The arches took the wind and fed it back as a warning. I listened anyway. June hunched over her tablet in the van’s open doorway, the seawall overhead turning the sky into a low ceiling my thoughts kept bumping.
“Give me your harbor,” she said, hands moving, wristlight strobing in tiny pulses. “Tide tables, the municipal tug allocations, and every weather exemption Vance has pulled this quarter.”
I scrolled my phone and handed her the feeds I milked from a union friend who preferred cash in coffee cups and favors in hurricane season. I could taste iodine on the breeze, brine and old net, and the algae-lit glass of the Spire glowed green on the far side of the marina like the city was pretending to be healthy. A drone passed, rotors thrumming like cicadas too wired to sleep.
“No straight lines,” I said. “They’ll hide the barge runs where current does the work.”
“Which is why we love math,” June murmured. Her stylus looped arcs across the bay. The screen braided colors: blue swells for height, gray for wind, thin red threads for shuttles that claimed they were “support craft—maintenance,” each tagged with a clause that made lawyers smile and auditors tired.
She pinched and the map breathed. “Okay. See how the tide peaks at 02:13, then again at 14:44, and the harbor authority declares ‘hazardous chop’ for twenty minutes before and after?” She traced three red commas tucked inside those windows like smuggled punctuation. “They piggyback exemptions exactly here. Weather says ‘don’t bother us,’ and the harbor says ‘fine,’ and the barge says ‘bring me.”
“Those aren’t maintenance,” I said. “Those are manifests disguised as mop buckets.”
“Helpfully,” June said, “the mop buckets need food.” She tapped a second layer, and a list spooled: catering invoices filed as “crew support,” all under shell vendors who shared a phone number with a florist that specialized in gala centerpieces and break-up bouquets. The name amused me; her owner’s jugular did not.
“We need a ground truth,” I said. “Not just receipts.” I looked out at Dockyard K where the wind dragged fish scales and fryer smoke into an accidental perfume. The tide clock on the marina kiosk blinked three minutes fast, smug about a lie everyone lived around. “Stalls keep paper because humidity eats screens. Someone has a ledger.”
June slapped the tablet into a rugged case, grabbed a roll of bills, and gave me a look I didn’t have to translate: stay small, stay dull, stay ready to run. I slid my fake vendor badge into view and we walked, two women in hoodies under city lights that refused to go dark.
Dock workers worked deals with glances and debts; I watched the barter dance change hands around us. A woman with forearms like anchor rope filleted monkfish without looking at the knife. A boy in a plastic crown declared himself “king of wet floors,” dragging a squeegee throne behind him. Music from a resilience festival rehearsal drifted from the park—snare drums practicing the city’s favorite lie: we always bounce back, nothing breaks for long, clap on the beat and forget who drowned.
We found the stall that fed crews—the one with soup that tasted like forgiveness and coffee that tasted like income. The ledger was right where I expected, wedged under a tin tray of lemons and scales. Tape repaired its spine; grease thumbprints annotated the margins; a rubber band held the future shut.
“Evening,” I said, voice soft, cash visible but not obvious. The proprietor looked up with a gaze that had measured men for decades and found the numbers wanting.
“If you’re selling fish,” she said, “you’re late.”
“I’m buying patience,” I said, sliding a twenty toward the lemons. “And two sandwiches for—” I glanced at the chalkboard and smiled “—whoever answers to ‘crew.’”
June had already leaned her hip against the counter, becoming a problem the stall owner could solve. “I’ll need change,” she added, because theater needs understudy lines.
The woman snorted, pocketed the bill without breaking the rubber band, and handed us two paper-wrapped truths that steamed in our palms. “You new?” she asked.
“Contractors,” I said, aiming at harmless. “We’ve been told to keep crews fed when weather is mean.”
“Weather’s always mean,” she said. “Crews are worse.”
I picked up the ledger and let it open at the center like it wanted to. Pages blackened with tally marks and names stacked in columns between oil rings: MON, TUE, WED—midnight entries, “crew meals,” numbers that matched the red commas on June’s map with a censor’s accuracy. I kept my face quiet while my pulse annotated every line; hunger and fear have the same handwriting.
“You keep good counts,” I said.
“You bring the money, I count heads,” she said. “You want to count, pay extra.”
“I do,” I said, and added another twenty. “I like knowing when to show up.”
The lemon tray moved. The ledger’s pages stopped resisting. June drifted closer, her breath warming my ear like caution. I traced backward—last month, last week, the night the fire suppression went “offline” right before truth tried to burn. Headcounts rose by three the week after; someone had discovered fear increases appetite.
