I let the skiff drift until the motor’s last cough fell into the arch’s throat. Stone cooled the air, swallowing city noise and leaving drip and pulse, drip and pulse. My lamp made a thin scar on the water and climbed the nearest pillar, careful and low.
The chalk was small—three quick lines for fins, a dot for an eye, a tail cut with a fingernail. Our fish. I’d taught her to leave it under sightlines, where lenses lost interest in wet concrete. Seeing it yanked breath from my ribs and left a taste like zinc.
“Lila,” I whispered, and the arch gave the name back in pieces.
A pebble kissed the water on my right. Then a voice, sharper than the stone and softer than the tide: “Don’t look at cameras.”
I ducked the beam at once. My pulse kicked, then steadied into work rhythm. I kept my chin down, studied reflections, counted drips. The smell here was iodine and wet rope, the old dock stink that lives in my bones. Drone rotors muttered over the park; they had the polite hover of security that pretends to be weather.
“I’m alone,” I said, low. “Skiff. Quiet.”
“You said that once,” she answered from the dark, voice marcelling around steel. “In a hallway with a poster about resilience.”
I swallowed the apology and put the skiff’s bow against the pillar to hold position. My burned palm throbbed inside the glove, heat and salt trading punches.
“Left three steps,” she said. “There’s a lip.”
I moved the light just enough to respect my ankles. The arch’s mouth yawned wider where old floodwork had spalled; someone had scored a recess behind a dangling weep grate. I slid sideways, felt cold slime kiss my boot, and stopped when the water sloshed different around my shin.
“I’m here,” I said.
The darkness reached back. A shoulder brushed my sleeve. Then her face rose out of the arch-shadow like the first hour after a fever breaks—pale, damp, stubborn. Her hair was shorter, hacked with a blade I could tell wasn’t mine. She had Lila’s chin and our father’s quiet anger sitting under it.
“Turn it off,” she breathed.
I killed the lamp. The city kept a little light for us anyway, algae glow sifting green into the vault. My eyes took the seconds they needed. Her cheeks were raw with wind. Her knuckles carried new history. Her mouth worked once before sound came.
“Hey,” I said, and that was all I could trust.
She looked at my face like it might be a trick, then at my hands like they might not let go. “You’re real,” she said, which I heard as a test and a verdict and a tiny, selfish prayer catching a ride.
I didn’t ask permission. My arms just moved, and hers did too, and we knocked breath out of each other in the tight, stupid way you hug when you’ve pretended you wouldn’t. Her jacket was soaking. My collar drank it. Her heartbeat kicked my ribs; mine returned the favor. We stayed crushed together long enough for the tide to nudge the skiff again, a tap on the ankle that said, You’re not special.
She pulled back first, but only enough to scan the arch and my pockets in the same sweep. “Mic?”
“Dead to outside,” I said. “Local record on my body. No uplink. I didn’t trust the air.”
“Good,” she said. “The arches hum when anyone opens a feed. They tuned it that way after the last storm—pretend privacy while the sensors gossip.”
“Blind zone still blind?” I asked, already counting minutes against the tide clock’s intentional lie.
“Blind enough if you don’t flinch,” she said, a tired smile breaking her face in two and stitching it back. “You flinch and the algorithm flags the pattern around your left eye. I wore a hood for weeks and practiced boredom.”
“You always hated hoods,” I said.
“I like being alive better,” she said, quick. “Mara—”
“I know,” I said, though I didn’t, not yet. “Talk while we move.”
I slid back into the skiff and reached a hand. She took it with a shake that traveled into my wrist. Her palm was cold-slick, scratched with old concrete. She smelled like river and brake dust and the cheap soap the clinics give out when they run out of shame. Her eyes hitchhiked past my shoulder to the park where families would take photos tomorrow and call it resilience.
“Don’t point your face at the open,” she said again, softer. “Cameras love reunions.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said, guiding her down. “One foot at a time. Let the boat take your weight, not the other way.”
