I believe him.
Blackvine’s guytexts with coordinates, call signs, and a reminder that,“If anyone asks who we are, we’re none of their business, and if they push, we’re the fucking Coast Guard.”
We link up at a private dock that doesn’t look like it belongs to the syndicate until you see the way the guards don’t look. Theboats are low and fast, matte paint, engines that purr like they’re bored until they open their throats.
The guy Blackvine has leading the retrieval shakes our hands but doesn’t offer his name. He jerks his head toward the boats.
“Two of ours on the other boat will handle the ladder. You two take eyes and hands. If she’s ambulatory, you don’t touch her until she says you can. If she’s not, you move like she’s glass with a thousand cracks. Anything that isn’t wearing a face we recognize gets pointed at the water and told to swim home, or you can put a bullet in their head for all I care.”
“Understood,” Storm says, taking the deck behind the pilot. Con settles on the other boat, meeting my gaze across the water.
I sling the duffel at my feet and hold on to a rail as we cut across the open water and start building a line toward a moving target that isn’t going to like us when we arrive.
The city behind us dwindles to a smear of yellow as the dark ahead grows bigger. The cargo ship is a suggestion on the horizon until it reveals its location by its lack of movement.
Atticus rides with us, headset on, voice low, coordinating the other half of the plan. “Blackvine’s dock team is in my ear. We keep everything quiet until we don’t need to anymore.”
“Copy,” Storm says.
We ride silence for a minute. The ocean does its repetitive miracle: wave, lift, slap, breathe. If I let myself, I could be eighteen again, on a smaller boat, carefree and out on the water for booze and fun and thrills.
But I’m not eighteen. I’ll never be eighteen again, not after tonight. None of us will. Tonight I’m counting all the ways it’spossible for a man to take and box a woman into the shape he wants…and then I count the ways we’re going to break that man apart.
“Why her,” the pilot asks, not like he wants gossip, but like he genuinely wants to understand the urgency behind the task he’s been given. And I understand, because it’s a task that could end with his people hurt or dead.
“Because she’s ours,” I say.
He nods. It’s enough.
The radio crackles. “I’ve got a visual,” the other boat says. “Two miles out. Running lights, but she’s not calling herself on AIS. Ladder’s dropped on port.”
We adjust course. Our engines change tone. We’re all teeth now.
I pull out my phone and send the text I’ve wanted to send for twenty-four hours.
We’re coming. Hold on.
If there’s a god who delivers messages written to air and ether, he’ll deliver this one because that’s the only way Phoenix would know. Her phone isn’t on. But when she does get it back, she’ll know that I cared enough to tell her we were on our way.
We hit the ship’s shadow and become a different kind of fast—quiet, focused. The men on the other boat clip lines and hand up grips. The ladder clanks against steel, and at the top, a Blackvine man already in play stops us with a palm.
“Deck left is hot,” he whispers. “We go right, snake the lanes. We keep our mouths shut until we see the face we came for. Then you do whatever you came to do.”
We move, my hand trailing lightly along a rail as I follow Storm around a stack of red containers.
We turn the corner into the lane that will make all of this either beautiful or hell, and I whisper the words again to the girl who learned how to survive in rooms built for men, “Come on, firebird. Help us find you.”
11
Phoenix
They marchme back down into the belly of the ship, past coils and drums and a hatch that breathes heat. The man—I have to call him something other than ‘The Man’ in my head—keeps an even pace beside me, not touching me, but not needing to. Two others follow with rifles held low. We take a grated stairwell that rings under our feet and a corridor that smells like metal and something sweet rotting in a drain.
Every turn steals a little more of the air.
He stops at a door with a familiar dent near the hinge and rusted number stamped above the handle that I recognize. My heart sinks.
He nods to one of the rifle men, and he unlocks and opens it.
