June’s van smells like solder and oranges—the first because she’s been resoldering a cracked drone gimbal since dawn, the second because she keeps a net bag of citrus to fight the iodine wind that crawls under everything in Harbor Eleven. Rain frets on the roof. The hurricane barrier’s arches shoulder the sky beyond the windshield, park lamps painting blind cones where the CCTV domes pretend to nap. I pull the door tight, and the city’s cicada-drone thrum becomes a muffled tap in my bones.
“We turn donors into fruit,” June says, nudging her tablet across the workbench. “Better for my head.” She has already started: apples for donor-advised funds, pears for family foundations, oranges for LLCs that pretend to be vitamins.
“I like a metaphor you can peel,” I say, and I slide into the jump seat. Elias perches opposite, knees grazing my calf in the cramped aisle, his damp hair curling at the temple. He hasn’t spoken since the fish market’s freezer door, but his eyes are moving. I want him quiet right now; I need his mind awake.
The spreadsheet she’s built is a thicket—columns of dates, wires, memos, account codes that pretend to be neutral. But the graph on the second screen turns them into a grove: trunks of holding companies, branches of LLCs, leaves that are payments, each with a fruit sticker taped half over the label like a dare. June pins another pear.
“Welcome to the orchard,” she says. “Palmetto donors on one side, Sable entities on the other, intermediaries in between like grafts you swear are organic.”
I lean in, the table’s edge biting my hip. “Run your script.”
She taps, and the tree quivers. A vine of oranges brightens to show the last three months. “Consulting fees, educational grants, and—my favorite—‘ocean resiliency sponsorship,’ ” she says. “Because nothing launders like charity in a port town that throws a resilience festival every time the wind stops pretending to be gentle.”
Elias exhales a thin laugh that doesn’t reach his mouth. “That’s not funny.”
“That’s why I’m laughing,” June says. “Find me the fruit that paid for gun hands.”
I scroll, track names that try too hard to be forgettable. On the edge of the tablet screen, a small photo is clipped under tape: Lila tossing her head in mid-laugh, blown hair, eyes cut sideways like she’s about to stick out her tongue. It’s a still from a video I don’t have anymore. I touch the tape once, a private hello, then drag down past wire IDs. My knuckles bump Elias’s knee; he doesn’t move away.
“Give me event dates on the barge,” I say.
June swipes over to a log she built from harbormaster pings, weather exemptions, and drone patrol fluctuations. “Milestones in blue, unplanned procedure nights in red,” she says. On the timeline, little flags stud the days like stitches.
“Overlay,” I say.
The orchard lights new veins. Dates on the right—funds out—kneel toward dates on the left—tide windows, barge lights flaring and dimming. Not a perfect march, but close enough to hum in my molars.
“Payments align with trial nights,” I say. “Not perfectly. Human delay? Or deliberate jitter?”
“Their relay hop adds noise,” June says, thumb teasing a slider that smooths the curve. “But there’s a pattern. Every ‘risk-tolerant trial’ week—remember your gala whisper—three oranges fall.” She grins without mirth. “Consulting. Consulting. Sponsorship.”
I tap an orange node. A label blooms: CERULEAN SHORE LLC → HARBOR SERVICE ALLIANCE (memo: ‘Vendor integration consult’). Amount: big enough to fix three clinics and small enough to hide under a gala bar tab.
“Dormant,” June murmurs, already digging. “Cerulean Shore went dark two years ago.”
“Then wakes,” I say, watching the dates. “Today?”
The node pulses once, then twice. On June’s other monitor, a bank notification she’s rerouted pings with a sterile chirp. She has a way of making corporate firewalls loosen their belts. My skin pricks. The van feels smaller.
“Woke,” she says. “Paid an invoice at noon. Vendor: Kincaid Strategic Research. ‘Consulting.’”
“Sable’s shadow name,” I say. “And the time?”
“Noon,” she repeats. “Three minutes after the marina tide clock hit twelve-oh-three.”
Elias looks up at that. “Three minutes fast,” he says, voice low. “Like Dockyard K. Like the mobilization window.”
“They live by that clock,” I say. “They think they set it.”
June zooms, hands quick, fruit stickers jittering on the screen as if the tree shivered. “Look higher up the trunk,” she says, and she scrolls to show a pear labeled VANCE FOUNDATION COMMUNITY ARM. A modest leaf hangs off it—an annual grant to something bland.
Elias draws back like the screen bit him. “That can’t—” He stops, closes his hand, opens it again. “That fund is for scholarships and asthma sensors for public schools.”
