Avery
By six I've turned the floor of my room into a case file.
I don't sleep. I work. Evidence is the one thing that has ever held me upright, and I need it now.
Photographs first, laid edge to edge across the boards.
Seal carcasses. The harbor mouth at slack tide.
O's boat frames, nine and eleven, printed a week ago and never solved.
My field notes. The witness statements I copied at the clinic.
The Saltline stencil. The county tunnel maps I'd filed under coincidence.
It all agrees now. I simply had the wrong physics.
The seals. I logged them as anomalous predation—paired punctures, no tearing, complete exsanguination, no shark profile, no orca, no propeller.
I built a whole folder around a predator I couldn't name, because I would not name the one I'd watched on the float.
They weren't kills. They were meals. Drained and left intact, because intact was the point.
I find the lab report on the gray film around the wounds. No toxin. No necrosis that fit the literature. I cross out my three careful hypotheses and write the only word left: residue. Of feeding. Of something a mammal's body has no slot to file.
Next the statements. The same sentences in different mouths, people who never met, and I'd flagged it as small-harbor reporting—one nurse, a shared local script.
Not a script. A seam. The clean line where a true memory was lifted out and a gentler one pressed into the gap.
They weren't lying to me. They'd been edited.
The tourists who came back "confused," the deckhands "disoriented" and quietly let go. Damaged. Testimony burned out of them, one soft, wrong sentence left.
I sit back on my heels. Here is one thing I can't cross out.
Dorian. Every time I closed on the truth, he turned me from it.
He wasn't only hiding what he is. He was keeping me off a road that ends with the rogues—or his own people—deciding a marine biologist with a camera knows too much to leave breathing. The protection was real. The cage too.
What I can't settle is Tracy. The thing he laid over her spared her the worst moment of her life and took the rest with it. She'll mend believing she tripped. No nightmares. No name for what fed on her. Is that mercy, or theft wearing mercy's coat? It depends on who decides, and why.
Mabel knocks once and comes in without waiting, a mug in each hand, toast balanced on a saucer on her wrist.
"You didn't sleep," she says. She steps around my photographs without looking down, which tells me she's seen worse on a floor. She sets the coffee by my knee. "Eat the toast. Whatever you're doing, you'll do it better fed."
I eat the toast. She's right.
"Sixty years here," she says, at the window, not at me.
"We've always had the rescues that don't add up—people who go off the end of the harbor and come back wrong, or come back fine and can't say how.
I stopped asking which it'd be." She collects my empty saucer.
"I'm not sure what's out there, Avery. I know the ones who insist there's nothing usually end up the worst off. "
She leaves before I decide whether that's comfort or warning. Both, probably. Everything here is both. I take my folder to the harbormaster's office. Greer sees what I'm carrying, and the morning goes out of his face. He doesn't ask me to sit.
"You've been to F-9," he says.
"You've been softening reports for years." I slam O's frames on his desk. "Missing hours. Strandings. Workers who didn't come back. You had a box for it all, and the box was a lie."
"There was no true box. You write down what the woman actually said—that the deck figure threw no reflection, that her friend walked into the water and the water handed her back calm—and you've just earned her a psych hold and handed the coroner nothing.
I kept people out of a mental institution, families from chasing a thing that would have eaten them for asking. "
"You kept the whole town quiet."
"I kept them alive." He plants both hands on the desk.
"Here's the part you'll hate. Valek has prevented more of this than I can count.
Boats that should have gone down didn't. People who ought to be names on a stone are pouring coffee this morning.
I haven't worked out how yet, and I made a point of not knowing.
That's the trade, Quinn. You can’t keep the people and the whole truth. I chose the people."
I mean to despise him for it. I can't, quite. None of the cowardice in this harbor is simple.
On the way back I cut through Nora's. A man at the corner table—one of the passengers from the boat that "ran aground" last month.
He stirs coffee he isn't drinking, telling Nora in a pleasant voice that they caught a sandbar.
When the bell strikes the hour his hand jerks, coffee slopping the rim, and his face does nothing.
No fear. No memory to hang the fear on. A body flinching at a sound it isn't permitted to understand.
There's the whole argument at a café table. He's safe. He's also been robbed—of his own terror, of the right to decide what to do with it.
My phone buzzes. O.
enhanced frame 9. tell me i'm crazy.
The reflection on the wheelhouse glass: a man on the foredeck, and the rail behind him showing straight through where his chest should block it.
you're not crazy, I send back. don't enhance any more tonight. stay off the docks.
He sends a single ok. Scared, still working.
I walk back with the whole case rebuilt and one variable unsolved, and Dorian is the center of it.
I know what divides him. I've watched him choose victims into safety instead of silence—most of the time. That doesn't square the real thing though. Saving my life multiple times doesn't buy more lies.
But I can't keep judging a truth that I don't hold everything for.
I climb the stairs to wait. Forgiving him seems difficult right now. But I know I need the rest, because yesterday just wasn't enough. I need it all. If he expects me to live in this newfound world, he can begin by standing ahead of me and telling me everything, with nothing left unsaid.