“Then we don’t die,” I tell her. “We don’t get separated. We don’t get sentimental. We stay exact.”
“No lullabies,” she whispers again.
“No lullabies,” I agree.
She leans in and kisses me. Her palm presses to my chest like a habit, like a claim.
“You promised,” she says against my mouth. “Not leaving.”
“I promised,” I say. “And I’m a man who keeps promises.”
We sleep early, the way soldiers do before dawn. Not because the world is safe, but because bodies need rest to keep fighting.
In the dark, she finds my hand and laces her fingers through mine. Her ring finger is bare for now, but the shape of a future sits there like a ghost. I press my thumb to her knuckle.
“Beautiful,” I whisper.
She hums, half asleep.
“Say it?” I ask, opening the door still there even in dreams.
“Yes,” she answers.
Her breathing deepens. Mine stays light, listening.
Outside, snow keeps falling.
Downstairs, the tailor’s bell rings one last time and then goes quiet.
Chapter Twelve
Luigi
The port dresses itself up for peace the way a guilty man puts on a clean shirt and thinks that clears him.
Flags hang from cranes like apologies. They painted the gatehouse a hopeful white, but the important people still don't notice. Cameras sit on tripods in clean rows, and men in suits practice their smiles for the lens as if a photo can erase the bodies this water's swallowed.
Valentine Week ends with ceremony because this city loves a parade. It loves the lie of closure. It craves anything that lets it clap loud enough to drown out what it refuses to admit.
We use that hunger.
We're done hoping for the best and moving on to what we can prove, since proof sticks around longer and goes further than fear or a bullet. A sting's a simple machine if you build it right. You plan for stupidity. You plan for panic. You plan for the ten minutes when everything goes quiet, and you need the machine to keep running even if you disappear.
Sound's cheaper than bullets, and it's harder to argue with later.
Smokestack takes the tower from Customs because height is authority. He's got a long lens and the kind of patience that makes men confess without realizing they're doing it. Nino takes the south fence in a flare vest and a clipboard because clipboards are the closest thing the world has to immunity. Nobody challenges a man who looks like he belongs to paperwork. Two more of mine sit in places most people can ignore, which is the safest place to be if you want to watch everything.
I start with the recorder.
The choir recorder sits in my palm like a relic, small and plain, the kind of thing you could mistake for trash if you didn't know what it can do. I'm counting on it to change history.
It hums when I arm it, a sound only a man who lives inside rooms like these learns to hear. I nest it inside a junction box under the catwalk by Bay Twelve, where the procession has to pass, because I want the truth to catch them on a day they believe noise will protect them. The Commission rented a PA and staffed it with bored contractors. One of mine is wearing their lanyard.
Isabella watches me set it.
She doesn't ask if I'm sure. She's learned my patterns over the last week. I do careful first and precise second, and then I do whatever comes after those two things, which is usually brutal.
Her hair's pinned for work, not show, although it manages both. The jacket she wears over her dress is borrowed from the tailor and cut like it was made to sit in a boardroom and win. The loaned boots are practical, which tells me she's not dressing to impress anyone today. She's dressing to stay standing. She slides a second recorder into the spine of the rail where men lean when they think, and she does it like she's planting a seed that'll grow into freedom.
