Mav:Meet me in the living room. Now.
Mav:Don’t care what you’re doing. Two minutes.
If I typeplease, they’ll know I’m losing it. So I don’t.
Con answers first.
Con: Got Zeus and I’m en route. I’ll be ten.
Storm:On my way up.
Atticus doesn’t answer. I don’t take it personally. I go to his office door, lift my fist, then stop and just say through the wood, “Two minutes. I need you.”
Silence. Then the click and there he is. Atticus blinks, adjusting to the light. He looks… contained. That’s the word.
“Two minutes,” he says, and stands. “Then I’m going back.”
“Fine,” I say. “Bring the map.”
Storm is already on the couch when we get back to the living room, hands on his knees, eyes on everything. He’s in black, hair back, face carved from stone. He looks at me, then at Atticus, and the smallest muscle in his jaw ticks. I know what that tick means: say what you need, and we’ll make it happen.
Conrad arrives in eight minutes, not ten, which tells me he ignored speed limits. He looks like he walked out of a fight when he gently lays Zeus on one of the many dog beds that appeared in the penthouse after his arrival. Shirt half-buttoned, sleeves pushed to the elbow, forearms tight with the kind of strain you carry in the hands when you’re not allowed to hit something. His knuckles are scraped. He doesn’t sit. He stands by the balcony door and stares out over the river like he can drag a container ship back with his eyes.
“Leg’s set,” he says without turning. “He’s on the good shit.”
That’s all. No more words will come out of him without a pry bar.
“Where were you?” I ask Storm, not as an accusation but as an accounting.
“Pier,” he says. “Walked every slip. Talked to three crews, one tug, two drunks with good ears. Everyone heard engines in the channel around twelve-thirty. No one admits to seeing any cargo move, though. Not yet.”
He tips his chin at Atticus. “You get anything new?”
Atticus shakes his head. He plugs his laptop into the big TV and the map pops up—the city a smear of light, the river a black ribbon. A dot sits at the end of a gray finger into the water.
“Her chip pinged here at 12:07,” he says, voice clipped. “There have been no more pings since. I widened the net. Nothing. Either she’s inside metal that’s blocking the signal, or the chip is broken, or someone found it and tossed it.”
“She wouldn’t drop it,” I say. “She didn’t really know what it was, but she held on to that thing like it was a piece of jewelry—” My voice thins on the last word. “We should’ve given her fucking jewelry.”
Storm’s eyes cut to me. “You sure she still had it on her?”
“She had it when she…left.” The last two words scrape. “If it’s not pinging, it’s because it can’t.”
“Meaning a solid metal container,” Atticus says. “Meaning a boat. Meaning the ocean.”
Con finally turns from the window, his gaze traveling over all of us. “We don’t have time to sit around and chat about it,” he says. “We need to move.”
“We are moving,” I say. “We just need to stop moving like four separate men, and start acting like the team we are.”
That gets his eyes on me—really on me. He doesn’t like the sound of stopping to organize when there’s our girl to find, and I get that. But I’m not going to watch us spin out because we’re all good at different things and we’re doing those individual things like we’re still single players.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he says, flat. “We’re all doing what we need to do?—”
“It means I’m not your glue on a good day for my health,” I say, letting the temper I’ve been holding find the floor. “It means I’m your glue because if I don’t make us look at each other right now, we’re going to waste hours chasing our own strengths in circles. Our power isn’t the casino. It’s not the money. It’s not the guns. It’s that when we move, we move like one fucking being. Four parts of the same body that work in unison.”
Storm looks down at his hands. Atticus’s mouth does something that would be a frown on anyone else. Conrad’s shoulders tighten. None of them argue, which is the only reason I keep going.
“Atticus,” I say, “you’re the net. You pull everything digital, every log, every ship manifest, every tug call. But you also need fresh eyes. You’ve been staring at that dot so hard you’re gonna drill a hole through the screen. You need one of us on a second screen to say the stupid ideas out loud so the smart ones have somewhere to land when they come from you.”
