The rain arrives like scouts—two drops on my jaw, four on the map, a line of dark freckles spreading across the concrete under the hurricane barrier. I kneel between rib seven and rib eleven where the CCTV forgets what faces are, and I let the wind learn my name the way Harbor Eleven teaches it: iodine on the tongue, salt crust at the lips, rotors singing in a cicada key above the park. I crack open the cache slot I carved weeks ago with a masonry bit and a prayer to friction, and I feed it the life I’ll need when the river opens: rope, wetsuit, pry bar, glow stick, three copper wedges, a dental mirror wrapped in oilcloth, a packet of sugar for heat.
“Talk to me,” June says from the van, voice half-in, half-out because she hates shouting across secrets. “How many meters from rib eleven to the ladder?”
“Twenty-one if I run straight and don’t break an ankle on heroism.” I press the lamination flat, wipe away the rain pearls with the back of my hand, and circle the swim route again—under the stern intake, the Y past the pumps, left toward Lab C’s anteroom duct where the door that hissed waits to be confronted.
The barrier emits one of its polite groans and the public park on top answers by getting louder. Vendors haul out tables for the resilience festival—because in this city every storm needs lights and a hashtag. A kid tests a glow stick, snaps it, and green leaks over his fingers. Dock workers bargain for ponchos at half price, trade cigarettes for ferry passes. Lovers with NDAs walk hand-in-hand under arches that promise no cameras, only weather. I watch their silhouettes and tuck my fear where the pry bar can find it later.
I cap the cache and smooth the concrete plug into place. I mark it with a line of chalk that looks like nothing to anyone who doesn’t know Lila’s stubborn diagonal. The tide clock across the marina blinks three minutes fast, the running joke that keeps ending in injuries and alibis.
Inside the van, algae-lit screens throw soft light against our faces. June’s shrug is all tendon and focus. “Storm band two hits in four hours,” she says, eyes sliding between weather models and a copy of the barge’s maintenance SOP she stole from a bored procurement tech with a crush on her voice. “They’ll run their lockdown tree: drones docked for recalibration, outer cams in ‘safe orientation,’ badge readers switched to buffered mode to prevent false rejects.”
“Buffered mode,” I repeat, tasting the phrase. “Fourteen minutes?”
She grins around the pencil in her teeth. “You know my heart. Shift change on pre-lockdown. Fourteen minutes where the door logs queue and the cameras stare at the horizon to avoid salt spray.”
The phrase makes my ribs line up in a way that feels like fate doing math. “Blind enough to swim,” I say. “Blind enough to make a mistake and blame the weather.”
“Blind enough to get killed if you add a minute,” June says, unsmiling now. “Don’t add a minute.”
I slide onto the bench and watch her hands become a small storm of their own—keys, laminator, printer head ticking in a private rhythm. She forges a service badge that looks like it has seen coffee and bad days: MARINE MAINT—CONTRACTOR. The photo is me with hair stricter and eyes less honest. The serial matches a dead contractor June resurrected for a weekend of good deeds.
“Hold still,” she says, lifting the lamination and blowing on it like an ember. “I need your neck to be the kind of neck that believes in clip lanyards.”
“I believe in clip lanyards the way I believe in polite guns,” I say, raising my chin so she can lay the plastic against the collar of my jacket. The laminate smells like hot sugar, the van like solder and storm.
She feeds a sheet into the second printer—this one a cheap municipal dinosaur bought from an auction, its firmware older than the youngest casualty in any of Sable’s trials. The paper shudders out: Work Order—Pump Cavitation Check—Priority Before Surge. Vessel: Institute Barge. Window: 1800–1814. The signature field holds the name of a night-shift supervisor who owes June a bike chain and an apology.
“I called the dock,” June says. “I’m their favorite emergency. If security asks, you’re the one keeping their intake from choking on storm froth. Public good.”
“Public good,” I say, letting the words scratch everything tender they touch. “You forged the ticket into the barge’s prep queue?”
“Better,” she says. “I slid it into the city’s queue and referenced the barge. They’ll trip over themselves to ‘assist’ private research for the appearance of unity. Harbor Eleven loves a marriage between corporate and civic when cameras are rolling.”
