Location: Portside Industrial Stretch — Tunaro Private Dock — Approaching Speedboat
---
The speedboat cut across the gray water like a blade.
Elijah stood near the bow, one hand braced against the fiberglass railing, the other hanging loose at his side. The wind whipped past his masked face—the Azaqor disguise still in place, still punchable, still doing its job. Salt spray misted across his jacket. The engine growled beneath his feet, a low thrum that vibrated up through his bones.
Behind him, the Portside industrial stretch receded into silhouette.
The cranes were skeletal against the evening sky—dark angular shapes, like the ribs of some enormous fossilized creature. Shipping containers stacked three and four high formed a jagged skyline, their painted colors desaturated by distance and fading light. The warehouses huddled together at the water's edge, their bay doors closed, their windows dark.
It looked like a city designed by people who had never learned the difference between industry and ruin.
Five PM, Elijah thought. The golden hour for anyone who wants to move goods without being noticed. Not dark enough for suspicion. Not bright enough for witnesses.
The timing had been Wilder's idea—one of his few genuinely useful contributions. The ship from Huxai was scheduled to dock at six-fifteen. That gave them an hour to reach the container vessel, board it, and position themselves before the crew began unloading.
Electrical components. That was what the manifest said. Parts for industrial equipment, shipped from a manufacturing partner in the eastern hemisphere, destined for assembly at a Tonaro warehouse and then distribution to various clients.
Crestwood was one of those clients.
Forty-three percent of the electrical components that passed through Tonaro's hands eventually ended up in Crestwood's supply chain. Elijah had found the numbers buried in the shipping database—not hidden, exactly, but buried deep enough that no one would stumble across them by accident.
Saiyan Harbor, Elijah thought. Tonaro's competitor on the other side of the port. They receive similar shipments. They distribute to similar clients. But they don't have Erickson and Wilder's problems with hijackings.
Interesting.
He filed the observation away for later.
---
The speedboat bounced over a wake.
Wilder was at the helm—or as close to the helm as Erickson would allow. His hands gripped the steering wheel with the loose confidence of someone who had driven boats before but had never bothered to learn the proper technique. His tracksuit jacket had been replaced by a windbreaker, bright yellow, the kind of thing people wore when they wanted to be visible in low light.
Erickson sat behind him, arms crossed, watching the water with the same patient vigilance he brought to everything else.
"Gentlemen," Wilder announced, his voice carrying over the wind. "I give you... the Siren's Call."
He gestured at the speedboat with a sweep of his hand.
"Named it myself. Thought it sounded cool. You know. Sirens. Mythology. Boats."
"You named it after a mythical creature that lures sailors to their death," Erickson said flatly.
"It's atmospheric."
"It's morbid."
"Tomato, tomato."
Elijah said nothing. The mask hid his expression, which was probably for the best.
---
The sky was doing something strange.
The sun had dropped below the horizon—not yet gone, but hidden behind the industrial silhouette of the port. Its light scattered upward, painting the underside of the clouds in shades of amber and rose. The water caught the reflection, turning the gray surface into something that looked almost warm.
Almost welcoming.
The Portside industrial stretch stood in stark silhouette against that painted sky—a dark cutout of cranes and containers and smokestacks. From this distance, it was impossible to see the rust or the grime or the cracked asphalt. All that remained was the shape of industry, pure and abstract and almost beautiful.
The world looks better from a distance, Elijah thought. Everything does.
Wilder began to sing.
The song was slow—a lazy, meandering melody that seemed to drift up from somewhere in his chest. His voice was not good. It was not meant to be good. It had the quality of someone singing to himself in a room where no one else was listening.
"My mind becomes a crowded room,
Filled with things I shouldn't do,
And you, you make me feel gooey inside..."
His body moved with the rhythm. A sway of the shoulders. A tilt of the head. His free hand traced patterns in the air—circles, waves, gestures that didn't mean anything except that he was feeling the music.
"Wrap me in your arms and pull me tight,
Spin me 'round the dance floor in the pale moonlight,
I never knew that I could feel this way,
But you, you make me feel gooey inside..."
