The van smells like solder, coffee gone bitter, and clean gauze. June snaps on a headlamp and cocks my wrist toward the fluorescent strip, the way a jeweler hunts imperfection.
“Hold still,” she says, voice flat with focus. “Your balcony friend kissed you back.”
“Prop nipped me,” I answer, watching the cut bloom thin red. “Tiny mouth, sharp teeth.”
“You and your metaphors.” She rinses with saline; it stings bright and hot. “You going to tell Prince Vance what happens if he dips into your orbit without notice?”
“He already knows the words,” I say. “Blue and black.”
June stitches with quick, sailor-neat bites. Thread whispers through skin. Rain pings the van roof like fingers drumming a bad decision. Dockyard K yowls outside—forklift beeps, gull complaints, someone selling chowder from a steaming cart that coats the air with pepper and brine.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Four stitches. You’ll live, Captain Compartment.” She ties off, tapes a gauze square, and flicks her headlamp off. The van dims to the glow of screens. Drone rotors buzz overhead, a nervous trill circling the piers.
I roll my sleeve down and flex. “Good hands.”
“I use them on machines, they behave. People argue.” She wipes the table, then sets down a clear capsule case. “Now for what you actually came for.”
I open the case. The kiss-transmitter looks like a strip of sea glass tattooed with copper vines. It smells faintly of mint and silicone. “Range?” I ask.
“Two centimeters for reliable, four with luck. Passive read of badge NFC, active skim with a pressure spike.” June taps the corner with a nail painted chipped navy. “Pressure spike equals kiss. Or breath on skin. Or hand to mouth if you don’t want to use the mouth.”
“We chose the mouth,” I say. I keep my tone dry. The strip clings to my fingertip, warm from the van.
“You’ll plant it under your top lip,” she says. “The copper traces align with your lateral incisor. Don’t swallow it unless you want to spend a day hunting for justice in your own stomach.”
“Noted.” I use the tiny mirror she hands me, curl my lip, and seat the patch along my gumline. The adhesive takes and the device hums against my tooth, faint, like a cat making a case for food.
June watches me the way she watches a code compile. “I still hate the theater.”
“Protection needs a stage,” I say, testing the fit with my tongue. “If I stand on it, we get closer to truth.”
“You ever worry truth will break the bystanders?” She doesn’t look up; she digs into a drawer and lays out a reader synced to the transmitter—small, deniable, disguised as a powder compact.
“Every hour.” I pocket the compact. “And I worry about what lies already broke.”
“Fine.” She pushes a mug toward me. “Drink. Then we fish your sister from a camera made in 2008 by the lowest bidder.”
The main screen blooms with dock feed blocks, static chewing at corners, rain cutting the pixels diagonally. June’s fingers dance; time stamps flow backward. We pass forklifts sighing under crates, stevedores arguing in three languages, a dog asleep in a puddle like it owns water.
“Look for the lift with the dent on the east brace,” I say. “That’s where the drones triangulated the operator.”
“Got it.” She zooms; the lift appears—paint scratched, a smear of oil like a thumbprint under the safety sticker. “This is three weeks before Lila’s phone went to silence.”
I lean in. The van’s roof creaks when a gust shoulders it. Harbor Eleven presses its iodine breath through the door gap.
A figure moves across the far corner of the frame—hood up, shoulders narrow, pace clipped like someone short on lunch and patience. They pause under the lift shadow. June slows the clip, frame by frame, until the ghost resolves into something the light can hold.
The patch. A small fish stitched in white thread on the shoulder seam, tail flipping toward the collar. I stitched it myself when Lila realized the jacket would dissolve in one winter. “Stop,” I say, and my voice doesn’t waver though my throat swallows glass. “Freeze there.”
June freezes. The image grains like sand but the fish shows true, stubborn thread refusing to forget what fingers did months ago. Rain streaks the lens; the shape of Lila’s hand cups her phone. She’s talking to someone we can’t hear.
“I know that patch,” I say. “I put it where a bag strap wouldn’t shred it.”
June keeps her hands still on the keyboard, a thing she does when my heart is a live wire. “Timestamp says 01:12,” she says. “Same night a spike hit the lab intranet I told you about.”
I cut a look toward her. “You held that back.”
“I was waiting for something you could hold,” she says, nodding at the screen. “Now you have it. Lila authenticated to the lab intranet at 01:09 from a device with her temp ID. Accessed a page marked internal-only. Then she hit a dead link. Two minutes later, a watchdog process purged the session. Someone saw the wrong set of eyes.”
Hope sharpens like a blade in my chest, then rotates, careful. “She got in.”
“She got in,” June agrees, voice low. “And then the system bolted the door.”
I track the video forward. Lila speaks into the phone, shakes rain from her fingers, and looks up toward something outside the frame—a person, a camera, a thought. Then she moves behind the lift’s column and vanishes into a blind angle.