I click the carabiner on my belt and feel the metal answer: ready, ready, ready. “What about the drones?”
“They rotate to charging nests at H–14, hold at H–12, then stagger to patrol with dead zones between sectors,” she says, tapping the schedule she teased from a janitor’s phone that never forgot Wi-Fi. “If you’re late, the rotors sing your obituary.”
I take the forged badge and the ticket and tuck them into a dry pocket like talismans. The van’s door breathes open a notch wider and the wind comes in with a fistful of rain. I smell river metal, algae, the plastic tang of glow sticks cracked by hands that don’t think about after.
“I’m going with you.”
Elias fills the doorway with a sentence and soaked hair. He’s wrapped in a jacket I recognize from the rehearsal—a thin thing that pretends to be brave—and his shoes are wrong for the weather. He holds himself like a lawyer trying to smile down a shark.
“You’re not,” I say, standing without thinking about height or mercy. “Not tonight.”
His jaw flexes, humor’s last barricade. “You can say not tonight like it’s logistics, but it’s the second time in a week and my math is catching up.”
June watches without blinking, then makes a show of finding a cable that doesn’t need finding. We’ve all learned the choreography: we fight while the printer hums like a conscience.
“I need you loud,” I tell him, putting the badge to my chest with two fingers. “I need you at the resilience festival talking about sandbags and science. I need Sable’s watchers to roll their eyes at your optimism and mark you harmless. If you vanish, the model recalculates and the river closes.”
He steps into the van and the rain follows him, tentative. “You need my face for misdirection.” He doesn’t fight the insult; he recites it like a confession and a dare.
“I need your face because I can’t wear it,” I say. “And because you said you would burn your inheritance to stop her; this is how you light it without becoming smoke.”
His throat works. “Come on, Mara. You might need—”
“What?” I ask, and I don’t soften it. “The weight of a second body on a ladder? Another cadence to shush under intake roar? A mouth that says don’t at the wrong breath?”
He flinches, then ships that flinch to humor’s port. “I was going to say someone to hold the towel.”
“June’s got towels,” I say, and June lifts one without looking up.
Micro-hook 1
He runs a hand back through rain hair and the gesture shows all the prints of the last week—confession in the shaft, kiss too long, the decision to stay visible when visibility is a weapon. “If something happens,” he says, softer now, “I can pull power at the pier junction. You said it buys you thirty seconds of darkness and a curse from a maintenance bot. Let me be the one who curses.”
“Compromise,” June says, not peacemaker so much as engineer. “He stays on the barrier with a radio and a borrowed city vest. He smiles for the feeds and watches the tide clock and, on your codeword, pulls the junction and calls the dockmaster to complain about a public safety hazard. The kind of noise that puts a clipboard between you and a gun for a minute.”
I translate the shapes in my head into seconds and exits. The barge’s lockdown steps become a song I can dance to only once: Four minutes to dock drones. Three to reorient cams. Seven to buffer badges. Fourteen blind. The math loves discipline; discipline loves rules; I am very tired of loving rules that don’t love my sister back.
“Fine,” I say. “You get one codeword. If I say rain jacket, you pull the pier junction and smile at anyone who asks you to stop. If I say orchard, you walk into a camera and say on record that you’re calling for a board review of Sable’s safety protocols. It forces daylight tomorrow no matter what I find tonight.”
He nods once, then again like he’s teaching his body a new habit. “What if you say nothing?”
“Then you don’t improvise,” I say, and I make my voice a dock cleat and tie him to it with eye contact. “No new words. No new heroics. The storm loves fools.”
June slaps the service badge against my chest, seals the lanyard clip, and signs the repair ticket with a little flourish that would get her arrested if ink had fingerprints. “Fourteen minutes,” she says. “Shift change blind window begins at 18:00 on my mark. You swim at 17:58 to own the first and safest seconds.”
Elias looks at the printers the way people look at machines that decide things about them. “How sure are we of the fourteen?”
June flips the SOP for him, practical as a slap. “Sure enough to bet her life,” she says, then points at the weather feed. “And sure enough that the next band’s gust will make the drones dock or eat rain. They dock.”
