The intake tunnel breathed brine into my teeth and tried to take my balance with it. I wedged my boots against a checkerplate seam and counted the river’s pulse—three, two, lift—then heaved the stretcher over the lip. Spray slapped my cheeks, salt burning the split in my lower lip like honesty.
“Hold there,” I told June, my voice rubbing raw against the throat-mic. “We move on my tide.”
“Loop is green,” she said, soft and close in my ear. Drone rotors thrummed like cicadas above the hull, briefly stuttering, then continuing their mindless patrol arc. “Cameras under the arches are chasing last hour’s ghosts. You’ve got a corridor.”
“Then we make a procession,” I said. I slid a palm beneath the strapped patient’s shoulder, felt the paper-crackle of medical tape, the thin heat of a drugged fever. The intake’s grate yawned black to my right, a throat that had once tried to swallow me whole. I’d jammed it days ago with a bolt the size of a child’s wrist. It still held.
We had six left: three ambulatory if dreams counted as walking, three deep in the narcotic fog Sable preferred when patients asked questions. The tunnel angle was mean, engineered to punish cargo and people equally. Rain blew through the external slat like thrown rice.
I listened to the tide again. The hurricane barrier’s park arches loomed beyond the slit of view like a stadium ribcage, candles of algae-lit glass along the seawall’s promenade flickering green as if the city were trying to calm itself. Harbor Eleven loved its resilience festivals—drums after a storm, banners clipped to wet ropes, branded cheer in exchange for donor names—but no one beat a drum here. The only music was metal and water and the small noises people make when their bodies are not yet sure they’re safe.
“Next swell in eight,” I murmured. “On the crest, we roll.” I set the gurney’s brake and checked the straps again out of superstition.
The stretcher slipped.
I saw the wheel lift in a tiny, treacherous shrug, felt the rail lighten under my hand, and moved on tendon memory. My shoulder complained, a hot wire from the earlier rope snap, but I threw myself across the frame, hip and ribs kissing steel. My knuckles sang. The stretcher’s nose swung toward the grate; the patient’s head lolled; the whole rectangle wanted to become an offering.
I caught the far rail with three fingers and a bad idea.
“No you don’t,” I said, breath gone mean. I pinned the frame, jammed my boot against the wall, and levered the wheels back onto the track with a grunt that sounded like my father pulling rope in a storm. The gurney thunked true. The patient exhaled through tape and plastic, unaware I’d just negotiated with gravity on her behalf.
“You with me?” June said, voice sharpening the way hers does when a joke tries to hide fear.
“I’m married to this rail,” I said, forehead touching the cold metal for a heartbeat. “Annulment later.”
She let out the smallest laugh, relief and reprimand braided. “Don’t make me sew you again.”
“You can tattoo me later with the bill,” I said, and rolled us forward on the tide’s inhale. The water rose graciously as if moved by the command it never obeys for long. I rode it like a borrowed apology, let the stretcher float a half-inch, and steered the frame onto the waiting plank bridge to the tug.
The tug’s deckhand—me, an hour ago—had lashed the plank to cleats and a rusted stanchion, building a hinge where bad logistics had left none. The plank bowed and then steadied, rain stippling the wood like Morse code for hurry.
“Nice timing,” June murmured, a beat of admiration I filed away like warmth in a pocket on a wet day.
“Say it again in four more trips,” I said, and passed the stretcher to the tug’s deck, where I’d prepared tarps, thermal blankets, and oxygen canisters labeled in a handwriting that told me too much about the person who’d bought them.
The sirens woke.
They didn’t scream at first; they found their throat with a croak, then built to a wail that turned the air inside out. The barge shuddered. Somewhere below me, metal groaned like an animal trying to stand with a broken leg.
“Talk to me,” I said. “What did you wake?”
“I didn’t,” June said. Her breathing shortened. “She did.”
The remote detonator blinked awake on the wall, a device no larger than a soap bar, tucked near the intake control box behind a flip plate with a yellow stripe. I’d missed it twice because my brain still wanted to believe in clipboards and signatures. A single red LED went steady. ARMED read the tiny screen like a dare.
I didn’t touch it. My fingers itched and I didn’t touch it.
