His thumb hovered. There was no name in the header, only the burner identifier: a string of numbers he recognized — her fallback. He turned the phone over, watching the little blue light blink like a heart. The dots and dashes carved out a rhythm against his skin.
He had been alone until that moment. People thronged the square, but his pulse had narrowed; the tape, the coroner, the cameras — all of it receded as if someone had pulled the curtain. A set of simple beeps in the language of telegraphy was more private than a whisper. It meant whoever had sent it wanted brute information in a method that couldn't be read by a casual glance.
He stepped back from the crowd and found a shadowed doorway where a delivery truck's rear blocked a camera's angle. He pressed his shoulder against the cold metal and let the city be a muffled roar behind him. He had learned Morse as a child in jail from Radley, who taught him just because they had leisure time. He never imagined it would come in handy now. He had tapped messages into the wood of a table while men slept, learning how dots and dashes could carry entire lives.
He read the first few characters slowly, the cadence returning, muscle memory unlocking like a trapdoor: dot dash dot dash — K. Then dot dot dot — S. Then a longer cluster: — — · · — — (he hesitated; the string was rapid). The message stitched itself weirdly in his head. He thought of Sofie at a desk with fluorescent lights, of her nimble fingers connecting threads of data, of the warded patience that made her a lifeline.
The message kept flicking. He realized he could either read it now, here, or save it, and wait until he was someplace safer. He had been waiting too long for answers. The little blue light blinked again, patient and small.
He thumbed open the preview with the same care a man lifts a lit match near gunpowder. The dots and dashes translated like a sentence sliding out of the dark: "MEET—NORTH DOCK—ONE HOUR—BRING NOTHING—TRUST NO ONE—S."
His chest tightened as if someone had put a hand on his sternum and leaned. Sofie's initial. A time. A place. An order that curled a glove around his throat.
One hour. North Dock. Bring nothing. Trust no one.
He folded the phone closed and felt the square press against his back like a memory he had not asked to own. The coroner's assistant laughed nervously at a reporter's bad joke. A child with a balloon ran by, blissful in ignorance. Life could be designed to continue while people were at war in the margins. Brendon slid his phone back into his pocket, the Morse string a hot coal under his palm.
He had been told to lay low. Camelia had told him to be quiet. Sofie had just told him to come out into a place that smelled of salt and old wood and possibly danger. The contradictions sat across his ribs and argued like two old friends who remembered different winters. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of the wooden tubes, the brand, the smear of the mayor's name, and the Crooked Man whispered like a curse in back alleys.
He rose from his lamppost shadow and walked away from the cordon, not toward it, but toward the river that led to the docks. The city watched with eyes without sympathy. He walked with a plan that had no plan built into it: one hour, North Dock, bring nothing, trust no one.
He felt the ember in his chest move like an animal beginning to consider a hunt.
---
The North Dock kept its breath low and cold that night, the water sliding under the piers like someone trying to keep a secret from the moon. Brendon moved with the automatic patience of a man who had learned to wait for things that might bite: a shadow here, two bootprints there, the faint, off rhythm of a truck shuddering in the distance. He had brought nothing, trusted no one — Sofie's instructions had been blunt — and he felt the small comfort of that constraint tighten around him like a strap.
At first there was only the slow geometry of shipping containers, stacked like sleeping beasts. The dock lights flared and threw rectangles across the metal sides; gulls called like old witnesses. He walked the edge of the yard, breath fogging in the streetlight, listening for anything that felt wrong in a place designed for wrongness. He did not see Sofie at first. He smelled her before he did — the clean, faint chemical tang of a human whose job had been to live inside machines and lights.
"Hey," a soft voice said from behind a container, the sound a practiced hush. "If you wanted a dramatic invite, you get points."
Sofie stepped clear as if emerging from a hole in the map. She wore no uniform; instead she had on a dark jacket and a knit cap pulled low. Her face was pale where the city didn't flatter it, and her eyes searched him as if she needed to confirm the shape of him in person. For a beat Brendon watched her check for tails: a glance at the fence line, the slow pivot of someone making sure no one had been stupid enough to follow.
"It's me," she breathed when she was sure. "God, you look like you traded your soul for a rag."
"You sent me a Morse." He kept his voice rough so it wouldn't shake. "You could have texted."
She let out a laugh that was mostly a sob that tried not to be. "Not safe. Not for now." Her thumb toyed with the hem of her jacket as if it were a toggle switch she could set to normal. "You weren't followed, are you?"
"No..." he said. "I came alone. Nobody near the canal. You sure you want to be seen with me?"
Her mouth tightened. "If I'm seen with you… Chief Tyson will brand me sympathetic to criminals. Already they've been whispering. That's the least of it." She drew a breath that looked like someone bracing to run and then lowered her voice. "We don't have long." She stepped around the container so they were in its shadow, where the light wasn't a thing that could make them blameless.
"What's the emergency?" Brendon asked.
Sofie folded her hands like a person trying to hold herself together. For a second she seemed very small against the metal. "It's the bodies. The parts. They found them at the docks this morning too. We recovered an ID from one of the scenes."
