I ran back into the barge with the storm pushing on my spine like a hand that wanted me gone. The plank flexed behind me; the tug engine chuffed forward; the river slammed questions against the hull. I kept one answer in my mouth: not yet.
“Left at the mural,” June said. “Panel’s pretending it’s culture.”
I took the turn, boots slapping a ribbon of water that had sneaked under the hatch. The red hall lived up to its nickname now—emergency lights strobing, steel ribs glowing like hot coals. The “mural” was a printed panorama of the hurricane barrier turned public park, families picnicking beneath the arches where cameras forget to see. Someone had hung a tiny plaque about Harbor Eleven’s resilience festivals. The text boasted about sandbag races and charity chili. The photo’s sky was a blue I didn’t trust.
“You do love a liar,” I told the wall, and slid the pry bar under the molding. The panel fought me with a groan; adhesives hate wet hands and love pride. I leaned my weight into it, shoulder hot where rope had kissed me earlier. The molding snapped free and clanged down the corridor. Under the image waited what I came for: a lattice of conduits and breakers, tagged with euphemisms—BALLAST AID, INGRESS SAFETY, INUNDATION LOCK. All of them braided toward a ceramic fuse the size of a beer can and a bus bar fat as a child’s arm.
“I’m at the heart,” I said. “Scuttle logic routed through an aesthetic. Very on brand.”
“Confirming,” June breathed. Her keys ticked like rain on a tin roof. “Yes. That board jumps the failsafe when water hits a height and the door sensors read open. It’s set to protect assets. Not people. Because of course.”
I rested my gloved knuckles on cold steel. “We change the definition of asset.”
“I can mask the height reading for twenty,” she said. “After that, the algorithm will throw a tantrum and call in a manual override. Where are you on the physical?”
“Looking at a fuse that thinks it’s king,” I said. I pinched the ceramic and felt the hum travel into bone. The knife at my belt warmed my hip just by wanting to help. “What’s through the next hatch?”
“Access stair toward midships. Old art crates, newer sins. And—wait—hot mic bounce,” she said, voice dropping. “She’s nearby.”
I felt the awareness prickle across my scalp like fine sand. The intercom grids canted from the ceiling; the last chapter’s voice had gone quiet, but proximity has a shape. The air changed. People smell different when their control cracks: sharper, sweeter, iodine and fear. I tasted iodine anyway—the wind carried it through the slats, a hospital on the sea.
“We don’t give her our backs,” I said, and slid two fingers under the fuse. Ceramic rasped against glove. I braced my boot on the panel frame, hips squared, spine stacked. “On three.”
“Counting,” June said, and set the rhythm because she knows how my muscles listen to her.
“Three,” I said, and pulled.
The fuse stuck, then surrendered with a sound like a cork deciding to ruin a party. The hum shifted. Somewhere below, a pump coughed in surprise. I tucked the fuse under my arm like a football I dare anyone to try to steal.
“Bus bar still energized,” June warned. “It’ll hunt a path. You need a wedge.”
“I brought one,” I said, and drew the knife.
The blade’s spine was scarred from years of wrong jobs done right. Dock workers had bartered me favors for detail work; elites had made me sign NDAs before pretending to fall in love. This knife had watched me ignore both economies. I shoved the tip between the breaker’s plated teeth and felt the system push back like a jaw.
The world narrowed to the angle of my wrist. Sweat ran down my temple under the visor and hit my lip with salt. Drone rotors hummed outside like summer cicadas that had read the weather wrong. The algae-lit glass beyond the slat flickered green, then dimmed.
“Brace,” June said.
I shoved the knife deeper, twisting to force a wedge where the barge didn’t want one. The blade bit, skated, then seated—barely.
Sparks spat.
They came feathered and bright, blue-white like unkept promises. The arc leaped the shortest distance and found me. Heat sprinted down the steel into my glove, through the damp, and kissed my palm. The glove smoked. Then the knife’s handle went hot enough to teach.
I hissed and refused to let go. The pain was clean and educational, the kind that clarifies instead of robs. I wrapped the handle with the hem of my jacket, jammed my shoulder against the panel’s edge, and drove the knife hilt-deep between the plates until the sound changed from hum to sullen gripe.
