The arches hold their breath with me. I taste iodine and nickel and the pre-storm air that always smells like someone unwrapped a battery. The tide clock across the marina flashes its three-minute lie. I check the lanyard once, twice, then flatten my palm to the wet concrete.
“Four,” I whisper into my own mouth, letting the number warm the back of my throat. “Three. Two. One.”
I slip into the water on the one and the river bites. Cold eats my ribs and writes its name down my spine. The intake grilles under the stern thrumming like a bass note drag the surface toward them, polite and constant—an office door I’m about to kick. I keep my head low, letting the world above be only arches, festival music smudged by rain, and drone rotors thrum-muttering like cicadas grown up and angry.
“Six strokes,” I tell my chest. “Then check.”
Metal greets my knuckles with a damp kiss. The grate wears slime like velvet. I palm the first copper wedge into the seam, heel of my hand against steel.
“Left. Press. Hold.”
The wedge slides in and sings a small, private note—a tuning fork for trespass. I work the second wedge into the opposite seam, the third at the bottom, shoulders burning as the intake tugs the river through me, through this moment, through every reason I know for reaching into Sable’s dark.
My gloves squeal against wet steel. The sound is small, but my body answers like I barked a confession. I set the pry bar, count the interval between security drones cycling past on their horizon-safe loop, and lean with everything the docks taught me.
“Breathe, Quill.”
The grate sulks and moves, a grudging hinge. A cough of trapped river ghosts my face. I suck a slow breath to measure the cold and taste the algae that used to hum Lila to calm.
“Two more,” I tell the ache that lives under my clavicle. “Two.”
The opening is shoulder-mean. I slide the dental mirror in first—shine, angle, black interior, dimpled condensate—and then I push my head through and let steel rebuke my cheekbones. My braid drags like a wet rope. Metal bites my palms like a landlord who hates renters.
The intake throat is a steel esophagus. I pull forward with elbows and faith, boots scraping, wetsuit rasping, the river tug teasing the toes of me still outside. When my hips clear the mouth I ease the grate back on its wedges and lay the pry bar where my hand will find it blind.
“Three meters,” I breathe, voice making a cloud in the dark. “Two. One.”
The duct smells of machine oil and wet rubber. I press the first microreflector to the seam at my shoulder and thumb its tiny switch. It answers with a moth’s glint. The second reflector goes higher, a breadcrumb for a future me who may be bleeding. The third, inside the turn where a hand might not remember left from right under fear.
I belly-crawl until the duct widens enough to let me crouch. The intake hum becomes a floor to stand on. A maintenance hatch waits—a grid of bolts, a smug hinge. I kiss the gasket with the mirror and see only my own intention.
“Quiet,” I tell the hinge. “Be a good door.”
The hinge believes me because the copper does its job. The hatch sighs and I slip into a corridor bright as a lab jaw. Fluorescent light turns the raindrops on me into a display of mistakes. I shake once, deliberate and minimal, toward the wall so the floor doesn’t tattle.
To my left, a maintenance catwalk runs under the stern scaffolding, stenciled with AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL—LOCKDOWN PHASE. The letters smell like a new stencil—fresh paint’s whisper under the machine stink.
“Walk slow,” I coach my legs. “Think clinic, not heist.”
Half a dozen steps and the barge talks back. A wrench falls somewhere above like a bell tolling for carelessness. The clang walks the corridor in boots. I freeze, all nerves leaning forward.
“Don’t breathe,” I tell my lungs. “Borrow oxygen from later.”
The wrench rings itself out, last note quivering like a small animal. Footsteps answer. A guard’s pace—heavy heel, lighter toe—crosses the catwalk above my head.
“Show me boredom,” I say with my face, schooled into repair neutral. “Show me we both hate this weather.”
The shadow passes the grated section where my body buys its silhouette away, pauses, and then leans over the rail. He exhales the sleep of a man who will never know what he didn’t see. The tide lifts inside the barge, a slow push; my boots float on a nerve-width of water and lose the truth of the floor. Every muscle in me becomes a sentence I refuse to finish.
“Stay floor,” I whisper to the soles of my feet, ritualizing physics.
The guard mutters into a radio that crackles like frying rain. Words die in static; intent doesn’t. He moves on. The echo limps down the hall and is gone.
I fit my boots back onto gravity and realize I crushed a prayer between my molars. I spit copper taste into my cheek and move again, the way cranes move—sure because doubt drops things.
“Mark it,” I tell my hands. “Never get lost where you can drown.”
I thumb another microreflector onto the base of a conduit, then one more where the corridor stutters into a T. I keep count because numbers are the only mercy I trust: five, six, seven. At the eighth, I pause and angle my head to the ceiling dome. The camera stares past me—edge-on, turned deliberately wide to cover the wrong place.
“Hello, dead zone,” I whisper to the gap under its eye. “Who were you built to forget?”
I step into the static cone and feel the temperature of neglect. The hair along my forearms becomes a sensor array. No accidental geometry makes a hole this clean. Someone designed the un-seen.
“Internal corridors include dead zones,” I say to the van that isn’t here, to June who will hear it when I can say it into a recorder. “Intentional.”
My breath fogs, then shreds under the vents. The floor slope nudges water toward a drain as fine as a stitch. The barge is a patient that sweats in antiseptic.
