I borrowed the crabber the way I borrow air—briefly, gratefully, with the intent to return it cleaner than I found it. The hull was old Harbor Eleven: resin patched like scars, gunwales rubbed smooth by years of hands working lines. I eased the throttle until the engine purred against my palm and let the boat drift into the channel where the hurricane barrier made the bay hold its breath. I tasted iodine and diesel on spray that slapped my lips. Ahead, the barge hunched in the dark like a courthouse pretending it was a hospital.
“No lights,” I told the boat, which meant I told myself. “No heroics. Count the beats.”
I kept my eyes off my watch and on the water. Drone rotors throbbed overhead with that cicada whirr the city taught us to hear without reacting. They flew lazy ovals around the barge, but laziness is a trick; the arcs sped up on certain passes, slowed on others. I rocked my wrist with the chop and started a low count.
“One… two… three… crest.”
A drone’s cone brushed the swell and lifted, losing focus in a silvered skin of wave. The sea erases. I rode the downbeat and slid the crabber into the dark between arcs. The tide clock in the marina would swear I was three minutes ahead, but out here I had the truth: I was on time only because I moved in water’s grammar, where you finish the sentence before the word completes.
I sketched the arcs in my head, a wireframe of light over dark. “Seven seconds wide,” I whispered. “Eleven to reset. Double pass every third loop.” My fingers drummed the rail to keep the math in muscle. My other hand adjusted the throttle half a thumbprint at a time, barely a rumor of movement.
Laughter drifted from the barge’s upper deck—bright, performative, too round for night. PR had found its sea legs. They were probably raising zero-proof glasses to resilience, to innovation, to whatever line their comms sheet suggested tasted like champagne. The sound made my jaw lock hard enough to ring my ears. “Party for a platform that eats hours,” I said to the salt air. “Of course.”
I let the crabber slide behind a shadow bulge where a mooring line met water like a muscle under skin. The barge’s algae-lit glass panels threw a faint green onto the chop; the glow tried to be soothing and landed on sickly. I timed the next drone, waited for the crest to lift its camera off me, and moved.
Micro-hook 1
The first spotlight sweep came without fanfare. One moment my world was tar-black with stars pinned in it, the next a white blade skimmed the water like a thrown plate. I dropped my body low, shoulder to bait tarps that still remembered dead things. The tarp sucked against my cheek with cold slime, and I counted breath in inches.
“Two… three… hold.”
The light swung away, found nothing but wave-text and reflection, and I tasted that particular small triumph that belongs to people who don’t die yet. I peeled myself from the tarp and blew a quiet breath into my sleeve to warm my face and kill the smell. The spotlight pivoted again, slower this time, trying to teach fear the rhythm of compliance. I made myself watch it, let it set the tempo for my next drift.
“You don’t own time,” I told the light. “You rent it from weather.”
I waited through a long arc to make them believe they’d swept me from the water and then eased the crabber to the barge’s stern quarter where rumors said the pumps moaned when the tide ran low. The engine ticked like a modest watch; every sound out here gets judged by radius. I feathered the throttle down to a whisper and let the current carry me into the barge’s lee.
Party laughter again—higher, with a tremor in it I recognized from crisis centers and backstage corridors: people laughing because not laughing means listening. A violin scratched a climb to nothing. I thought of the clinic’s waiting room, the IV beeps, the mothers who used new grammar to talk around pain, and I braced my knees on the deck like I could anchor them all with calves and quiet.
A deck hand appeared at the stern rail in a slice of warm light, profile carved by the spill from the party above. He wore the weary gait of someone who has unlocked too many doors he wasn’t supposed to open. He held a bakery box. For a second I thought he’d pitch it as trash, but he lifted the lid with a care that made my throat go tight, lifted pastries one by one—glazed, powdered, golden for a moment in the light—and tossed them to the water like seeds. The gulls that hadn’t gone to the barrier arches swooped low, and their wings made the air beat like paper fans.
“I get it,” I whispered. “Not for me. For them.”
I didn’t call out. I didn’t wave. I kept the crabber in shadow. His covert gesture wasn’t invitation; it was signal. He didn’t know me, but he knew someone might be watching and wanted whoever that was to know there were small kindnesses afloat, even here. Or he wanted gull noise to cover a different sound.
I listened past laughter and wingbeats and heard it: a low, steady pull under the stern, a throat drinking in intervals. Not bilge, not standard circulation—stronger, more rhythmic. The service intake. I shifted weight to the port side and let the hull slide closer until a new texture joined the water’s song: a gritted hum, metal against current, a grate holding back weeds and unlucky creatures.
“There you are,” I said, and my voice tried to do too many things—praise, curse, calculation.
I marked the measurements in my mouth because mouths remember better than notebooks when notebooks get wet. “Intake centerline two meters off keel. Grate is double—outer slats wide, inner mesh fine. Flow strong but pulses—twenty seconds draw, five resting.” I palmed the hull to feel vibration travel up bone. “If I time my lungs to the rest, I can wedge. If I time my fear, I can live.”
Micro-hook 2
The second spotlight sweep snapped across the stern faster than before, and I dove under the tarps in one motion that scraped my shoulder on a cleat and filled my mouth with the taste of rotted rope. I let the tarp fall over my head like a coffin lid and stared into darkness that smelled of bait, salt, and someone else’s cigarettes. The cone of light sliced right over me; the hull glowed pale for a blink and turned back into wood.
