The storm hit them two days out from nowhere worth naming, and it did not ask permission.

Lou had seen weather before. He had stood at the rail through squalls that turned the sky the color of a bruise and driven rain sideways hard enough to sting like grapeshot. But this one came up fast and mean, no warning in the swells, no long roll of thunder to give a man time to brace. One hour the sky was the ordinary gray of an ordinary afternoon. The next, the mainmast was groaning like something dying, and Nate was screaming for hands on the lines, and the ship was taking green water over the bow in sheets that knocked men flat.

They rode it out. That was the only thing to be said for it. They rode it out, and when the sky finally broke gray and pale and almost sorry for itself, the ship was alive but wounded. A cracked spar. Rigging torn loose in a dozen places. A seam below the waterline that had opened just enough to keep two men busy at the pumps in shifts, day and night, until they could put in somewhere and fix it proper.

"Three days," the carpenter said, when Lou asked him straight. "Maybe four if the wood's bad and we have to source new."

Four days. Four days sitting still while Cortez kept moving.

Lou did not say what that cost him. He had learned, in the years since the shipyard burned, not to say things like that out loud, because saying them did not make them false and it did not make the storm smaller. He only nodded, and gave the order for the nearest port, and stood at the rail a long while after, watching the horizon like it might apologize to him personally.

The port was small, the kind of place that existed because ships needed it and not because anyone had ever wanted to live there for its own sake. Gray buildings leaning into a gray hillside, a harbor thick with gulls and the smell of tar, a customs house with a Spanish flag that had faded almost to the color of the sky behind it. Nobody looked twice at another battered merchant ship crawling in with her rigging in a state. That was, Lou supposed, the one mercy of the whole business. Nobody looked twice at much of anything here.

He went to the harbormaster's office himself, the second morning, while the carpenter and half the crew argued with a local shipwright over the price of good oak. He kept it plain, kept it far from anything that sounded like a man hunting another man. Ship movements. Recent arrivals. Nothing more than any captain might ask, checking the waters ahead before he committed to a heading.

The harbormaster was a thick, unhurried man behind a desk that had not been dusted in some time, and he heard Lou out with the patient, unbothered expression of a man who had priced every request there was.

"Arrival logs are the crown's business," he said, when Lou finished. "Not for strangers to go thumbing through. And even if I were inclined, there's a fee for that sort of look, a considerable one, and three days before a clerk could copy anything out, seeing as he's laid up with his leg."

He did not wait for Lou to argue it. He was already reaching for the next paper on his desk, a man done with the conversation before Lou had finished having it.

Three days. Lou did not have three days to spare on top of the four the ship already owed him, and he did not have the coin the man's tone made clear he was really asking for, not without selling something he could not afford to sell this far from home. He thanked the harbormaster with more patience than he felt and walked back out into the morning with his jaw tight.

Nate was waiting outside, leaning against the customs house wall with the particular stillness he only had right before he said something Lou wasn't going to like.

"That went well," Nate said.

"He wants money we don't have and time we don't have either."

"So we don't have it the honest way." Nate pushed off the wall, fell into step beside him. "Might be there's a less honest way going begging."

Lou didn't answer that. He didn't have to. They both knew exactly who they were thinking of.

They found Vincent down at the shore end of the docks, doing what Vincent did with his hands idle, which was never actually idle at all. He had a length of cord threaded between his fingers, tying and untying some sailor's knot Lou didn't recognize, watching the harbor traffic with the loose, unbothered eyes of a man who noticed everything and wanted no one to know it.

"You've a look about you," Vincent said, before either of them spoke. "The look of a man who's just been told no."

"Harbormaster keeps the arrival logs locked up tighter than the crown jewels," Nate said. "Reckon a man like you might know a way around a locked door that doesn't involve coin we haven't got."

Something moved behind Vincent's eyes, quick, there and gone. He set the cord down slow.

"I might," he said. "Depends what you're asking me to risk my neck for."

