“Me too, only I’m not lazy,” Allen said spitefully, coming up, having holstered his walkie. “Paperwork?”
“Noxious odor.” I opened the clipboard and handed him the brief.
“Anonymous complaint?” He sniffed.
“We don’t want anybody dumping anything in the ocean. Abyssal–Surface Compact, Section 12(b).”
“Lady—we go over all this shit before it goes anywhere. We even use a Geiger counter.”
I tilted my head and gave him a look of pre-exasperation. “Then this will be an incredibly fast visit, eh?”
He shrugged his defeat. “Fine. But that box,” he said, looking over the Avian’s shoulder with a squint, “is three deep. We’re not even provisioning it till this afternoon.”
Which was exactly when Nex projected it would be loaded aboard theHelepolis. “Duly noted,” I said, then took a step back. “Lead the way.”
“Least you wore the right stuff,” he muttered as he took me out of the office again. “Stay between the yellow,” he warned me,pointing to the lane that’d been painted onto the dock’s concrete as I followed him like a duckling.
Cargo boxes rose up like skyscrapers on either side of the narrow path as we neared the edge of the dock itself. TheHelepoliswas berthed along the far side of the pier. It was blindingly white under the noontime sun, and it had several aggressively sweeping decks, some with parked helicopters, some without, but the effect made them look like the kind of tiny birds that perched and pecked at an alligator’s teeth when its mouth was open.
Then Allen took me around the corner, and the only things around us were cargo boxes. Several of them were on low dollies.
“We still have eyes on you,” Nex whispered in my ear.
I had no doubt that Lung had infiltrated and pulled himself up to a higher vantage point. He was so spectacularly fearless he was probably somewhere on the scaffolding for the crane.
Allen checked a manifest on his phone, then read some combination of the numbers sprayed on the cement, plus the boxes we were near.
“Almost there,” he announced.
I slung the clipboard under my arm and reached beneath the hard hat like I was scratching my scalp—when in reality I was turning off my crown.
Luckily for me, just about everyone on the job was truly concentrating on what they were doing. There was the usual undercurrent of “when’s lunch” and “what sports-ball team is playing tonight?” but nothing like Nocturne, nothing demanding my attention. It was easy to view their minds as so many doors in the door aisle of any number of local hardware stores—thick, sturdy, and unless you were there to actually purchase one, easy to ignore.
Including Al, who thought that my dragging him out to inspect boxes personally was bullshit but who also knew betterthan to say anything. He’d been taking anger management classes, as a stipulation for shared custody after a messy divorce.
I closed the door between his thoughts and mine more firmly, as he shouted, “This is it!” over a wave of noise coming from a nearby diesel engine.
“Really?” I asked, looking at a solo box. It was lifted a bit off the ground.
“Yeah—I don’t smell anything! Do you?” he asked at volume.
Under the scent of the diesel, no, not really—but that wasn’t why I was here. I pulled out the yellow volatile compounds meter from my workbag and waved it at the seams of the cargo box in what I hoped was an official fashion, while I listened for someone—anyone—inside with my mind.
But the doors around me were all the same as they had been, earlier, and no red threads to lead me through, either—until inside my mind, I thought to look up.
And inside the ceiling of the palace I created in my mind, I saw what looked like the bottom of a pool, the bright blue color of the Barbicide you saw at hair salons, and inside the pool, there were naked people floating.
Bodies.
Thirteen of them.
“I’m getting a reading!” I shouted, and then stashed the meter, ready to claw through the box’s steel with my own fingers if I had to.
That was the cue for everyone else who was waiting from the MSA to descend, my backup.
“Nah, come on,” Allen protested, then hauled his walkie out. “Whichever jackass is running a motor near D5, cut it out!”
“Tell him per 12(b), that’s a credible release risk,” Nex whispered in my ear.