I take the ticket, the badge, and the towel. “Help me stage the last cache,” I say, because doing is what I have instead of armor. We step into the rain together, and the barrier’s ribs make our footfalls sound like percussion for a ceremony I didn’t agree to but will officiate.
We lift a grating I pre-loosened, set a drybag in the cradle—backup mask, thin crow, a line of tape—and wedge copper at the corners. Elias kneels on wet concrete without dramatics and hands me the tools in the order I would have asked for them. He doesn’t touch my wrist, but his heat lives close enough that the iodine air tastes less like metal.
“Tell me again why this will work,” he says when we fit the grate back, not because he doubts, but because he wants to memorize the reasons it fails.
“Because the barge thinks more about optics than water,” I say. “Because they schedule lockdown like a board meeting. Because their cameras hate salt spray more than they love catching me. Because the city believes in resilience festivals more than maintenance budgets. Because I’ve done worse in quieter water for less noble people.”
“Because you’re you,” he says, and I let it stand because there’s nothing tactical about arguing with a truth I want.
We return to the van’s mouth. June hands him a city vest that smells like damp clipboard. “Congratulations,” she says. “You’re now Pier Liaison, Volunteer Division. Try not to unionize yourself.”
He shrugs into the vest, self-indicting grin in place. “I’ll agitate on my own time.”
I snap the ticket into a plastic sleeve and tuck it under my jacket. The lamination warms against my sternum, a polite lie with municipal fonts. The drone song overhead changes key—half a step, the kind of shift Harbor people hear in their sleep. We all freeze, counting.
June checks the feed. “Reorientation,” she says. “They’re locking to horizon-safe. It’s starting.”
Micro-hook 2
The park on the barrier wakes into noise—vendors test mics, a brass band does scales under an awning, a woman with a glitter stencil booth outlines lightning bolts on cheeks that have never seen a storm up close. The tide clock throws its three-minute lie across all their plans. Life is a choreography of wrong clocks; I choose which to obey.
Elias takes my hand to pass me a coil and doesn’t let go when the coil is mine. “Mara,” he says, and my name in his mouth makes my breath stumble. “Come back.”
“That’s a request without a plan,” I say, but I don’t make him release me yet.
“Then here’s a plan,” he says. “When you’ve got what you need, say harbor lights. I’ll step into the nearest camera and say something so public your route back gets respect. I’ll make my mother promise families on-air. Sable can’t shut a dock if there’s a pledge in play.”
June snorts softly. “Weaponized sincerity. I should have patented you.”
I squeeze his fingers once and let go. “Harbor lights means I’m running home and you’re making noise. Rain jacket means kill the pier power. Orchard means you explode the board.” I slip the towel over my shoulders like a stole and try to feel holy about it.
He nods with that stubborn mercy I can’t afford and can’t refuse. “Go be better than rules,” he says.
I step backward from them both so I can see their faces at once: June’s with all the receipts and none of the sleep, Elias’s with all the risk and none of the armor. The wind learns my name again and pronounces it right this time.
“We align at pressure,” I say. “That’s our talent.”
June flicks her gaze to the time. “Seventeen fifty-three,” she says. “The barge’s drones dock at fifty-six. Cameras reorient at fifty-seven. At eighteen hundred, the readers buffer. Fourteen minutes where the system is proud of its own script and forgets improvised acts.”
The rain thickens from scouts into columns. Festival canopies tremble. The smell of algae-lit glass drifts from the Spire district—clean air sold in subscription tiers. Under the arches, a couple kisses like they mean it and I look away because I need to keep mine for breath.
I sling the rope, pocket the copper, press the badge to my chest, and feel the van’s floor hum a low approval. June raises a fist; I bump it. Elias looks like a man who has finally found the usefulness in fear.
“Three minutes,” June says. “Make them honest.”
I step into the rain and let it write the first line on my skin. The barrier’s ribs drum an answer, drones whirr their grudging compliance, the tide clock lies with the confidence of an heir.
I ask the storm the only question it honors in this city: in fourteen blind minutes of borrowed dark, will the river open for me—or close its teeth around everything I’ve promised to pull free?