The wind at the arches tastes like iodine and old anchors. I guide Elias down the ramp where the seawall swells into concrete ribs, a cathedral for storms that doubles as a public park when the sky behaves. Under here the cameras blink lazy, their cones misaligned by a city worker with a soft heart and a wrench. I paid him with two free stitches and a promise to fix his niece’s tablet. Harbor Eleven runs on barter unless you have a lawyer.
A gust lifts Elias’s hoodie. He laughs it down and cinches the drawstrings, cheeks flushed from the cold. Above us the arches drum, a bassline the barrier never stops playing for the river. Drone rotors whirr past like cicadas running late. The marina’s tide clock across the water lies three minutes ahead, smug in metal. Everyone in this city plans around that lie so they can blame it when they miss the truth.
“You said truth on the plate,” he says. “Serve it.” He keeps his voice pitched to wind—the right choice. Words here get shredded before they reach the nearest microphone.
I thumb my phone and cue a thirty-second slice. No metadata, no name, just sound. Lila’s laugh breaks mid-sentence like a glass nicked at the rim. She jokes that the algae wall hides stress spikes if you know how to breathe under it. In the background a door hisses; a man coughs; then the whisper: don’t write that down.
I watch Elias, not the river. His eyes flick once, like a small bird startled and deciding to land anyway. He doesn’t speak until the last second of audio dissolves in the wind.
“That’s her,” he says. “She had that laugh that refused to apologize.”
“You told HR you met her twice,” I say. My hands stay in my jacket pockets, fingers curved around the hard edges of truth and an extra clip for the flare gun. “I think you met her at least three times.”
His jaw works, then releases. “We’re in the blind zone,” he says. “You chose it.”
“I did.” I tilt my head toward the arches. “Protection needs places where I can’t be subpoenaed by accident. I still record my own memory.”
We walk. The wind claws at the water and throws flecks up into our faces. Dock workers at the far end of the arches stack crates and argue in a lazy rhythm that ends with a shared thermos. Across the barrier, the biotech towers glow algae-green, everyone’s biofeedback pretending calm for the photo feeds.
“Say it,” he says.
“I suspect Sable,” I say. “Center node, not only because it fits. Lila noticed lighting shifts around certain executives. Your mother’s foundation touched the orchard June charted. And in the boardroom today, a number rolled straight to Palmetto House while your ethics died eight to one.”
“That’s a lot of doors,” he answers, soft, like his throat might cut itself on any of them. “Some I can’t open without setting off alarms.”
“Then tell me the ones you can.” I stop under the arch where the camera leaves a crescent of privacy on the ground like a shy moon. I step into it and wait for him to join me. He does, hood shadowing his eyes, the wind trying to get a hand between us.
He breathes in through his nose, out through a small twist of mouth, a habit from runs on the seawall. “I met Lila in a corridor a week before HR logged her ‘offboarding,’” he says. “I told HR I met her twice because I didn’t want to explain why the third mattered.”
My ribs brace on reflex. “Why did it matter?”
“Because I offered her a dev role.” He doesn’t look away. He drops the words like coins into a shallow bowl, ready for the clang. “On my team. Direct.”
The wind swallows my first answer. I let it. I hold the concrete instead, the grit and the salt, the sound of gulls arguing with the weather. I keep my voice low enough to stay inside the crescent. “Because of her work in the clinic trial cleanup? Or because of something else she showed you?”
“Because she saw what I couldn’t admit,” he says. “She described an edge case in the compliance model that read care as friction. I asked for her notes. She said she’d bring them after she finished a shift on the barge ticketing desk. We stood in front of the algae wall and I watched the color fall when she said the wrong names. I told her I could pull her off Palmetto’s list and tuck her into my sandbox within a week.”
My throat tightens. I swallow sea and think of Lila balancing shifts, ferry schedules, secrets under a borrowed jacket. “And then she vanished.”
He nods. “HR says she finished the contract. The system says she ghosted my floor after that. You already know that part.”
“I do.” I look out at the park disguised as a wall and the wall disguised as a park. After every storm, Harbor Eleven throws a “resilience” festival out here—streamers tangled now, plastic flowers snagged in the railings, a child’s ribbon pinned under a bolt like a tiny prayer not meant for a god who listens. People dance where the waves would eat them if the pumps cough at the wrong minute. We celebrate survival more than prevention; it photographs better.
He touches the ribbon with two fingers, then pockets his hand again. “I didn’t tell HR about the third meeting because I didn’t want them to bury her as a would-be whistleblower,” he says. “I didn’t want to teach the machine to flag everyone who talked to me after hours.”
“So you lied by subtraction.” I track a maintenance drone high above us, its LEDs steady. “You get that honesty entangles you now.”
“I do.” He cuts a glance at me, then back to the river. “Does it entangle you?”
“Always.” I blow heat into my hands and rub them, watching my breath fog and shred. “But I’m not on the payroll you are. If I put your confession into the wrong inbox, counsel paints you as a jilted prince manufacturing a conspiracy to punish a board. They call Lila a problem recruit who harassed you for a job. They call me… creative.”
He winces. “They’ll burn you for me.”
“They’ll burn me for Lila. You are just accelerant.” I let the line sit so he understands the math I use.
He toes a pebble into the gutter along the concrete. “Say Sable’s name again,” he says, and it lands like a dare he had to put a shape on.
“Sable,” I say. “She praised ‘risk-tolerant trials’ in a hall with phones sleeping. She commands money through Palmetto. The orchard feeds her barge. Someone welded shut a hatch that should be open. Your board opened a door for defense today. All roads slope toward the same person, and the slope is measurable.”