“Scuttle is live,” June said, voice now a careful flat. “Trip conditions tied to water level and door status. She can do it remote or the system can be engineered to do it ‘for safety.’”
“We’re the safety,” I said. I tasted iron again, a lesson my mouth refused to unlearn. “Keep the drones distracted.”
“Copy. I can spoof three and blind one camera bank for sixty seconds at a time, but the loop’s integrity degrades every pass. And the tide clock at the marina—”
“Three minutes fast,” I said. “I know.”
“She may be counting on that,” June said. “If you time to the lie, she wins.”
“I never time to their clocks,” I said, and started the second stretcher’s roll. My shoulder barked; adrenaline promised it would bill me later with interest.
The tunnel squeezed close. Rain hissed on the metal skin; the barge answered with tiny complaint noises. I hummed under my breath because bodies listen to certain kinds of certainty; mine always has. The patient’s fingers twitched against the strap, waking to a world I was trying to keep from flooding.
“Two steps on my count,” I told myself, because I am sometimes the only person I can boss who listens. “Three, two—”
We floated the frame over the worst seam and the river lifted us like we were worth it.
“Hull integrity is still green,” June reported. “But the pumps are pushing back a lot of stupid.”
“Stupid pays well,” I said.
“Until it doesn’t,” she said. I could hear her fingers on keys, the small percussive music that means she’s painting reality more favorable than it feels. “I’m looping the arch cameras now. Harbor Eleven loves its blind spots under those arches, but Sable’s contractors hate trusting myth. I’m not a myth.”
“You’re my favorite science,” I said.
“Focus, poet,” she said, but the fondness threaded the word.
We made the second transfer. The tug deck swayed with the weight, then held. I switched oxygen, checked a pulse, tugged a thermal blanket tight around a man whose forearms wore the story of a dock worker—rope burns old and new, favors owed and collected. Harbor Eleven ran on barter as much as currency at waterline; NDAs seduced the elites; the rest of us traded labor and lies.
Sirens again—closer, coiling into a single pitch that set my jaw on edge. The metal under my palms groaned, a basso vibrato that told me the scuttle gates had woken to test their hinges.
“We need to accelerate the procession,” I said.
“I know,” June said, typing faster. “I’ve got a half-minute blind on your intake lens now and a soft cough in Sable’s intercom. If she tries to monologue again, she’ll hear her own echo.”
“Music to my legs,” I said, and ran the third stretcher through the tunnel’s mean angle, my breath fogging the inside of my visor, the salt air cutting my throat in ribbons. My hands remembered ladders and ladders remembered me.
Micro-hook || The detonator’s red eye watched me work and stayed patient, like the river.
The third transfer went clean. The fourth didn’t. A rotor dipped low outside, wind sheared sideways, and the plank tried to wring itself out of its lashings. I slammed my palm on the gurney brake, clipped a carabiner from my belt to the stretcher rail—bad rigging, good luck—and rode the pushback with knees and lower back arguing in languages orthopedists love.
“You good?” June asked.
“Define good,” I said through my teeth. “We still have two humans and no time.”
“Marina clock just clicked,” she said. “Public time says you have four minutes. Real time says you have one and change before conditions trip ‘uncontrolled ingress’ and the system spins a kill story.”
“Then we tell a better one,” I said. “Ready on five.”
“Ready,” she said, and I counted the throat of the intake like a metronome built to keep people alive instead of on schedule.
Five. Four. Three. The water surged. Two. I shoved. One.
We slid the fourth stretcher like a letter under a locked door and pretended the universe knew how to read.
My back lit fireworks. I ignored them. The tug deck took the weight. I switched oxygen, thumbed perfunctory vitals, and ran back into the tunnel that had started to talk in a new voice—hollow and hurry.
“Status,” I said.
“Drones think the arches are hosting a resilience pop-up,” June said, grim amusement sharpening her tone. “Hashtag blessed-be-the-sandbag. I gave them a fake post-storm festival schedule and a loop of teenagers skateboarding under the third span.”
“Civic pride saves lives,” I said.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Move.”