“Where did she go?” I whisper, to the van or the air.
“Camera misses it,” June says. “But the next angle shows forklift tracks fresh on wet concrete and a cart roll leaving toward the river-facing warehouses. I can’t certify Lila rode that, but the timing hums.”
I rub the topography of the table with my thumb and pull a breath that tastes like solder and rain. “Run the crosscam.”
June splices adjacent feeds, aligning drip patterns and headlamp sweeps. The screen becomes four squares doing a clumsy dance together until they click into rhythm. I feel it in my ribs when the images sync—the little harmony of machines agreeing.
Lila appears again, hood down now, hair dark and ropey with rain. She carries a clipboard she didn’t have in the first shot, and a wristband flashes in the sodium light when she reaches to press a call button on a service door.
“Crew meal band,” I say. “Dock vendors use them to comp workers. She must’ve borrowed one.”
“Or earned one,” June says. “She made friends quick.”
The door hisses. Lila steps through and disappears into warehouse thirteen. The feed from inside is a field of static; a corner camera blinks a death signal with every lightning flicker. June curses, a soft hiss, and toggles to a still. A manifest board sits under an emergency light, laminated sheets curling at the corners, ink running where rain crawled inside.
“Zoom,” I say.
“Enhance is for TV,” she mutters, but she leans on the software until letters emerge from noise.
The column headers are simple enough: date, time, truck, contents, destination. My pulse presses behind my eyes.
“Read me the destination column,” I say.
“Dock-to-barge shuttles,” June says. “Mostly research barges, some legit, some barely pretending. Here—this.” She highlights a row stamped two days after the Lila clip. “Sable Institute Barge. Multiple. Night.”
The barge name sits on the screen like a bruise that hasn’t finished blooming.
“Sable,” I repeat, every muscle around the word taut. The institute keeps its ethics paperwork polished and its deck plates clean. Offshore jurisdiction buys privacy you can drown in. “What contents?”
June scrolls. “Crates marked MED-HAB and EQUIP-ASSAY. One line redacted with sharpie. Cute.” She leans closer, squints. “Handwriting notes: ‘calibration.’”
I picture Lila’s small hands placing a clipboard on a wet crate, the ink wanting to run away. The hope in me burns white for a beat, then drops to the heavy heat of dread. “Go back,” I say. “One frame. Stop. Her wristband. Can you get the number?”
June coaxes the pixels into a barely readable string. “You’re asking me to pull a miracle out of dot soup.”
“You are good at dot soup.”
“Flatterer.” She exhales through her nose, types, and then crows, small and private. “Got five digits. Cross-reference with vendor logs…” Keys click, a drumroll built from caffeine and need. “Okay. That band ID corresponds to a crew meal issued to ‘temp—Quill, L.’ Last swipe recorded that same night at 01:16.”
“At the door.”
“At the door,” she confirms.
I press my thumb into the edge of the bench until the wood complains. The sound keeps me on the floor, not in the air. “She walked through a door with her name on the band. If anybody cared to look.”
“I cared,” June says. “And I look.” She turns the screen to me like a lantern. “Keep looking now.”
We run the video forward. A forklift blurs past, lifting crates bound with damp webbing. A person in a lab coat—no hood, no rain care, arrogance for weather—checks a manifest on a tablet with a gesture that reads expensive training. The crate stencils flash destinations like a deck of bad cards: BARGE, BARGE, BARGE.
“You see the seal color?” I ask.
“Yellow,” June says. “Which means ‘priority-don’t-ask.’”
“I want the handoff logs from the forklift hub to the river shuttle,” I say.
“I’ll beg a favor,” she says, meaning she’ll bribe someone with a fix or a patched drone wing. Social economy bleeds through Dockyard K: favors move faster than cash and last longer. “I’ll also grab the patrol schedule. You know Sable runs drones along the river like geese in a V.”
“I know.” I glance at my stitched forearm and think about tiny mouths with sharp teeth. “Their V expects head-on. We won’t go head-on.”
June smiles without humor. “There’s the woman who used a luau string of lanterns to mark a blind route under the hurricane barrier.”
“Public park by day, blind CCTV under the arches by night,” I say. “City design is my coauthor.”
“Your coauthor will not testify in court.” She looks at my mouth pointedly. “How’s the transmitter?”
“Humming,” I say. The copper traces buzz against my gum, a quiet promise. “I plan to use it at Palmetto House when the phones sleep and hands wander.”
“Phones in lockers, mouths in trouble,” June says. “Harbor Eleven, land of NDAs and slow weathervanes.”
The van door rattles with a slap of wind. Outside, a forklift reverses, beeps turning the night into a metronome. I taste salt on the air and the metallic note of the rain run-off.