"Names," Lou said. He kept his voice even, kept it the way he'd learned to keep it when the thing underneath mattered too much to let show. "Ships in and out the last month or two. That's all."

Vincent looked at him a long moment, longer than the question seemed to need, like he was doing sums Lou couldn't see the shape of. Then he nodded, once, and stood.

"Records room's behind the harbormaster's own office, most like," he said. "Locked separate, if this place runs the way most do. Tonight, then. After the watch changes and before the moon's up proper."

The records room was exactly where Vincent said it would be, a narrow door at the back of the customs house with a lock that looked older than the building around it. The night was thick and close, no moon yet to speak of, just the sound of water against the pilings and somewhere off a dog barking at nothing.

Nate kept watch at the corner of the building, jumpy in the particular way he got when a plan depended on someone else's hands instead of his own. Lou stood closer, near enough to see Vincent's fingers working two thin picks in the dark, utterly steady, utterly patient.

"You've done this before," Lou said, quiet.

"More times than I'd care to count." Vincent didn't look up. "Man learns a trade early when he's got nothing and no one to teach him a better one."

The lock gave with a small, satisfied click. Vincent eased the door open an inch, listened, eased it further.

Inside was worse for the dark, ledgers stacked in leaning towers, the whole room smelling of dust and old ink. Vincent produced a stub of candle from somewhere on his person, lit it low, and they went to work by that thin light, Lou scanning entries while Vincent kept his ear half turned to the door and Nate's low warning-whistle from outside, the one that meant nothing yet, only stay ready.

It took longer than Lou liked. Names, dates, cargo manifests, none of it in any order a sane man would have chosen. And then, near the bottom of a stack half-buried behind a rack of unused ledgers, in a hand more careful than the rest, as though whoever wrote it had known it mattered:

Ship out of the eastern approach, unnamed on departure, master given only as R. Cortez. Cleared harbor bearing southeast, toward the Windward passage.

Lou's hand went still on the page.

He did not say anything for a moment. He only stared at the name, the first solid ground he'd had under his feet in longer than he wanted to admit, four years of asking in taverns and shipping offices finally answered in a stranger's careless handwriting.

Vincent was watching him. Not the ledger. Him.

"That's him," Vincent said. Not a question.

Lou looked up. There was no use lying, not with the name sitting right there between them, not with whatever was showing on his own face plain enough that a thief who read men for a living could see it clear. "That's him."

He waited, in the part of himself that had learned to expect a price on everything, for Vincent to name one. A cut of whatever came of it. A promise. Leverage held up to the light and traded fair. It was what Lou would have expected from anyone he'd met in the years since the raid, and he braced for it without quite meaning to.

Vincent only nodded, slow, like something in him had settled into place.

"Then we'd best copy it down before that candle gives out," he said, "and get you back to your ship."

Nothing more than that. No bargain. No price named. He turned back to the ledger and started the careful work of copying the entry by candlelight, and Lou stood there a moment longer than he needed to, looking at the back of a man who had every reason in the world to make this cost something, and hadn't.

It was, Lou would think later, the first moment he trusted Vincent without meaning to.

They cleared port four days later, near enough to when the carpenter had promised, the ship patched and the crew rested and the name Cortez sitting in Lou's chest like a coal that wouldn't cool. Southeast, toward the Windward passage. It was more than he'd had in years.

It was not enough.

They raised the passage on a gray morning eleven days out, and the harbor there told them plainly, in the unhurried way small ports always seemed to tell a man the worst news, that a ship answering that description had put in nine days past, taken on water and salt pork, and cleared out again three days before Lou's own ship ever came in sight of the coast.

Three days.

Lou stood at the rail a long while, the way he had after the storm, watching a horizon that had nothing to say to him. Behind him, he heard Nate swear, low and bitter, and heard Vincent say nothing at all, which was somehow worse.

Three days. Four years of searching, and the gap between them had narrowed down to three days, and it might as well have been the whole ocean.