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the wind carry the last notes away.
"Banger," he said. "Absolute banger."
---
Elijah turned to Erickson.
"Is he always like this?"
"Yes."
"And you're..." Elijah gestured vaguely between them. "...the way you are."
Erickson's expression did not change.
"He is younger than me. By a significant margin. The person who raised him—" He paused, choosing his words. "—spoiled him. Not with things. With affection. With patience. With the belief that the world was a place where people could be good to each other."
"And for you?"
"It was different."
Erickson's eyes moved to the water. The sunset caught his glasses, turning the lenses into mirrors.
"I learned early that the world is cruel. That survival requires sacrifice. That trust is a weapon people will use against you."
His voice was flat. Not bitter. Not angry. Just...陈述.
"I spent my childhood trying to stay alive. There was no room for singing. No room for dancing. No room for anything except the next meal and the next place to sleep."
He paused.
"And then someone came along. Someone who saw what I was becoming and decided to drill something else into me. Discipline. Control. The ability to choose my battles instead of fighting everything that moved."
"That someone," Elijah said. "They taught you well."
"They saved my life."
Elijah was quiet for a moment.
That really shows, he thought. Erickson isn't a bad person. Hard. Guarded. But not bad. The life he described... that wasn't exaggeration. That was survival.
He wanted to ask more. About the someone. About the person who had drilled discipline into a scared child and turned him into the man standing beside him.
But he did not.
We barely know each other, Elijah thought. I can't just probe into his past like I have the right to know. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The question lingered anyway.
Elena Tuner. The database showed her as young—early thirties at most. Beautiful, in the way that old photographs could still convey. But if she was that young, how could she have raised both Erickson and Wilder? The timeline didn't match. Erickson was clearly older. Wilder was younger. Elena would have been a child herself when Erickson was young.
Unless someone else was involved.
Unless Elena wasn't the one who raised them.
Unless there was another figure—someone older, someone hidden, someone who had never appeared in any database because they didn't want to be found.
Because owning a share of a harbor in the Portside industrial stretch wasn't something an average person could do. It required connections. Resources. Power. Elena Tuner Sae'thar had those things. But where had they come from?
Deep waters, Elijah thought. There's always deep waters below the shiny surface.
And the name Sae'thar... if it was connected to the eight subclans—to the Sutran ancients who probably ran the world from behind the scenes, with Gilgamesh at their head—then Elena Tuner was not just a woman who had disappeared.
She was a thread.
A thread that connected Erickson and Wilder to something much larger than a shipping dispute.
But there was no rush.
Elijah let his hand fall from the railing. He spread his arms slightly, tilting his face toward the wind. The salt spray felt cold against the mask. The breeze pulled at his jacket.
Right now, he thought, I just go with the flow.
---
Wilder noticed.
"See?" he said, pointing at Elijah with a grin. "I told you. He rocks. Better than you."
He spread his own arms—mimicking Elijah's posture, tilting his own face toward the wind. His windbreaker flapped. His hair—already messy—became catastrophic. His glasses caught the sunset and threw it back in shards of gold.
"This," Wilder declared, "is living."
Elijah did not respond. But he did not lower his arms either.
The speedboat continued across the gray water. The silhouette of the container ship was visible now—a dark mass on the horizon, growing larger with each passing minute. Lights burned on its deck. Crew members moved between the stacks, preparing for the unloading.
Erickson watched them both.
Wilder, arms spread, hair flying, singing something under his breath. Elijah, mask-faced, unreadable, but somehow... present. Present in a way that Erickson had not expected.
He did not remember the last time he had experienced a moment like this.
Not the mission. Not the objective. Not the threat assessment or the tactical calculation.
Just... the moment.
The wind. The water. The sunset painting the clouds in colors that had no name.
When was the last time? Erickson wondered.
He could not remember.
He stared ahead. At the container ship. At the horizon. At the sky that went on forever, indifferent to the lives being lived beneath it.
Maybe, he thought, I should remember this one.
---