“We should talk about Elias,” June says, softer. “We rerouted those drones tonight, but whoever sat on the manual override isn’t sloppy. If we misread Lila’s trail and chase ghosts, your client eats the next punch.”
“I know.” I rub the heel of my hand against my sternum like I can sand the thought into something useful. “I won’t trade his safety for a hunch.”
“This isn’t a hunch.” She taps the manifest. “This is a path. Lila to lift. Lift to warehouse. Warehouse to shuttle. Shuttle to Sable.”
“And an intranet login at 01:09,” I add. “Which means she found something worth locking the door for.”
June nods. “I pulled the network record out of an old error log. Someone tried to delete it, but deletion leaves fingerprints too. The page she reached didn’t have a title—just an internal code. I can’t prove content yet. But I can prove eyes touched glass.”
I lean back against the van wall, feel the chill come through metal. “Then we pull the thread until the sweater begs.”
“Plan for tonight?” June asks.
“Sell the cover,” I say. “Ten minutes at Arches, let cameras drink, then move him home by a route that keeps us under arches where the CCTVs nap. After that, I need board member faces on my cufflink cam. You feed me who to bump. I use the mouth to earn us a badge skim when we dance next week.”
“You always talk like that?” she says, but the corner of her mouth lifts. “Fine. I’ll compile a list of wrists worth kissing.”
“That makes you my most romantic friend.”
“I’m everyone’s most romantic friend.” She spins in her stool, grabs a dog-eared paper ledger from a milk crate, smacks it on the table. “I still keep some things analog. Vendor notes, whispered transfers, checks I can’t cash but can read. Look at this.” She flips to a page. Ink blurs in places where rain said hello. “Warehouse thirteen logged ‘calibration crates’ three nights in a row the week after Lila vanished. That word again. Calibration.”
The word tastes like metal filings. “Predictive compliance,” I say, thinking of ethics panels with teeth ground flat. “Teach a machine what kind of human causes friction, then prune.”
“Don’t do the monologue,” June warns, soft. “Save it for someone who needs convincing. I’m on your team.”
I nod. “What time do the shuttles kiss the barge?”
“Two windows,” she says. “03:10 and 04:40, depending on tide and patrol. Don’t get ideas. You’re not swimming anywhere tonight.”
“I’m not. I’m counting the beats between now and dawn, because someone at K just powered on their terminal.” Her small alert tone chimes; a red dot pulses on a tiny map overlay June left in the corner of the screen. “There,” I say, pointing. “Warehouse thirteen. West window.”
June leans in. “Operator online, same MAC signature we saw bouncing through Palmetto House. Maybe they came to tidy after our camera nap.”
“Or to watch us watching them,” I say.
We hold still in our tin can, listening to the rain rat-a-tat a rhythm I can’t trust. The van’s engine ticks cooling noises like a watch with a fever. I roll my stitched wrist, feel the tug, welcome the sting.
“We can poke,” June says. “Throw a little noise in their subnet, make them move, watch which way.”
“No,” I say. “We let them feel comfortable. People tell on themselves when they think they’re alone.”
“Then what?”
“We set for tomorrow,” I say. “I want you to pull any door hiss signatures on the barge that match the ones Lila walked through. We’ll map hallways by sound if we have to.”
June whistles, impressed. “Waveform fingerprints.”
“The door that eats people squeaks different,” I say. “I’ll learn its voice.”
She pivots back to the keyboard, already typing. “I’ll get you door songs by morning. Anything else?”
“One more thing,” I say, and I hate the words in my mouth. “If I miss a ping, you call Elias, not because he needs saving, but because I promised him I would be honest with my risks. If he chooses to step back, he gets the choice.”
June throws me a look that contains every time she’s had to pull me out of water. “That’s new.”
“Closeness breaks cover,” I say. “It also gets people out alive.”
“Okay, poet.” She closes the case on her headlamp, slides the medical kit back into its slot, and knocks my shoulder with her knuckles. “Go sell a romance. I’ll hold the river maps.”
I reach for the van door, then stop. “Play the clip again,” I say, quieter than the storm. “The patch.”
She presses space. Lila’s shoulder fills the cheap screen; the fish tail flips toward the collar, frozen mid-swim. I press my fingers to the bench until the wood remembers me.
“I’m coming,” I tell the stitched fish, the dock, the rain, the city that eats names for breakfast.
June clears her throat. “The manifest just updated,” she says. “New entry: Sable Institute Barge. Estimated pickup 03:10. Redacted contents.”
The red dot at warehouse thirteen blinks twice. My transmitter hums against my tooth like a tiny clock.
“And the operator?” I ask.
“They just opened a chat to the Palmetto subnet,” she says. “Two words. ‘Weather window.’”
I pull my hood up, ready to step back into Harbor Eleven’s wet mouth. “Then we’re already late,” I say, and I let the van door swing to the rain while the red dot throbs on the map like a pulse I need under my fingers.