“Asthma sensors, algae walls, PR,” June says, softer than usual. “And donor-advised money that can pivot through intermediaries without fingerprints.”
I reach over and tilt the screen to him, but not away from me. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. We’re always threading that wire. “It doesn’t mean your mother wrote a check to Sable,” I say. “It means someone made a leaf align with a branch that feeds her.”
“That’s not better,” he says.
“It’s survivable,” I say, because survival is a math I do daily. I pinch to zoom again and read the intermediary’s name: Harbor Service Alliance. The letters wobble in my head, not from the van’s idle. I’ve seen that name before. I dig in my bag for Lila’s notebook copy—a torn page, ring-binder holes like bites. Ink bled into the paper from a night of rain. HSA vendor gate she wrote, underlined twice.
“Here,” I say. My nail taps the match. My throat tastes like battery.
“HSA,” June says. “They keep showing up like understudies.”
Elias’s focus sharpens, shoulders tight. “What’s the memo on that leaf?”
June taps. “‘Compliance calibration support.’” Her mouth twists. “That phrase could mean training janitors to smile.”
“Or running patients at two in the morning,” I say.
Rain drums harder, a hand on the van roof. The algae-lit sheen on the Spire’s distant flank breathes green, a slow lung. Under the arches, joggers use the barrier park even in this weather because Harbor Eleven trains its citizens to prove resilience like a loyalty card. Blind CCTV zones cradle their comfort as much as our work.
“We can’t go public,” I say. “Not yet.” The orchard looks back at me like a test I can pass if I don’t let the teacher see I know the trick. “If we shout now, the tree gets pruned. Quietly. Leaves fall. Roots hide.”
“So we harvest,” June says. “Evidence that doesn’t bruise.”
“Fast,” Elias says. His jaw works, a muscle counting to a number he doesn’t like. “Before another ‘trial night’ lines up with another check.”
June flicks a switch on the bench and the van’s interior fan pushes warm air down onto our hands. “Let’s put milestones in context,” she says. “Your rooftop data, Mara?”
I pull the badge skim and push it to her through our shared tunnel. The metadata unspools on her screen: doors, times, elapses. The broken logic of an offboarded credential ghosting a floor it should never touch. Lila’s ID peeking like a kid under a curtain it already drew.
“I hate this part,” Elias says, barely audible.
“This is the only honest part,” I answer, because the lie is everything else we have to do to get here. “Look at the day she ghosted your floor. Now look at the orchard. Anything flare?”
June lays the graphs over each other, translucent layers of wrong. Dates kiss. Payment leaves sprout the same week the ghost walked. Not every time, but often enough to feel like a rhythm. My neck tightens.
“God,” Elias whispers, and I watch him swallow whatever he almost says next. His mother’s foundation leaf sits there, modest, out of the spotlight, doing exactly what a leaf does: pretending it only drinks light.
“You didn’t sign those checks,” I say.
“That’s not the point,” he answers. He wipes his palms on his jeans, slow, like his hands are the part that might betray him. “The point is this orchard uses our shade.”
June nudges him with her elbow, then gives him room. “Here’s the dormant LLC wake-up call,” she says, pulling up the noon transfer again. “Bank trigger from a server in Palmetto’s subnet. Our relay tag from the sconce agrees.” She glances at me with a tiny cheer in her eyes. “Your plant sang.”
“Hymn to the hypocrites,” I say, but my mouth won’t turn it into a joke. I watch the fruit stickers—hand-cut circles—cling to the glass of the tablet like they’re trying to stay alive.
Micro-hook: The van’s radio hisses, just a squall alert, but my bones file it under someone listening. I kill the audio and keep talking low.
“What’s the path offshore?” I ask. “I want to see where the orchard spills into the water.”
June drags the map to the harbor line. Vessels appear—tugs, ferries, research craft—and thin gray lines of payments start to bend toward a woven mat of shell companies with sea-sounding names: Blue Lintel Maritime. East Shoal Partners. Tideclock Holdings.
“That one,” I say, stabbing with a finger I can’t keep steady. “Tideclock.”
“Cute,” June says. She opens the node. “Registered last year. Agent is the same firm that fronts Sable’s barge leases. And look at the memo on inbound money: ‘Weather window support.’”
I taste the inside of the freezer again, cold stinging my gums. “That phrase, June. That’s the phrase from the van the night you showed me Palmetto subnet moving.”