And there, in half-rubbed pencil where the page had been damp, a wristband shorthand I recognized because I had taught myself the codes after Lila vanished: CRU-Blue-87B.
My throat closed like a door. “June,” I said, keeping my voice level by force. “Look at the suffix.”
June’s finger shadowed mine. Her eyes flicked, widened, shuttered. “Eighty-seven B,” she said too calmly. “That’s a crew meal band—external contractor, one week, blue access. They rotate the numbers, but the suffix sticks with the batch.”
“Lila borrowed a band to skip a scanner once,” I said. “She was proud and angry at the same time. She texted me a photo to prove she could get through the wrong door with the right food.”
The entry date next to 87B matched her last clean day. The pencil had dragged; the hand had been wet, or the air had been. I saw her hand on the page by proxy, a ghost step.
“She ate with them,” June said. Not a question. Not mercy. “Or they logged her with them.”
The proprietor coughed a single syllable that meant business. “You done counting? Coffee’s not a library.”
I smiled like I had learned a lesson about rudeness and let the ledger close. “Sorry,” I said, and pushed a final ten under the lemons as if gratitude was a tip jar big enough for grief. “Busy nights?”
“When the barge ghosts in,” she said, glancing toward the black mouth of the channel, “every gull in the county announces a funeral.” She lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t hear that from me.”
“I hear it from the gulls,” I said.
We walked the back aisle where crates stacked like punctuation marks people refused to read. The wood was seasoned with salt and bureaucracy, stamped with codes that meant nothing until you knew who wrote them. Trucks backfired. The drones’ hum softened under the arches, blind angles shaped by concrete and municipal neglect.
“Crates,” I said. “We need their old names.”
June handed me a small UV torch and kept watch, face turned to the ferries like a lighthouse that had learned patience as a weapon. I ran the beam over stencils until I found burns in the grain where productive habits hide sins: initials seared into corners, brands that never washed out. I lifted my phone, angled it to avoid the stall’s gleam, and snapped shot after shot: MKD, PHC, SABL, and a tidy V inside a circle that someone thought was a cute joke until it wasn’t.
“Get the repeats,” June said. “Patterns make prosecutors happy.”
“I’m not feeding prosecutors,” I said, though we both knew I would if it kept people breathing. “I’m feeding the feeds first.”
I found a crate with a double burn—two initials overlapped like a bad marriage. The top layer read “SBL,” neat, recent. Under it, scorched deep and older, “PH”—Palmetto House, the concierge’s kingdom. I swallowed the old heat the brand had left behind.
“They repurpose with flair,” I said. “Concierge to barge. House to hull.”
“Same logistics, different gods,” June said. “Follow the food, follow the favors.”
I kept photographing. My fingers stung with salt and splinters. The smell of diesel and brackish rot curled under my tongue until I could name each engine by the way it coughed. I moved faster when laughter rolled down the aisle—PR kids in borrowed Carhartts, practicing authenticity over oysters.
A tug horn moaned, far out, then closer. June’s head lifted. “That’s not on the public timetable,” she said. Her tablet was already back in her hands, map awake, layers trembling.
“Overlay,” I said.
She made blue chew red; tide kissed exemption; a new line appeared where no line should be: a shuttle listed as “charter—resilience festival support,” hugging the cut between sandbars where I had once stolen a dawn. The time stamp sat square in the untidy minutes when the tide clock lied and humans believed it. The shuttle number matched a catering invoice from the ledger’s corner—twelve crew meals, one vegetarian, two “no nuts” which usually meant execs.
“They’re moving tonight,” June said. “Again.”
“Names?”
“Manifests are redacted to initials,” she said, teeth going tight on the word. “But the new shell forgot to randomize order. Give me the ledger counts.” She tapped. “Twelve meals, twelve bodies. You got initials burned into the crates, I’ve got initials on the screen, and Harbor Eleven thinks if you scramble letters you scramble guilt.”
We ducked between stacks, the arches swallowing us and giving us back in smaller shapes. I sent the photos to her with the speed of muscle memory. She aligned and cross-referenced and swore softly in a rhythm that matched the drone’s pulse. We watched names resolve from initials like faces out of fog:
MKD → Moniker Diagnostics, a ghost vendor we’d chased in Chapter Nine’s orchard map.
SABL → obvious, arrogant.
PHC → the concierge again, a host who seats guests at tables and gangways.
And then a cluster of JNs and LLs and HRs that looked random until June stacked them against a payroll. One belonged to a janitor who had lodged an anonymous complaint six months ago, then “transferred” three days later—commute replaced by a shuttle, family given a resilience scholarship for “continuing education” they never asked for.