“You still boss like it’s a compliment,” she said. But she followed—left foot, right foot—then folded into the skiff with the grace you keep when you haven’t had dinner in too many hours. She tucked her knees and made herself small without being told.
“Water?” I asked.
“After the tell,” she said.
The tell was our rule. We never traded comfort before information. I tilted the lamp guard with my thumb so the faintest crescent lit her mouth. She took a breath, looked at the pillar fish, then at me.
“I have a cache,” she whispered. “Tide-safe. Locker behind the grate, see the weld? I used a replacement bolt from the park lights. Everything else they try to grab, I let go. Not this.”
My throat clicked. “What’s in it?”
“Paper first,” she said. “Because paper doesn’t ping. Board minutes, redline drafts, hand edits where Sable cuts ethics to fit budgets. Names tied to trial codes. A drive in a dry bag—a mirror of what you already have, but with clinic crosswalks. They buried complaints under ‘resilience reimbursements.’ You can track the money through a festival grant, because of course they did.”
The drone hum drifted closer, then meandered. Cicadas with better PR. I kept the skiff kissing the pillar. My fingers ached to tear the grate now.
“When?” I asked.
“Between tides,” she said. “You taught me that. I learned the barge’s pump window the first month. You’d laugh at my charts.”
“I will,” I said, and felt the future put a coin in my pocket.
“There’s more,” she said. Her mouth tightened on the next word. “Voices. Nurses. A janitor. I kept their statements in their handwriting with dates I made them write twice—their calendar date and the marina clock time. Three minutes off, so nobody can accuse me of backfilling.”
“You were busy,” I said. My burned hand remembered the panel and the knife and didn’t resent the scar anymore.
“Busy kept me from thinking,” she said, not apologizing. “We have to get the locker before the park rangers get curious about nothing.”
“We will,” I said. I reached for the grate’s weld with the hooked pry clipped to my belt. The metal hissed under the angle of it. I worked slow, careful not to ring the arch like a bell. Lila draped her body over the point of work, turning her back into a curtain; the move was reflex I recognized from hiding cheap presents on bad birthdays.
“Hold,” I said.
She pressed harder. Her breath warmed my cheek with river cold still living in it. I counted under my tongue to four—my number for screws that lie. The bolt eased. The grate sagged.
“Got you,” I whispered, words for steel and for her.
“Hurry,” she said. Her voice went thin. “They park corporate joggers above us at dawn to prove recovery.”
I tilted the grate, and Lila reached into the dark. Her fingers disappeared, then reappeared around a dry bag the color of wet sand. She held it like a lung.
“This is it,” she said. “Everything I couldn’t afford to keep on me.”
I pressed the bag under my jacket and zipped. The plastic’s crinkle against my ribs made my skin light. On the arch wall, our fish watched without blinking. The tide nosed the skiff again, higher now, impatient.
“Water,” I said, and handed her the bottle. She drank with small, neat swallows, then forced herself to stop, a soldier with a ration.
“Shelter?” I asked. “Where have you been sleeping?”
“Under the second arch most nights,” she said. “Sometimes near the algae plant vents when I needed warmth. The vents buzz different when the model gets spun up. I learned to hear it. Your city sings when it wants someone to disappear.”
“Our city,” I said.
“Yours,” she said, but the word came without teeth. She reached and hooked two fingers in my sleeve and left them there, like a tent stake.
I let the skiff ease out a yard, then another, keeping us in the pocket. The drones drifted, bored by things that didn’t wave.
“They went to your man?” she asked, voice casual and not.
I kept my face still. “You heard the spill,” I said.
“I listen to wind, not feeds,” she said. “Wind said the tower’s elevators were tired in a pattern that means too many eager people.”
“He’s moving,” I said. “He knows the route I need him to take. I chose you.”
Lila closed her eyes, long enough for a drop to fall from her lashes. “You’d choose me,” she said, and didn’t put thanks on the end because we don’t trade that currency. She opened her eyes and looked at the algae-lit rib above us. “I left marks from the marina to here,” she said. “Chalk fish, tucked low, on surfaces that get washed but not scrubbed. They disappear in two tides. I made the last one five hours ago.”
