Chapter 12 Sirena
“Okay, so,” I muttered, shrugging into the orange vest and fitting a hard hat over my bun. My paperwork was on a clipboard in my lap, and Kelly was pulling me right up to the end of the dock.
“Comms check,” Nex announced in my ear.
Everyone chimed in “green” one by one, until I was the only one who was left.
“Green,” I said, adding to the chorus, and then stepped out of the car, picking up my clipboard and workbag with a few implements in it to help keep my cover.
I knew the Dullahan was angling his head on the dash to keep eyes on me, while his body paced outside the door—Kelly’s body was incredibly strong, with or without him—which was why he was my porter to the dock.
I walked up to the dock office and presented my paperwork. The owl-like Avian woman behind the counter seemed to utterly not care—and behind her, there were two portly men stalking around, using walkie-talkies to shout instructions.
She pushed her glasses up her beak, inspected her computer screen, then tapped a gloriously pink talon on its glass.
“The box you’re looking for is in section D5. I’ll get one of these guys to take you,” she said, and then swiveled her head to look behind her, without moving her shoulders in the least. “Allen—Al!” she shouted, before whipping her head back around. “He’ll take you—”
“We’re in the middle of a live unload!” Allen complained.
“Can you not see?” the secretary hollered back, gesturing at me, and my very orange vest. “She’s port authority! Sooner you get it over with, the sooner you can get back to your day!”
“Marge—”
“I can’t leave the front desk! I’m on modified!” she said, kicking a braced leg his direction, before whispering loudly to me. “I’m union.”
“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 the Helepolis. “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.
The Helepolis was 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 better than 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.
“Per 12(b), that’s a credible release risk. Open it up now!” I shouted at Allen—and while he might’ve been used to other rough dockworkers shouting at him, he was clearly not expecting it from a blonde half-siren, especially followed by a push.
I wasn’t supposed to push people.
I was never supposed to take anyone’s autonomy away—it was covered under the same codicils at work as live rounds and wetwork.
But I’d seen them in my mind. Women and men—and suddenly I was glad we’d acted now, because whatever had happened to them, making them wait another minute to be saved was torture.
“Okay, okay!” he shouted back, already in the act of opening the box. “I gotta be official!”
He took a picture of the box’s seal with his work phone, used a key from a keyring to pop a lock over one of the levers, then unlatched two of them, swinging the door open toward him in a wide arc—and he was in a nominally better position to see in than I was.
“Motherfucker,” he whispered—that was all I needed to know. “How?” He started in, then followed it with “What!” as he stepped back, lifting his walkie to shout at someone.
I didn’t hesitate—I stepped inside, and found thirteen people on the ground, lying side by side, wearing hospital gowns. I threw an arm over my face—there certainly was a noxious smell inside here; they were covered in their own waste—and the entire box shuddered as the door slammed shut behind me.