Elias scrubs his face with both hands, then drops them, steady. “So the three-minute lie on the marina clock is a ritual for them,” he says. “Payments, mobilizations, approvals, everything three minutes wrong to be on time.”
“They worship precision but live inside a cheat,” I say. “I can work with that.”
June pulls up a dormant leaf near the edge and taps it awake. “Check this. A vessel supply company routed ten thousand to an entity that then sponsor-paid an ‘employee resilience retreat’ at Palmetto House. The week before: a red barge milestone.”
“So Palmetto hosts the pep talk,” I say. “And the donors get storytelling about courage.”
“And Sable gets bodies,” June adds, so flat it hits like a door edge.
Silence thrums. Rain softens. The van smells more like orange peel than solder now, like the thing your grandmother did to keep bad air away. I think about the welded hatch under the Spire and the single path the building tried to force on Elias. Funnels everywhere.
“We need a branch to break and a branch to follow,” I say. “If we cut the wrong one, the orchard learns and hides. If we wait, another patient gets pushed into a night with a memo.”
Elias leans over the tablet again, jaw set. “This leaf,” he says, tapping the Vance foundation branch. He doesn’t touch it for long, like it stings. “I can request a review of the donor-advised distributions without tipping why. I’ll look like a son who cares about headlines.”
“That telegraphs,” I say. “We can’t spook the roots.”
“I can also do nothing,” he says, and his mouth twists. “I’m getting good at that.”
I take his hand under the edge of the table, a small press of knuckles, then let go before it becomes anything the room can’t hold. “You are not the root,” I say. “But your shadow falls. We’ll use the shadow without burning the tree.”
June reaches into a drawer and comes up with a sheet of glossy fruit stickers—cherries this time. “New code,” she says. “Cherries mark nodes we can jostle without shaking the crown. Vendors two steps from Sable. Intermediaries that don’t report in the same quarter. People who won’t notice us yet.”
“Plant cherries,” I say. “And put a star where I can get a list of names we can save if we have to pull the alarm early.”
June nods, softer again, and I watch her paste cherries onto digital leaves with the same focus she uses stitching a wound. “Saving names is the only game,” she says.
Micro-hook: My cuff buzzes—a silent, tiny nudge. I check the haptic code. Dock cam at K picks up a familiar gray sedan circling the market again. Yellow-light driver likes patterns. He’s learned that people who survive come back the next day to make sense of it.
“We’re not done,” I say. “He’s out there patterning us.”
Elias sits back, hands flat on his knees. “He can pattern me,” he says. “He can’t predict you.”
That’s kind and wrong. People like him always think my unpredictability is armor; sometimes it’s a wound that looks like one. I don’t say that. I point to the branch labeled Harbor Service Alliance. “This is the one,” I say. “We follow HSA offshore. We let the Vance leaf alone until we can catch the trunk moving.”
June nods. “HSA runs vendor gate. Lila wrote that. I can chase onboarding packets, procurement emails, delivery schedules that pretend to be boring.”
“And I can watch bodies,” I say. “Machines loaded, drone patrol gaps reprioritized, kitchen orders scaling up for a night they call ‘resilience.’”
Elias’s voice lowers. “And my mother?”
I hold his eyes until the van feels too small for the two of us. “We keep her name off our lips until we have a picture that doesn’t smudge,” I say. “You tap nothing. You ask no one. You breathe. You stay in the building where I can get to you in under six minutes.”
He nods once, then again, like a man accepting a splint. “Under six,” he repeats.
June flicks a cherry onto Tideclock Holdings and grins at her own pettiness. “Let’s see who thinks they own time.”
I take the torn page with Lila’s HSA vendor gate back and slide it inside my jacket. The paper crackles; outside, the rain slackens to a patient tick. A jogger passes under the arches, shoes slapping in the blind zone, and the tide clock over the marina keeps lying three minutes fast for everyone who wants to plan and never be ready.
I look at the orchard, at the cherries and pears and oranges, at the single leaf I don’t dare name, and I feel the shift from stunned to something colder and cleaner. “We harvest quiet,” I say. “We keep the roots thirsty.”
Elias presses two fingers to the screen where the Vance leaf hangs and then pulls back like the heat got him. “If the root is family,” he says, voice steady but small, “where do you cut without killing the tree?”
I don’t answer, because the only honest answer is a blade I’m not ready to hold in front of him. Outside, drone rotors click like insects gearing up for dusk patrol, and the fruit stickers shine in the van’s warm light, waiting for me to choose which one bruises first.