“Then we have one tide to stay anonymous and one to move,” I said.
“Less, if the tide clock keeps lying to please sponsors,” she said, and a laugh shook out of her, ragged and private. “God, that stupid clock.”
“Saved me this morning,” I said. “Lied in my favor.”
“It lies for everyone,” she said. “Equality at last.”
I couldn’t help it—I tipped my forehead to hers for one second. The contact was a seal on a letter I should have sent years ago. She let it happen, then nudged me away. Work again.
“What’s the exit?” she asked.
“Under the arch to the service cut,” I said. “Then along the shadow of the algae panels where the heat makes cameras sleepy. We’ll take the skiff to the maintenance stairs, ditch, and go on foot to the under-park path.”
“And then?” she asked.
“Then a van driven by a friend,” I said. “No names on the road.”
“I hate vans,” she said.
“You hate the wrong vans,” I said.
The drones changed pitch, slewing toward the marina, the cicada hum sharpening before it dulled. The tide lapped higher, wetting the chalk fish’s tail and turning it into a white tear.
“Now,” I said.
I hooked the grate back, slid the bolt with my sleeve between metal and metal to muffle it, and tapped the pillar twice—the signal we used to leave without being watched by ourselves. Lila mirrored it on the other side of the lip. We pushed off together; the skiff answered with a glide.
“You’re burning,” she said, eyes flicking to my glove. “Hand.”
“Later,” I said.
“Now,” she insisted, and tugged the glove half off before I could bark. The brand the knife had left at the panel glowed dull and angry under arch-light. She inhaled through her teeth. “You did something stupid.”
“Something necessary,” I said.
“Both of our favorite adjectives,” she said, and fit the glove back with a gentleness that curled my toes in my boots.
The skiff cleared the arch’s deep shade. I kept the lamp dead and let algae light make our faces ghosts. Over the park, the hurricane barrier’s promenade lay empty but for wind and the wrappers resilience festivals shed when the speeches end. Far out, the tide clock blinked its perfect lie—three minutes fast, three minutes arrogant.
“When we hit daylight,” I said, “keep your head down and your posture bored. Bored people survive.”
“Teach me something I don’t know,” she said, but she adjusted, shoulders softening into the slump of a commuter who hates the train but loves getting home.
The skiff kissed a maintenance step. I cut the motor a breath before starting it, an old trick to hide sound inside sound. The rotors’ thrum disguised the whisper. I tossed the painter around a rusted ring and hauled; Lila climbed when I told her to, palms flat on wet steel, feet finding ribs. We gained the first landing and crouched under a panel that hummed with algae life.
“One more thing,” she said, breath clouding the metal at her lip. “If we’re separated, the locker has a second cavity back-left. I used a broken reflector as a false back. Photocopies of the statements live there. I taught the janitor to draw a fish. She made hers fatter.”
“We’re not separating,” I said.
“We always do,” she said, and her smile this time was all salt and history. “But okay.”
I set my shoulder against the maintenance gate. The lock had a camera I knew how to blind with a scrape of wet chalk and a thumb smear. It blinked lazy and looked away. I felt the city’s gaze slide off us like rain.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Ready to be boring,” she said.
I opened the gate to a slice of gray with the park beyond, empty benches, algae glass breathing its soft green, and a path that pretended to be safe because families liked to run there. I tasted wind, new and metal-free. The drones had drifted toward the marina; their cicada song thinned.
We moved.
Lila’s shoulder brushed mine once, twice, on purpose. I kept our pace slow enough to sell errands and quick enough to cut the window in half. The tide clock blinked again, reminding me that everyone plans, no one is truly ready.
At the landing above, a distant door alarm tripped in my earbud—three soft notes only I heard. I didn’t flinch. Lila didn’t ask. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. I held both truths in my mouth like a coin and didn’t swallow.
“Left,” I said, and her hand found my sleeve again, two fingers light—our invisible knot as we slid toward daylight that wanted to make a story out of us.