The Banks are not on any chart the Array will sell you. You find them the way everyone finds them, by following a hull that is still moving and waiting to see where it stops moving for good. Mine stopped at the third sandbar out of the Irminger murk, a reefer the size of a borough, run up onto frozen shoal at high water and left to be taken apart by hand. There were forty people on it already. None of them looked up.
Cold is the only thing worth money this far north. The Thule Array runs on a geothermal loop and a rationing machine nobody understands, and lately there is less cold than the brokers will admit. The Banks are where the shortfall gets quietly made good. You cannot buy what the Array does not have. So you come out here and you cut it out of the dead.
The dead are ships. Reefer hulls, decommissioned cold-trade carriers, a coast guard cutter with its numbers ground off. Every one of them was built around a cooling core, and the core is the only reason anyone climbs aboard. Strip the copper, strip the loop fittings, strip the long silver coolant runs that still hold a charge if nobody bled them first. That last part is where the Banks earn their reputation.
Saar runs a cutting crew on the reefer's aft section. She is cold-water stock, a seal-template build that some SCA program spec'd for resort dive shows and then sold off when the resorts went under the salt line. Wrong zoo, she calls it, and laughs. Out here it is the right zoo. She can work a flooded compartment in water that would stop a baseline heart in ninety seconds, and she does, six times a shift, for a cut of whatever the crew pulls up.
I watched her crew open a coolant run on the second day. They do it slow. A kid named Pelt put his ear to the line first, the way you would listen at a door, because a charged run has a sound, a low complaint, and an empty one does not. He listened for a long time. Then he nodded, and they cut, and nothing happened, which is the only outcome anyone wants and the rarest one to trust.
The camp lives on the hulls it has already finished. People sleep in stripped compartments stacked three deep on the high shoal, lashed together with cargo strap and faith. The fashion is whatever holds heat and reads as competence. Most of them wear their last good core run as a patch, a strip of coolant-line lagging sewn to the shoulder, silver going gray, and the older the patch the more room you get at the stove. Nobody up here asks what faction you are. They ask how many winters you have cut.
An intact core is worth more than Saar's whole crew clears in a year. Everyone on the Banks knows it. Nobody has ever pulled one intact. The cores were built to be lifted out of a working ship in a dry yard by people with the right tools, and there are no dry yards left and no right tools, so the core comes out in pieces and the cold comes off it by the kilo. Scrap cold, they call it. The Array buys scrap cold and files it as surplus recovery, and the lie keeps everyone fed.
The worst job is also the one that feels safest. Inside a sealed reefer compartment the temperature holds steady, no wind, no spray, almost comfortable, and that comfort is the cold the hull is still carrying. It is the product. It is also what kills you when a line you misjudged lets go in a closed space. The Banks lose people to that exact comfort every winter. The crews keep going in. The comfort is the entire reason the cold is worth pulling.
Saar showed me her hands at the end of my last shift. The webbing the SCA grew between her fingers for the dive shows has gone gray at the edges and stopped healing. Drift. Her warranty was up four years ago. She held the hands out flat, the way you would show someone a tool that is wearing out, no complaint, a weather condition. Then she pulled her gloves back on and went down into the flooded section. The tide was turning. The next hull was already up the shoal, still moving, the way they all are when they arrive.