“Talk to me,” June said, her voice tight with the empathy of someone who has cauterized her own conscience.
“I’m eating electricity for lunch,” I said through clenched teeth. “Tastes like money.”
“You’re good,” she said, fast. “Pressure spike bypassed. Ballast pumps just lost the vote. Scuttle logic is confused and—”
A scream fractured the red hall.
It wasn’t on the intercom; it wasn’t shaped for an audience. It ripped down the corridor raw and real, human and full of teeth. Sable, close enough to fling voice against metal, not polished enough to measure it. The sound cracked, then cut, as if someone pressing a hand over a mouth met someone biting it.
“She’s here,” I said, my pulse doubling back on itself.
“On-site and not okay,” June breathed, a diagnosis, not a hope. “I’m locking a few doors in her path. We just need sixty seconds for the last bundle.”
“Make them count,” I said.
Pain throbbed in my palm where the heat had found bone. I flexed my fingers once to confirm I’d still have a grip later when later wanted a throat. The knife stayed wedged, a stubborn crossbar holding back the ocean the way good lies hold back better truths—temporarily.
The barge made a decision about gravity. The deck under my knees tilted with a slow, awful courtesy. Water ran toward my boots, slapped the panel, then thought better of it. The list kept going until the horizon outside the slat invented a new angle and the hurricane barrier’s arches slanted through rain like saints leaning to listen.
“We’re tipping,” I said, a report, not panic.
“She’s trying to ballast you into a story,” June said. “Headline: ‘Storm Sinks Rogue Rescue.’”
“We write our own,” I said. I braced my shoulder against the panel and kept the knife steady with my damaged hand. My breath cut in and out like a stubborn zipper.
The detonator’s red LED on the intake wall glowed steady in my memory, a patient pupil. I pictured it anyway, because fear respects proper nouns. I didn’t have to love power to understand it; I only had to outlast it.
“Status?” I said, pacing breath to syllables.
“Packet two clear,” June said. Keyboard staccato filled my ear. “Packet three at eighty-nine. Rotors whining. One drone has your corridor, but I fed it a skateboarder under Span Three. God bless blind parks.”
“Harbor Eleven’s one civic gift,” I said, and bared my teeth to no one.
“The elites dated each other behind NDAs,” she said. “The rest of us learned where cameras nap. We adapt.”
“We don’t drown,” I said.
“Copy,” she said, and a smile bent the word.
Micro-hook: The knife sang in the panel like a tuning fork for risk, and the barge leaned harder to hear it.
The list stalled at an angle that forced my calves to quiver. A crate down the corridor slid and banged into a stanchion, the noise ringing down the red hall like a bell used to call people to a chapel that had switched gods. My visor fogged, then cleared as I lifted it with my wrist and sucked in air that tasted like hot pennies and wet rope.
“She’s moving again,” June whispered. “I hear boots, not heels. She dressed for work.”
“Then she came to do it,” I said. Love makes you stronger to fight power. It also gifts power a map of where to cut. I tucked that into a pocket I couldn’t afford to forget.
“Forty seconds,” June said. “If she reaches a manual reset, the wedge buys us breath, not life.”
“Breath is life,” I said. I thought of Lila under the seawall arches, the chalk marks only we would read, the tide clock in the marina lying for everyone and telling me the truth anyway. Three minutes fast forces a city to hustle. Tonight, I hustled the world.
A shadow grazed the red hall’s end. A figure stopped, recalibrated, and retreated one step like instinct meeting plan. My knife hand ached to turn me into a weapon. I stayed a wedge instead.
“I can hear her,” June said. “She’s muttering.”
“Translate,” I said.
“She’s bargaining with herself,” June said. “That tone. I’ve heard doctors choose what to name mercy.”
“We name it upload,” I said.
“Twenty seconds.”
The barge’s list eased a degree, then two, as the pumps remembered their job description without the scuttle’s script. The sparks had stopped; the knife glowed a dull heat in my palm where the handle had tattooed me with work. I smelled cooked rubber, singe and salt and the sour of my own adrenaline. The drone rotors outside dipped low over the arches, their thrum a summer memory left out in winter.
