Avery
By nine the square itself could be a picture on a postcard.
Banners climb between the lampposts, blue and gold, and a girl on her father's shoulders points at each one like it's a kite.
Two food trucks beep their way backward into the curb while a man in a reflective vest waves them in.
A speaker on the bandstand shrieks, dies, comes back as a flat voice counting one, two, three.
Near the chandlery, four volunteers crouch over a clipboard, fighting about whether booth nineteen goes before or after the funnel-cake stand.
It should look like nothing. To me it looks like a map I can't stop seeing.
I have the other version folded in my jacket—Lucien's, in waxed paper.
The town's cheerful chaos keeps matching it.
The road-closure signs go up exactly where his red lines fall.
The barricades stack along the routes he drew as walls.
Every laughing vendor is setting a piece of his stage and calling it a festival.
I may be a marine biologist, but I can't stop reading the crowd the same way I read water. The lanes between booths are channels. The square is the basin everything drains into. And every exit will be blocked once he begins his war.
"Tell me what I'm fighting," Greer says, handing me a coffee. He looks like a man who hasn't slept.
I ignore what he's asking, and ask about the others. "Dorian's people?"
"Took the piers and the water side. He left the square to us. Said you'd see it faster than he would."
So we start dismantling what we can. The alley beside the chandlery is one of the exits, and someone's staged barricades so it pinches to single file. Greer plants himself directly ahead of the festival coordinator.
"Ambulance access. Eight feet minimum, fire marshal's orders."
"The permits are filed, the—" the coordinator is cut off.
"Eight feet." Greer doesn't move until the barricades do.
Booth nineteen is worse. The vendor rows are going up across the throat of the square, where the crowd wouldn't have an escape.
"Your propane has to clear ten feet from that cable run," I tell the funnel-cake man, "or the whole row fails inspection."
"That's the best corner on the waterfront. I paid for it. I've worked this festival since before you were born, missy."
"Then you know it floods if a hose pops." I don't blink. I move his row twenty feet north and open the throat back up, and I feel like a liar the whole time, because I am.
O trails me with his camera. "Ave." He points his lens at a temporary cable feeding the bandstand, straight across a service door Lucien timed for nine-forty. "That run's sitting in a puddle."
"Shock hazard." I flag it; they reroute it. Small. It doesn't fix the festival—his plan's still going ahead.
Mabel brings sandwiches none of us asked for.
"Crimson Harbor's an odd place," she says, watching the banners go up.
"People here survive things they don't get to understand.
Boats that should've gone down. Folks who walk home who shouldn't have.
" She pats my hand. "Some of us stopped asking who pulls them back. We just got grateful."
Caleb appears at the curb just after noon, stepping out of a rented SUV with his search-and-rescue jacket over one arm. My clipboard slips. Greer catches it before it hits the pavement.
"Ave," Caleb says. "You stopped answering."
"You came here because I missed a few calls?"
"You missed twelve. After the fiancé, you ran to Oregon. After Oregon, you ran here. I'm not watching you disappear into another disaster because you're too proud to come home."
The word home doesn't feel the same anymore. Everything in me reaches for him and shoves him away at the same time.
"I'm not leaving."
His eyes harden. "Then I'm staying."
"No." I glance toward the bell tower, then make myself look back at him. "But if you're going to be stubborn, be useful somewhere public. Main square. Near Greer. Nowhere quiet."
His eyes narrow. "That sounds very specific."
"It's a festival. Specific is what keeps people from getting crushed by a funnel-cake line." He doesn't smile, but he does disappear and do as I say.
A woman from the flower stall stops arguing about table space long enough to press a roll of tape into my hand.
"You're with Greer today, right? Tell him the south stairs always jam after fireworks. Folks cut through there when the band starts, and nobody listens until someone falls."
I look at them, then at Lucien's map. South stairs. Another throat waiting to close.
"Thanks," I say. "I'll move it up the list."
She gives me a tired smile and goes back to unpacking paper lanterns, never knowing she may have just saved herself.
I'm checking the bell tower because Lucien's roster named someone there when I see Nora by the storage tents, frowning at two men in festival vests beside the PA cables. One has the access panel open. The other is feeding a coil of wire behind the stage skirting.
To anyone else, it looks like setup. To me, it looks like someone choosing where panic gets its voice. Nora takes one step toward them.
"Nora," I call, too brightly. "Greer needs your booth permit before the health inspector starts throwing his clipboard around."
She turns. "He needs my what?"
"Permit. Now." I get between her and the stage before she can look back. "Please."
Her face changes, but she follows. Greer reaches the panel thirty seconds later with Caleb beside him.
"Audio inspection," Greer says. "Step away from the box."
One man hands over a festival badge. The other disappears behind the bandstand before Caleb can move.
"Stay," I say, catching his sleeve.
He looks at my hand, then at my face, and stays.
Nora's voice drops. "Ave, what is happening?"
"Someone's messing with the festival setup," I say. True enough to stand on. "Stay near the square. Near people."
Caleb waits until Nora walks back toward the café truck, then turns on me. "I came because you stopped answering. After everything with that ex-fiancé, you said this place was temporary. A reset. Now I get here and you're in the middle of whatever this is."
"It is temporary."
"Then come home."
I look at the lights, the barricades, the open panel Greer is now taping shut.
"I can't. Not before Friday."
"Why?"
"Because someone is using the festival to hurt people, and Greer doesn't have enough eyes."
"Then I'll help."
My throat tightens. My eyes cut to the docks, then I make myself look back at him.
"Help Greer with the square. Crowds. Exits. Nothing quiet, nothing off-route."
He hears the shape of what I don't say.
"Fine," he says. "But after Friday, we talk about home."
"After Friday," I say.
By dusk they're testing the festival lights. They flare down the waterfront in long strings, and the square fills with fried dough, somebody's bad sound check and a kid laughing too hard at nothing. Pretty. Ordinary. A celebration.
And underneath it, perfectly aligned, the other thing—Lucien's plan. I stand knowing I'm in the middle of both at once. Then I pick up my clipboard, find the vendor blocking the south stairs, and start moving people out of the places he wants them trapped.