Brendon felt the ground slip under him, not because of the words — he had expected the violence — but because of the name that followed.
"Whose?" he managed.
"Seth," she said. "Seth Harrow. My fiancé."
The syllables fell like stones. Brendon had to step back, as if distance might give him room to breathe. For a moment the dock was all sound: a gull, a far horn, the distant clatter of a crate. Sofie's face had folded something in it he hadn't seen before — a private ruin. He might have reached for her then, but the world and their history made public gestures dangerous. Still, something inside him went taut in the old, old way he reserved for the few people whose hurt meant more than his own.
"You—" Brendon started, but the word failed him. He had no shield for condolences that didn't sound like paperwork.
"They identified him from a card," Sofie said. Her voice was steadyer than her hands. "They found a driver's license at the East Wharf that had his name. Heart said it was damaged, but the digital prints matched. Chief pulled me off the tech team this morning."
"Tyson pulled you?" Brendon asked, incredulous. Sofie, who had given him feeds and a quiet pocket of trust, who had stayed when others would have closed doors — why would the chief remove her?
"He says it's for my protection," she said, as if reading from someone else's script. "He says the department doesn't want me compromised by trauma; that I'll make mistakes. But the truth is uglier." She swallowed. "He's worried I'll leak something. He's worried I'll bend the data to fit my heart. He's worried I'll be... used. Or worse — he is protecting someone. I don't know which."
Brendon let the silence sit like a third presence. The dock could carry the sounds of grief and make them look like fog, but grief had edges you could not smooth.
"I... I'm so sorry for tour lose." he said finally, and it came out as a sentence both small and true. He shifted forward, awkward, because comfort was not something he was confident giving, but he wanted to lend weight to the words. "Sofie, I — I had no idea. I'm so—"
She exhaled, a raw little sound. Tears flashed in her eyes, quick and unashamed, then she blinked them away like a technician with an eyelid problem. "Please don't, I don't anyone's sympathy for now." she said sharply, half to him and half to herself. "I didn't bring you out here to break me down under a lamppost."
"A... all right," he said. He sat on a nearby coil of rope, careful not to step into the light. "Tell me what you want me to know. Tell me why you sent me a Morse code."
She looked at him as if weighing his anatomy for truth. "I was pulled from the tech team at nine. They changed my access; they scrubbed my most recent logs. They gave me reassignment papers as if I'd requested it. But I still have the backup feeds — the things I hid before they could lock me out." Her fingers flexed, knuckle white. "Seth's ID was found at the East Wharf. There were traces — fibers, prints — tied to docks workers we've been watching. But the evidence is… scattered. Someone is moving the pieces in a way that buries the story. And I don't think the Chief wants us poking too hard."
"Because whoever's behind it is connected to him or is a part of the system." Brendon said, the words hard as a benediction.
Sofie's head snapped toward him. For a moment she looked relieved at the bluntness of his thought, as if he had offered a formula that made sense of the ragged chaos. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. But I can't use my clearance publicly. They'll flag me and then they'll take anything I touch and claim contamination. You aren't a suspect anymore, Brendon. You're a liability. But you're also… you're not sworn to the paper. You can move. You can ask the questions I cannot. I need someone in the field who will not be read by an internal memo."
He considered that. It felt like someone handing him a weapon and asking him not to cut himself.
"What do you want from me actually then?" he asked.
Sofie took a breath that hitched like someone bracing to leap. "I want you to do what detectives do but won't because they have to follow procedure. I want you to talk to the truckers, to the dockhands, to the men who don't show up in the morning papers. I want you to follow the small invoices, the fake names. And when you find something — anything — you bring it to me. Quietly. I'll use what I can from the backdoors. I can't risk being your handler, not now. But I can be your anchor."
Her voice broke on the last word, honest and fragile. Brendon felt that old ledger inside him tilt. He'd been trying to be something clean: a man who kept accounts. This offered him a different kind of balance: a living ledger, one that tracked bones and names and debts in a currency he could understand.
"You want to hire me, huh." he said, and it tasted like a negotiation and a benediction all at once.
"I can't pay you with a city job," she said, a ghost of a smile. "But I can give you what I have: feeds, timestamps, the things they can't scrub without raising the Chief's eyebrow. And I can give you the truth as I can sleuth it. I need someone who can move where I can't."
Brendon looked at her then, at the way she'd arranged herself not to require saving, and felt the small, complicated ink of responsibility reassert itself. He thought of Seth, an ID stained and discarded like evidence someone hoped would dissolve.
"All right," he said after a long beat. "I'll do it. But I'm doing this my way. I won't be a decoy for anyone's theatre."
Sofie reached out as if tempted to touch his sleeve, then withdrew. "That's... all I ask, Thank you." she said. "Come back to me when you have something that doesn't need a warrant to believe. Okay?"
Another gull called. Behind them the dock hummed its slow life. Brendon folded his hands together, feeling the small ache behind his ribs — part grief, part resolve. He had been called to keep accounts. Tonight those accounts had names, and someone had to settle them. He stood, and they moved back into the shadow where plans were shaped rather than announced.