going badly in a dozen different ways he hadn’t fully let himself dwell on since.
"I will be," he said, and meant it.
"Good." Renna pulled up a fresh listing on her display — a scrolling roster of independent vessels currently registered at the Anchorage, filtered, he noticed, by routes touching the general direction he’d indicated. "There’s a handful of captains who run that corridor with some regularity. None of them advertise it loudly — nobody wants the Span’s customs authority taking a closer look at cargo bound for territory this thin on oversight — but they exist, and some of them are even reasonably honest, by fringe standards." She tapped one entry. "This one’s your best bet, if you’re patient. Independent survey and salvage vessel, captain’s got a decent reputation among the people who actually deal with her regularly. Runs a loose circuit through the Fringe every few months restocking outposts too small for the bigger consortiums to bother servicing."
"When does she leave next?"
"Not for another eleven days, according to this listing. Docked here for resupply and repairs." Renna glanced up at him. "Which gives you time to earn your passage properly instead of trying another stunt like whatever got you here in the first place. I’d recommend using it."
Rohan looked at the listing a long moment, turning the timeline over in his mind — eleven days to gather more resonance readings, to earn honest credit toward passage, to prepare properly for a stretch of the universe that apparently answered to nobody but whoever happened to be loudest that week.
Eleven days. That’s not nothing. That’s time I can actually use.
"Thank you," he said. "Again."
"Don’t thank me yet," Renna said, echoing her own words from days before with a faint, wry smile.
"Thank me if you actually make it back through that door to tell me whether whatever you’re chasing was worth the trip."
The eleven days that followed passed in a rhythm Rohan hadn’t realised he’d missed until he found himself back inside it — the particular, grounding discipline of useful, honest labour, performed in exchange for something real.
He found the work, unglamourosely enough, back at the freight docks where the heavy-set foreman had turned him away that first afternoon. The man remembered him, to Rohan’s mild surprise, and when Rohan returned with Renna’s working credit as informal collateral and an offer to work unregistered shifts at a fraction of standard pay, the foreman studied him for a long moment before shrugging and waving him toward an idle loading arm.
"Off manifest," the man said. "Cash only, no insurance, no complaints if something goes wrong. You still want it?"
"I still want it."
The work itself was simple by comparison to everything Cael Athis had demanded of him — hauling, stacking, guiding loading arms through their slow, careful arcs, learning the particular choreography of a dock crew that had clearly worked together long enough to move almost without speaking. It paid poorly, and it left his body aching in ways that reminded him, not unpleasantly, of the early weeks at Veyrhold, back when Maerin’s training had felt less like preparation and more like punishment.