The screening contract was routine work at eleven hundred credits, on a Corrow trading house consignment held at the river dock. Four crates of beast material, inbound from the eastern flats, carrying a manifest that two different clerks had signed on two different days.
Vell took it himself because the Cup opened in six days and a river dock is a quiet way to spend an afternoon. Yenna came for the paperwork, Wren came because she always comes, and Luna stayed at the workshop with a queue of contracts.
Crate three answered the anchor read before he had a hand on it.
[Composite construct: active.]
[Control frame: absent.]
An active composite with no control frame is a thing nobody in Orison had ever screened, since the frame is what holds six architectures in agreement. What Corrow had shipped up the river was a body with nothing arbitrating between its parts.