“Hold,” I breathed. “Hold, hold.” I was whispering to capillaries and heart rhythm and the pockets of air under the tarp because I needed everything to agree.
When the light swept away, I counted slower to slow the blood. “Four. Five. Six.” My brain wanted to sprint; my body wanted to shake. I made both of them do math. “If I start at slack, I have one quiet minute to cross the gap before the drone’s double pass. One minute to find the bracket I saw in the drydock diagram, two to set the prep rig later. Not tonight. This is just first touch.”
Above me, the party band shifted to a cover of a song Harbor Eleven never lets die, the one the city uses to sell resilience festivals every season. I pictured lanterns bobbing under the arches, cameras switching to wide to catch the silhouettes of couples laughing into wind that hurts your teeth. The blind spots under the arches had been my first classroom; I’d learned when to be smaller than a camera’s assumption. Out here, the assumption was that no one would come by water unless they belonged. I belonged to the tide.
I nudged the tarp aside and risked a look. The deck hand had set the empty bakery box on the rail, turned it into a small barricade for whatever gesture he’d made. He lit a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke it. He held it out into the wind until the coal flared and the ash slid into the dark. He wasn’t signaling me; he was signaling himself: proof of timing. I filed his rhythm alongside the drones’.
“Thank you,” I told his silhouette, quiet enough that only the gulls heard. Gratitude is a map too.
I edged the crabber backward with tiny kisses of the throttle, letting the current do most of the work. The engine coughed once like an old man taking a step he didn’t trust. I froze and pressed my fingers to the choke. “Not now,” I said, friendly and firm, the tone I used on frightened dogs and rich clients.
The motor settled. The drone arcs above stuttered, and one of the cicadas dropped lower, testing a hunch. I shoved the crabber into the shadow of a support strut and became geometry: straight lines, dark triangles. The drone’s light combed the water where I’d been and found nothing but pastries dissolving into fish food.
“Your security is a show about security,” I muttered. “You built it for cameras that watch you watching yourselves.”
I backed into the lee again and let the barge’s sounds layer themselves: laughter like cutlery, pumps like distant thunder, drone rotors like summer insects that forgot to die. For a second my knuckles whitened on the tiller because I saw Lila in the overlap: my sister laughing too loud in a lab corridor to cover for someone else’s fear, then quiet under the hum of machines that made hours go missing. I relaxed my grip just enough to keep blood in my fingers.
I drew the route in my mouth again: “Approach from the south where the arches hide me from the public cams. Ride the double pass to the rest. Tuck against the stern, hand over hand along the barnacle strip. Wedge at the grate when the pulse eases. Knife at the chord if needed. Breath on the rest.”
Micro-hook 3
On my third drift-by I reached out with the boathook and touched the stern’s seam where white paint flaked into the water. The metal felt colder than the night. I scraped off a curl of paint and pressed it between finger and thumb like a relic. “Proof of proximity,” I told my pocket as I slid it in. Proof matters. The feeds love images; the courts need contact.
The spotlight didn’t come back for a long thirty seconds that made me suspect a radio discussion somewhere above my head. The drone arcs kept their lazy pattern while some guard decided whether to send a skiff to ask me for paperwork. I angled the crabber’s bow toward the marina like a woman who had always meant to go home, and I let the boat be obvious about it: a little wobble, the mild inattention of a tired fisherman.
My mouth watered suddenly—the body’s joke under stress—and I realized the pastry sugar had dusted the spray and come back to me. The scent made me absurdly angry. “Feeding gulls while you write NDAs for night migraines,” I said. “You can keep your generosity.”
I passed under the bandstand deck where a string of bulbs trembled in the wind and heard a new sound: a clatter like a mop bucket upended. Then the soft curse of a man who didn’t plan to be overheard. I ignored it and kept my course. Not my night to play hero for someone who had time to drop buckets. My night to keep next time possible.
Beyond the barge, the hurricane barrier made black teeth against the sky. Between two arches, the public park’s path lights marched dutifully, and two teenagers sat with their backs to the city, heads close. I envied them their ignorance for one heartbeat and then didn’t. Protection is a paradox you only learn by losing parts of yourself to it.
I cleared the barge’s outer drone net and let breath leak from me in a long, thin thread. “First pass complete,” I said, making it ritual. “Gaps mapped: north quadrant, eight-second curtain every minute fifteen; west quadrant, double-pass, good for a body pressed to steel; stern intake confirmed—service gate under the throat.”
The crabber nosed toward the marina where the tide clock grinned its three-minute lie. Lantern hardware from the last resilience festival clinked against a bollard like wind chimes practicing excuses. I cut the engine and let inertia and current do the last meters. The silence slapped me harder than any spotlight: without the motor’s comfort-noise, I could hear my own pulse, and it told me the truth—the small triumph had already curdled into resolve.
I tied off with the hands of someone who learned knots before taxes and sat a moment with the city’s salt air sinking into my jacket. I took the curl of barge paint from my pocket and set it on the seat beside me like a pressed leaf. It didn’t look like anything worth the risk, which is how the best evidence starts.
“Next time, I go under,” I told the tide clock. “Next time, I bring tools and prayers I don’t believe in.”
A gust rattled the arches and blew a smear of laughter from some late-night party on the seawall park. Drones traced their routes like they were sure of the future. I touched the cut on my shoulder from the cleat and let the sting sharpen me.
“One more question,” I said to the water that keeps secrets at scale. “Can I reach that intake before they smell me in the dark—or did I already leave a note in the tide that they know how to read?”