I cross the dead zone slowly, scanning for the story it hides—scratches where gurney wheels catch, scuffed paint at hip height, a smear of something that won’t be blood because blood is messy and mess is intolerable here. It’s only sealant. But the scuff pattern draws a shape—something that stops here often and turns left.
“Left it is,” I tell the doubt that loves right.
The intake’s hum has become a choir. Far off, a public-address tone pings the shift change I’m riding. I adjust the strap on my forged badge and let it rest where a camera might flirt with believing me later.
“Halfway,” I lie to my nerves. “Almost.”
Another hatch mouths the corridor, a square of dented comfort. I sidle into it and kneel on grated metal. The hatch’s wheel complains under a measured hand. I give it a sticker—my ninth reflector—right at the hinge.
The room beyond is a pump chapel. Pistons pray up and down; gauges confess in needles. The smell here is salt married to lubricant. My tongue goes numb along one edge—taste buds agreeing to disagree with aerosolized maintenance.
“Bless me,” I tell the machines, because blasphemy is cover too, “for I am trespass.”
I cross on cat toes and hear the storm’s lowing through the hull. Somewhere up on the barrier, the resilience festival blows a speaker and a trumpet laughs about it. This city loves its parties like it loves its secrets: loud enough to drown the truth.
The far wall holds a service crawl filled with cable, and beyond that, the duct that will take me toward the predictive compliance suite—the door that hissed in Lila’s last true sound. I sniff at a seam; warm air answers, less river, more breath. People work past that seam. People slept badly past that seam.
“Gloves,” I remind myself. “Gloves do not touch face. Face does not touch room. The room does not get any piece of me I don’t choose.”
The duct is tighter—a meaner throat than the first. I fold the towel over steel to bless it quieter and haul myself forward in three heaves and two swear words my father would approve. I keep my chest off the floor, a trick learned in foreign basements where alarms wore dust like crowns.
“Ten,” I say, pressing the next reflector into a corner. “Eleven.”
My watch hisses an inaudible nudge against my wrist—June’s heartbeat in metal: H–04. Four minutes into the blind. I map seconds across my knuckles and assign each one a task. My boots make a sound like trying to remember your own dream.
The duct spits me into a horizontal shaft that smells of antiseptic and fear-sweat. People have been dragged near here. Not recently, the molecules say, but not before the paint dried either. I place a reflector at eye height as a promise to whoever I have to talk back here later.
“If I have to run,” I tell the future, “follow the moths.”
A service panel sits loose, screwed by someone who believed in speed over signatures. I ease it aside and roll into a corridor empty enough to feel staged. The lights don’t hum; they purr. The cameras here point confidently toward the grander elevator triangle, leaving the service run like a country road at night.
“More dead zones,” I tell the air. “This is choreography.”
The floor subtly dishes before a door ahead, two millimeters of depression over three meters of approach—the kind of threshold you design when you want to know, by the prints a cart leaves, who stopped and who ran. I walk it like I’ve walked hospital guilt, slow and necessary.
The door seal sings when I get close—a low, possessive breath. The waveform in my memory overlays itself on the air. Lila’s shard: hiss wobble at 310 hertz, the little yodel on decay where the pneumaseal is tired but proud. I place my ear to the seam and the world becomes a heartbeat I have chased through six months of wrong rooms.
“Hello, Lab C,” I say, not louder than a thought. “Do you remember me?”
My boots float again, a kiss from the tide through the barge’s deep breath. I bend my knees and let the water take my weight so the floor can’t tattle about pressure changes. Somewhere behind me, another wrench decides gravity is interesting. The echo walks away this time.
I slide a probe under the plate that guards the seal’s service override. The plate considers being difficult and then remembers every other plate I’ve ever met. It opens with a whisper and shows me its neat little wires—green, black, a smug orange for diagnostics.
“Don’t cut,” I remind my hand. “Convince.”
I bridge the test contacts with a clip I carry in my mouth when I need my hands to remember they’re holy. The seal inhales. The hiss matches my memory like a fingerprint—and the audio shard spills into my skull fully alive: Lila laughing soft, then someone saying, Don’t write that down.
Every part of my body becomes a lens. I am only eye and ear and nerve and the copper taste of before.
“It’s you,” I say to the door, to the room beyond, to the part of the past that refuses to die. “It’s you.”
I set two reflectors at knee height on either side of the threshold—tiny stars only my flashlight will harvest, never theirs. I press one more into the underside of the override plate so I can find it blind with blood in my eyes. I count what matters left: three wedges, one towel, a handful of luck I don’t trust.
“Twelve minutes,” I breathe to the math. “Two left to go in, two to improvise, ten to get out if out still exists.”
I touch the seal again. It answers with that wounded wobble I studied in June’s van. I could open it now. I could walk into the room that taught a machine to lie.
The tide tugs at my boots with the gentleness of a noose. I taste rain that has never been cloud, just condensate and air fresher than people earned. I press my forehead to steel and close my eyes because closing them is the only honest thing I can do in a place that arranges lies with such care.
“Lila,” I whisper into the seam that remembers her. “Do I go through now, or do I wait for the next breath?”
The door hums its answer in a frequency I don’t speak. The corridor behind me holds its light like a held note. The dead zone cuddles me, a dangerous kindness. I lift my hand toward the override and ask the only question left that scares me: if the room beyond knows my name, will it say it back— or count me, too, as friction?