The harbor smelled different in the early morning.

Not different from itself — different from the palace. The palace had its own smell: cedar from the record shelves, old clay, lamp oil, the specific dryness of stone that had been inhabited for a long time. The harbor was salt and wet wood and the particular sharpness of rope that had been in water and dried and been in water again so many times that the salt had become part of the fiber. Lysander had been walking between the two for two years. He noticed the transition every time and had stopped being able to say when he had started noticing it.

He went to the harbor before the second hour.

Daidalos’s workshop was at the eastern end of the harbor district — not on the water but close enough that you could hear the rigging from inside when the wind was right. The door was open when Lysander arrived, which meant Daidalos had been there since before the light. He was usually there before the light. He slept in the workshop on the nights before something was being tested and had apparently never seen a reason to change this arrangement.

Lysander came in.

The workshop smelled of wood shavings and tar and something chemical he had never been able to name — one of the compounds Daidalos used in the hull treatment process, something that kept the wood from absorbing water in the specific way that caused the joints to loosen. The floor was covered in the fine dust of recent work. In the center of the main space, on the long work table, was a model.

Not a small model — a working model, the kind built at one-quarter scale to test the actual behavior of the design before committing the full material cost. Long and narrow by the standards of the fishing fleet, with a flat-bottomed hull that sat differently than the rounded hulls of the deep-water vessels. Lysander had seen the previous two iterations. This one was different.

He looked at it.

Daidalos came in from the side room carrying a measurements tablet and the specific expression of a man who had been awake for a long time and was fueled by the particular energy of someone in the middle of a problem they found genuinely interesting.

He said: "You are looking at the third version."

"I can see that."

"The second version had a stability problem at high load in the shallow coastal waters — the beam was too narrow for the carrying capacity we were trying to achieve. I widened it by one-fifth and adjusted the keel depth. The flat bottom is shallower now. It can operate in water where the fishing vessels cannot go."

"How shallow."

"The small harbor approaches along the southern Anatolian coast. The ones where the large trading ships have to anchor offshore and transfer cargo by tender. This vessel can go directly to the dock."

Lysander looked at the model.

He said: "The carrying capacity."

"Forty people with full personal cargo, or the equivalent weight in goods. At the speed of a working coastal run — not racing speed, the sustainable speed a crew can maintain over a full day — it covers the distance between Troy and the southern Anatolian ports in one day in good conditions. In poor conditions, one and a half."

"And the inland routes."

Daidalos looked at him. "What about them."

"In a season — how much did the inland routes move between the eastern interior and the Anatolian coastal ports before the contraction began."

Daidalos was quiet for a moment. He was a man who did not answer questions he did not understand the purpose of, and he had learned over two years that Lysander’s questions usually had a purpose that was not immediately visible.

He said: "I would need to compare against the eastern trade records. But from the harbor cargo logs before the contraction — the volume that arrived at the Anatolian coastal ports from inland sources — I can give you an estimate."

"Yes."

"How precise."

"Precise enough to put in front of a king."

Daidalos set the measurements tablet on the table beside the model and picked up a different tablet — older, covered in the dense notation he used for the harbor cargo analysis he had been running as part of the supply monitoring work for the past year. He read through it for a moment, cross-referencing from memory with numbers Lysander could see him calculating internally.

He said: "Before the contraction — the peak years, three and four years ago — the Anatolian coastal ports were receiving approximately four times the current inland supply volume per season. If you distributed that volume across vessels of this design, running the coastal route rather than the inland roads, you would need—" he paused, calculating "—six vessels operating continuously, or ten vessels on a seasonal schedule."

"We have twelve coastal freight vessels currently operational."

Daidalos looked at him.

"Yes," he said. "You do."

Lysander looked at the model on the table. The flat-bottomed hull. The shallow keel. The design that could reach harbor approaches where larger vessels could not go.

He thought about Meron’s letter. Whoever builds that capacity first will own the replacement for what the inland routes were.

We built it for other reasons, he had told Ampelos. It doesn’t matter.

It didn’t matter.

"Write me the figures," he said. "Carrying capacity, coastal range, the comparison to pre-contraction inland volumes. I need it in a form that someone who has never been in this workshop can read and understand."

"Today."

"Yes."

Daidalos picked up his stylus without further discussion. He was a man who asked one question — what specifically do you need — and then produced it. This was one of the reasons Lysander had wanted him in this role from the beginning.

Lysander looked at the model for another moment.

He said: "The third version. When will the first full-scale vessel be complete."

"Six weeks. The keel is laid. We are waiting on the beam timber from the northern suppliers."

"The timber. Is it coming."

"It is coming. The Thracian contact confirmed the shipment last month."

"Good."

He looked at the flat-bottomed hull one more time. At the shallow keel that could reach the small harbor approaches along the southern Anatolian coast — the ones where the Carian intermediate ports were located, the ones that had been receiving less and less from the inland routes for three years.

