Nightshade
The mainland tastes like salt and diesel and rain.
No adrenaline this time. No crash. Just weight – the kind that settles into your bones and refuses to be shifted. The docks are quiet, sodium lights throwing long shadows that don’t move unless someone makes them.
Honey paces, empty hands flexing. Snow perches on a bollard, fingers moving like he’s playing chords only he can hear. Ghost leans back against a crate, breathing measured, eyes distant but present. Hatchet stands at the edge where the dock gives way to dark, watching the seam where water eats sky.
Bones stands apart, burner dead in his palm.
They look at me.
Not for comfort.
For direction.
“We wait,” I say.
Honey stops pacing. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The words taste wrong. Waiting has always been my strength – patience, poison, inevitability. But Kayla’s absence is a toxin that doesn’t metabolise. I don’t have time. I don’t have margin.
Snow laughs softly, humourless. Ghost closes his eyes for a count and opens them again. Hatchet doesn’t blink. Bones nods like a man accepting an ugly equation.
Valentine’s phone vibrates.
He’s been ignoring it since we touched down. He glances at the screen just long enough for me to see the name reflected in the glass.
Paula. Meaning,Seytan.
“You can’t ignore her forever,” I say.
“I can try,” Valentine replies, tucking the phone away.
“I doubt it. What’s her issue anyway?”
”She’s probably discovered by now that the new chips I had embedded are actually signal jammers and she can no longer track you all. She’s pissed.”
I’m actually impressed. “So…no kill switch?”
“Don’t make me regret it. And maybe don’t make it common knowledge just yet.”
He angles his face into the wind and addresses the group. “I’ll secure transport and housing. Quiet. Off-record. Don’t improvise.”
“Off the map,” Bones adds.
Valentine exhales – a professional sound. “I know a place.”
He leaves. Yellow light swallows him.
The docks breathe. Rain starts, stops, decides. I make the world small enough to survive: pulse, air, horizon, her.
Bones joins me. “You trust Branson?” I ask, glancing at him sideways.
He shrugs. “He owes me.”
“That’s not trust.”