“They paid off the witnesses with their children’s futures,” I said, watching rage become numbers so I could carry it.
“They paid for silence and called it opportunity,” June said.
I took a breath and tasted a memory: Lila’s laugh when she stole a crew band to smuggle dumplings to the night shift. The ledger entry for 87B glowed at the back of my eyes like a flare that no one else saw. “She ate on her way out,” I said. “Or they made her eat with them so the log told the right story.”
“Which means she was with the crew long enough for the band to register at the stall,” June said. “Which means she wasn’t dragged blind; she was walked with paperwork.”
“Consent manufactured like weather exemptions,” I said. “Windy enough and anything is an accident.”
A forklift rattled near; we slid deeper, past baskets of ice reflecting streetlight like the sea had grown eyes. The drone rotors shifted pitch toward curious; a camera on a lamp head ticked back and forth like a finger wag. I kept my shoulders loose, my jaw slack, my phone steady. The crate brands became a language under my light, a classroom no one wanted to attend. I photographed initials burned so deep they made the wood darker.
“We have enough to assemble a list,” June said, voice barely air. “Participants, escorts, and a very tidy chain of custody from house to hull.”
“We don’t have enough to survive going loud,” I said. The words hurt on exit. “If we publish before we can extract, Sable scuttles. Evidence sinks. People drown.”
“Then we don’t push yet,” she said, and I loved her for making patience sound like action.
We circled back toward the soup stall, ledger returned, cash respect paid. The proprietor gave us a nod like a benediction she’d earned the right to grant. Harbor Eleven blew cold through the arches, and the festival drums picked up a brighter beat—resilience on parade, grief in the wings.
“One more pass,” I said, stopping at a final stack where the brand looked fresh enough to smell. I turned my phone sideways to catch the angle and a shadow, long and slim, crossed the frame. I froze, then lowered the light and looked up.
A man in a reflective vest walked by without looking at me. He pinched a cigarette from behind his ear, tapped the filter against a crate, and frowned into the wind. He wore the posture of someone who answers to nobody and owes everyone. He kept walking. Nothing moved to stop him. My breath went back to work.
I finished the set: initials crisp, corner flares, scorch on the grain like old arguments. I slid the phone into my pocket where the velvet box’s emptiness still lived from last night—PR’s gift now a gutted tracker in June’s bin.
“We have Lila’s wristband code,” June said when we reached the van, voice quiet, hands already writing the list that would become a map that would become a plan. “We have the janitor’s ‘transfer.’ We have meal counts matching the shuttle bodies. We have crate brands crossing from Palmetto to Sable like they share a pantry.”
“We have a pattern,” I said. The ocean pressed a wet palm against the seawall. The arches hummed in their blind confidence.
The tug horn moaned again, closer, stubborn. On June’s screen, the unlisted “resilience support” line inched toward the barge’s private mooring. The tide clock blinked its lie to a crowd that didn’t care because the music was warming up and the fryers were full.
“Intercept?” June asked, not moving her eyes from the thread that would become a boat if we let it.
I looked at the names we had teased back into being. Initials turned into people when you said them aloud, and people break when you grip too tight. “If I go,” I said, “I make noise. They pull the switch. The barge goes dark and down. If I don’t, we watch another load cross the water like a quiet theft.”
“We could track,” she said gently. “Bleed our rage into a net instead of a wave.”
I rested my hand on the van’s frame and felt the salt in the steel. Protection demands closeness; closeness writes logs that betray. Truth heals victims but breaks bystanders when it arrives without a ladder. Love makes you strong enough to fight power and soft enough to be used by it.
The horn called again. The drones panned toward the channel, interested. Somewhere in the neon reflection of the Spire’s algae skin, a boardroom plotted a festival speech about resilience that would sound better than this water feels.
“Track,” I said. “For now.” I tasted the word like a promise I didn’t deserve.
June nodded and set the hooks—harbor pings, union radios, a cousin’s cousin who drove a tug when his back didn’t hurt. The map breathed.
I slid the last photo into a locked folder: initials burned into crate sides, proof that heat leaves marks even when water licks at the edges. I closed the gallery and looked back at the ledger stall where kindness and commerce blurred. The proprietor lifted her chin toward the channel, a gesture that asked the only question that mattered tonight.
The tug answered with its horn. The tide clock smiled its lie. I put my hand on the van door and asked the question back, out loud, to the water that keeps secrets at scale: how many names can I write on a tide before it writes one back that I can’t bear to read?