"The figures by midday," he said. "I will send someone for them."

"Yes."

He went out into the harbor morning.

The walk back to the palace took him past the organized settlement at the northern edge of the walls.

He did not usually walk this way — the direct route from the harbor to the palace ran through the commercial district, shorter and more direct. But he had taken the longer route without deciding to, which meant something had pulled him toward it without his awareness.

He walked through the edge of the settlement.

It was doing what it always did in the morning — the specific industry of a community that had learned to be functional under difficult conditions. Small fires, the smell of food being cooked in the open air, children moving between the structures that had been built or modified or claimed over the past months. The sound was different from the palace and different from the harbor — more voices at close range, more languages, the particular density of many people in a contained space going about the ordinary business of survival.

He walked and looked and thought about carrying capacity.

Forty people with full personal cargo. The distance between Troy and the southern Anatolian ports in one day.

He thought about fourteen boats of displaced families arriving at a northern port over two days. He thought about eighty boats on the northern coast. He thought about the people in this settlement who had arrived in open boats designed for short-distance coastal movement and had made those boats carry more than they were designed to carry because there was no other option.

Whoever builds that capacity first will own the replacement.

Not just for trade.

He stopped walking.

He stood at the edge of the settlement for a moment, thinking about something he had not thought about before — or had thought about in pieces without assembling the pieces into a single shape.

The coastal freight vessels could move goods.

They could also move people.

Not emergency movement — organized, managed, dignified movement. Communities relocated intact, in the Carian king’s phrase. Move communities intact. The social network is a supply chain. Do not cut it.

He had been thinking about the vessels as a commercial argument for Caria. They were also something else. Something he needed to think about more carefully before he said it to anyone.

He continued walking.

He was passing the school in the harbor district when he saw Arsini.

She was outside the building, standing with a woman he did not recognize — middle-aged, with the practical clothing and the direct posture of someone who worked with her hands. They were looking at the building’s exterior wall, specifically at a section near the roof where something had been marked in chalk. A structural assessment, by the look of it.

Arsini saw him.

She said something brief to the woman, who nodded and went inside, and came toward Lysander.

"The structural review," she said. "For the craftsmen’s quarter building — the wall we were discussing."

"I thought that was the building Daidalos identified."

"It was. The woman I was just speaking with is a builder from the settlement — she has been doing structural assessments for two months, for us and for the settlement’s own construction. She found something in the eastern wall that the initial review missed."

"Something serious."

"Manageable. She says the foundation is sound but the eastern wall needs reinforcement before we put the weight of a full school operation on the upper level. She gave me the timeline and the materials required."

She held out the tablet. He took it and read it.

The assessment was clear and detailed — the kind of clarity that came from someone who had been reading buildings for a long time and knew exactly what to look for and how to describe what they found. He handed it back.

"Use her," he said.

Arsini looked at him. "I already have been."

"I mean formally. For the other school buildings. If she found something the initial review missed, she is better than the initial review."

Arsini was quiet for a moment.

"She is from the settlement," she said. Not as an objection — as a fact she was checking his awareness of.

"Yes."

"That will require an administrative arrangement we have not done before."

"Then we do it for the first time. The arrangement should reflect what she is actually worth, not what category she arrived in."

Arsini looked at him for a moment with the look she sometimes had — the one that was not surprise exactly, the look of someone recalibrating something they thought they already understood.

"I will arrange it," she said.

She turned back toward the school.

At the door she stopped.

"The figures from Daidalos," she said. "Are they for the schools or for something else."

"Something else."

"Something that will matter."

It was not a question.

"Yes," he said.

She went inside.

He stood for a moment in the street outside the school. The morning light was high enough now to be simply present rather than traveling. The harbor sounds came from one direction, the settlement sounds from another, the palace sounds from a third.

Something that will matter.

She had not asked what. She had simply registered that it would and moved on.

He walked to the palace to wait for Daidalos’s figures.

They arrived at midday — precise, clearly presented, organized in the form Lysander had described: carrying capacity, coastal range, pre-contraction inland volume comparison. At the bottom, in Daidalos’s dense notation, a single additional line that had not been requested: At full operational capacity, the current coastal freight fleet can replace approximately seventy percent of pre-contraction inland route volume on the southern Anatolian coastal corridor.

Seventy percent.

Not a replacement. A near-replacement. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

He added that himself, Lysander thought. Because he understood what the question was actually about.

He took the figures to Ampelos.

Ampelos read them standing at his office table, the same way he read things he intended to assess quickly. He set them down.

"Seventy percent," he said.

"Yes."

"I will have the letter ready before the evening tide. The ship to the Carian coast leaves at the second hour of the night."

"Good."

"The argument plus the figures. Concrete enough for a king who has been watching his ports receive less for three years."

"Yes."

Ampelos picked up his stylus.

Lysander went back to the supply office and finished the afternoon’s work.

He picked up his shard.

Nine hundred and seventy-six words.

Keep going.