The fifth stretcher’s wheels squawked like scandal. I shouldered it forward anyway. The sirens found their fullness now, a cathedral of warning, and the hull’s groan shook a flake of rust into my hair. The red LED on the detonator didn’t blink. It didn’t have to. It had all the patience in the world and I had none.
“I can spoof the scuttle’s pressure sensor for ten seconds if you give me—” June started.
“I can give you eight,” I said. “On my lift.”
“Three, two—now,” she said.
The tunnel’s pressure gauge hiccuped, needle falling as her trick convinced the barge it had already swallowed. I shoved, the stretcher floated a fraction, and we cleared the lip with a swear I’d learned from a crane operator who’d once traded me protection for his niece’s scholarship paperwork.
“You’re buying me a new keyboard,” June panted.
“I’ll embroider your name on it,” I said.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, and laughed once like pain. “Last one.”
The last patient was the nurse with the traded wristband. Her eyes were open now, lucid enough to track my face. Fear slicked her skin more than the rain did.
“You did good,” I told her, keeping my hands simple and visible. “You bought my sister minutes. I’m paying them forward.”
Her mouth worked around a tube. She nodded anyway, tears mixing with storm. I tightened her straps, then my jaw.
“This is where the river pretends to be polite,” I said. “It’s not. We take it anyway.”
“Mara,” June said, and I heard what she hadn’t said all chapter: please. “Trip condition armed. She’s paging the scuttle routine from two endpoints. I can step on one, not both.”
“Step on the one that measures mercy,” I said. “I’ll race the other.”
The tunnel vibrated as if rehearsing its collapse. I closed my eyes for half a heartbeat and saw the arches—graffiti softened by salt, chalk marks only Lila would leave, the city’s brittle idea of a park you could trust. I opened my eyes and lifted.
“Three,” I said.
I bent my knees and set my feet and made a promise to this body I have used like a tool since I learned love could be leverage.
“Two.”
I felt the tide under the metal, the river counting its secrets. The marina clock would be lying, but my bones keep better time.
“One.”
We moved. The stretcher skated, the water rose, and the tunnel tried to become a mouth swallowing a word. I shoved with everything I was not saving for later. The plank flexed, the lashings sang, my shoulder became lightning. We hit the deck of the tug with a lurch that rattled teeth in the next county.
“Clear!” I shouted, a ritual, a spell, an invoice.
The sirens shifted pitch. The hull groaned in a way I’d been trying not to define: not complaint—decision.
“She’s pushing it,” June said, voice gone thin. “Remote confirms armed. I’m seeing the second endpoint—manual override from a secure console. That’s not a bluff. Scuttle is live-live.”
“Copy,” I said, shucking wet gloves with my teeth and tightening the last blanket around the nurse’s shaking knees. Relief hit and ricocheted into vigilance so fast the two felt like the same chemical wearing different jackets.
Out past the intake, rain slashed diagonal across the view. The hurricane barrier’s arches hunched like saints with bad posture. The tide clock on the marina tower winked its three-minute lie at me through the downpour, and I flipped it the respect it deserved.
“June,” I said, already moving back toward the barge, every cell in me annoyed I still had one more sprint. “We’re off, but this isn’t over.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve got an idea where the scuttle wiring kisses the rest of the barge’s pride. Red hall, midships, behind a panel that pretends to be about art.”
I took the detonator’s image with me, that patient red dot like a pupil that never dilates. Love makes you stronger to fight power and becomes leverage for that power. I had both hands full.
“You want to tell me not to go back in?” I asked, half a dare.
“I want to tell you to go faster,” she said. “Upload is almost done. Proof is oxygen. But oxygen is also oxygen.”
I laughed once, harsh. “Copy that.”
The tug engine coughed awake, our own siren rising as we drifted under the arches into a corridor June had drawn between myths and cameras. The patients lay blanketed in lines I’d made neat because order can bully panic into waiting a minute. I put one hand on the rail and the other on the knife I carried where earrings should go.
The barge’s metal sighed—no, chose—and from deep inside it, a relay clicked like a tongue before a cruel sentence.
“June,” I said, already stepping back onto the plank that would be a memory in another thirty seconds. “Point me at the scuttle switch.”
The storm answered; the remote’s red eye did not blink; and the river, impatient as ever, counted down in a language I have always understood.