He nods, once, twice, the way he nods when code compiles on the first run. “I can pull audit schedules,” he says. “Not the ones they show the press. The ones the team uses to make sure the press won’t find anything.”
“Good.” I take a step closer to block the wind for his mouth. “But we don’t email. We don’t text. Locksmith rules: touch, pocket, walk away. We meet under arches or in June’s van. Dock workers will sell our shadows for a favor, but they’ll also sell the rumor that we fight, which is a kind of cover I can use.”
He laughs under his hood, quick, guilty, bright. “We can stage a fight. I know the place.”
“I know the place too,” I say, and we share the memory of forklifts and muffled shots and my flare burning a red hole in the air. The fish market freezer coughs cold into my bones all over again. My fingers twitch at the phantom of his shoulders shaking after we closed the latch.
He nudges my arm. “You carried me through smoke in your head again,” he says. He doesn’t make it a joke.
“I check the exits even when there’s no fire,” I say. “The panic-shaft pretends to be mercy, and someone welded our second hatch shut. I’m planning for the day we get pushed down that tube without choosing.”
“Then we make our own choices now,” he says. “Right here. Who else knows about the third meeting?”
“June, by inference. No one else.” The wind shifts and brings fried batter from a pier stall, brine lifting underneath. The smell of Harbor Eleven: grease, salt, antiseptic promises.
He pulls his hood back. Wind grabs his hair and stings his eyes. He doesn’t blink. “Then I tell you the piece I couldn’t say in any room with carpet,” he says. “When I offered Lila the role, I told her the price. She’d have to sign an NDA that covered research and private life. She made a face—your face when you hate a rule. She said, ‘What if I date the boss?’ I said, ‘Then we sign two.’ I swear I was trying to be funny. She didn’t laugh.”
I close my eyes for a breath that feels sharp. Biotech elites date inside NDAs; I’ve watched the etiquette at Palmetto: a flirtation becomes a signature as fast as a drink. Lila joked in the memo about the algae wall hiding stress; here she asked who owns a kiss when the signature owns a life.
“She was teasing you to measure your ethics,” I say. “That’s how we do it on the piers. A joke is a probe you can pull back without blood.”
“She walked away, then turned and said—” He stops, jaw locking. “No. I won’t paraphrase her to make myself cleaner. I’ll find a way to give you the exact words. Not today.”
I nod. He earns that by knowing not to launder her.
A long shadow slides across the concrete at our feet. It stretches, thins, and vanishes beyond the next rib of the arch. Neither of us moves for a second. We both tilt our heads at the angle a guard would choose.
“Maintenance drone?” he asks, voice airy.
“Too low. Wrong shape.” I scan the rails above us—empty. The shadow could belong to a walker on the upper path, or a camera tech who decided to take a new way home, or the concierge’s friend with good shoes and time. The arches magnify absence into threat.
“We should go,” I say, and I place my body so the crescent of privacy holds him at its center while we move.
“Before we do,” he says, “I need to say it the way you need to hear it. I offered Lila a job that would have put her under me. Direct line. I thought I was protecting her from the parts of my house that needed cleaning. I might have been leading her into it.”
The words land heavy and square. The arches throw our echoes back small and fast. I step into his space and catch his wrist. “You didn’t push her off a boat,” I say. “But we treat this like you might have closed a door she needed open. That’s what truth does: it turns our hands into levers we didn’t know we were pulling.”
He nods. “Use me right,” he says, rough.
“I’m trying not to use you at all,” I answer. “But love and leverage share a bed in this city, and I lie to myself when I say they don’t.” The line tastes like metal in my teeth. I keep it because it keeps me honest.
We start walking. The arches give way to a stretch where the park furniture tries to look casual—benches bolted to concrete so storm hands can’t steal them. On the bench closest to the ramp, a flyer from the last festival flaps, bright with a slogan about resilience that reads like a dare to keep surviving the same harm.
“What do you need from me tonight?” he asks.
“Two things,” I say. “Your internal audit schedules, and five names you trust below the level where anyone has a view of the whole machine. I also need you to decide if you want me to make contact with the concierge directly, or if we let him watch us and waste his own time.”
“Dinner,” he says, and the smile he gives me is grim. “Same table.”
“I saw that line.” I bump my shoulder against his. “We give him a show he can’t monetize.”
The tide clock winks through an opening—three minutes ahead, still lying. I stop at the ramp and look back under the arches. The shadow doesn’t return. That makes me trust it less.
“We’ll debrief once more,” I say. “In the van. Then we go visible and talk about weather. Cameras love forecast talk. No one can subpoena rain.”
He threads his fingers through mine for a heartbeat, the grip not romantic so much as steady. “You asked for truth on the plate,” he says. “I gave you mine. You owe me yours.”
I squeeze. “I suspect Sable, yes. I stole your badge key. I kissed you for the skim, and then again because I wanted the second one. I can live with both truths, but one of them makes me bad at my job.”
He breathes out, shaky, then laughs into the wind, small and fierce. “Or better,” he says. “Depending on the job.”
A gull screams and the arches carry the noise like a blade skittering over stone. We climb the ramp, side by side, into the not-quite-safe glow of the park lights. The marina clock holds its lie up for anyone who needs an excuse.
At the top, I look back one more time. The watcher’s shadow stays missing, which is its own message. I file it beside Lila’s laugh and the hiss and the cough, and the way his hood lifted when he decided to be brave.
“Ready?” I ask.
He nods, and the wind steals the word he might have said. I pocket that silence like evidence and head toward the city that records everything—except the most important three minutes I keep taking for myself.