“Fifteen,” June said, breath shallow now. “I’m throwing a final loop: resilience festival drone show rerun. Fireworks minus fire.”
“Bless the grant committee that funded that,” I said.
“Bless your grip,” she shot back. “Ten.”
Boots again, closer, then gone. Sable knew this ship better than I did. She’d built its lies and rented its truths. I wanted her voice to come back on-mic so I could aim at it. Off-mic, she was harder: a person, not a brand.
“Five,” June said. “Four.”
The barge creaked, ancient and offended. A gust shouldered the slat; rain entered like it had a ticket.
“Three.”
My palm throbbed with the rhythm my heart would later resent.
“Two.”
I pressed my forehead to the cold panel, a ritual against hubris.
“One.”
“Upload done!” June shouted, and joy cracked her composure like sunlight through a warehouse clerestory. “Whole package is riding five paths—clinics, unions, public defenders, plus the dead drop for the tabloid that hates being second.”
I laughed, a short bark that hurt deliciously. The sound came out of me thinner than I intended, relief strangled by other concerns that had waited politely to pounce. “Then we don’t die today.”
“Not if I can help it,” she said, and I heard her wipe her eyes without shame. “Now get your body out of that panel before it decides you’re ballast.”
“Copy,” I said, and tried to pull the knife.
It didn’t want to leave. Metal had closed around it in a petty marriage. I twisted the handle and pain flared up my arm like a flare signaling idiots. The wedge shifted a hair; the hum flirted with return; I shoved the blade back in reflexively and felt the rightness of resistance settle through my bones.
“New plan,” I said. “We leave the ring in the drain.”
“You’re abandoning your favorite knife?” June said, scandalized for me.
“I’m divorcing it with love,” I said. “It deserves a better death than drowning.”
“Sable’s two doors away,” June said, tone snapping back to surgeon. “I locked the nearest reset. She’s going for the far one—the one behind the sculpture that looks like a spinal column lying about posture.”
“Red hall,” I said, standing, my burned hand cradled by the other like a small animal I had promised not to drop. The barge had leveled enough to let me move without doing math with gravity every step. “I owe her a conversation.”
“You owe yourself distance,” June said.
“I owe myself both,” I said, and that was the truest sentence I’d built all night.
I backed away from the panel, careful, eyes on the knife that had become a shiv in a throat I had dared. The sparks had dried to sullen ash. The ceramic fuse under my arm thumped against my ribs in a heartbeat that wasn’t mine. The red hall breathed heat and embarrassment.
Somewhere in that heat, Sable made a sound—not the earlier scream, not words—more like the kind of noise people make when a plan remembers it’s breakable. On-site and losing control. I let the information settle where instinct could reach it fast.
The detonator’s red eye still glowed on the wall near the intake, steady and indifferent. My next problem waited polite and violent.
“Upload’s in the air,” June said, softer now, wonder sitting next to terror. “If she sinks the barge, she drowns a corpse with no alibi. But she doesn’t erase us.”
“We still keep the living breathing,” I said. “Proof is oxygen. Oxygen is oxygen.”
I turned toward the far hatch, the corridor washed red and wet, the sculpture ahead vertebrae-white and lying about posture. My burned palm pulsed in time with the river outside, the iodine wind sneaking through the slats to mark me with the city I was trying to save from its own legend.
“I’m with you,” June said. “In your ear. In your hand, if you need it.”
“I need it,” I said, and tightened my jaw until resolve felt like enamel.
The barge listed once more, a tired shrug, then held. The knife stayed where I’d left it, a black handled covenant keeping a mouth from closing. I left a piece of myself with it. I could take it back later or I could build another.
I stepped into the red and thought about the arches, blind spots that had saved more than they had hidden, and about the tide clock that lied to make us brave. The corridor funneled my breath toward a woman who had named herself necessary.
“Ready?” June asked.
“Ready to meet her without a script,” I said, and walked toward the reset that would make a lie into a flood or a confession.
Relief folded inside me like a collapsible knife: useful, not safe. I held it there, sharp and small, and did not let go.