The city had rinsed itself clean of night without inviting morning in. Sky the color of old steel, sidewalks still slick in seams, the kind of gray that hides people better than dark ever could. James set a pace that matched the hour, trimmed of anything extra, and I kept close, the case heavy in my grip for reasons that had nothing to do with weight.
We cut beneath a raised spur of track, into a service lane that smelled like cold metal and detergent. A metal door waited at the end, scarred and anonymous. James tapped a code into a keypad, two short tones, one long. The lock released with a tired click.
Inside was a freight corridor. Fluorescent lights hummed in a broken pattern overhead, some alive, some dead, a dotted line that drew us forward toward a shutter half open over a loading bay. Breath steamed in the chill. Somewhere water ran behind the walls, a steady thread of sound that made the big space feel smaller.
A man waited by the bay, broad through the shoulders, hands bare in the cold like he had forgotten to feel it. He lifted his chin when he saw James, not much else.
"Jax," James said.
"You cut it close," Jax answered. His eyes shifted to me for a beat, then the case, then back to James. "You bring the noise with you."
"It followed," James said.
Jax jerked his head toward a workbench scattered with tools and a small hard case the size of a paperback. "Put it down."
I set the case on the bench. The echo of the metal on metal was too loud in the empty room. Jax flipped the small case open to show a compact scanner, the kind that looked like a phone with the polite parts removed. He powered it on and the screen lit pale blue.
"If they were steering you," Jax said, "they are not guessing anymore."
The scanner trilled a faint tone as he passed it over the handle, the hinges, the seams. James stood beside me without touching, presence steady as a wall. The tone stayed flat until Jax reached the rear corner of the case near a rubber foot.
The sound climbed.
Jax shifted the angle and passed again. The tone rose, thin and insistent.
"There," he said.
He took up a driver and eased the tiny foot free. A black dot sat underneath, flush to the metal, no bigger than a lentil, a thin ring of adhesive catching the light.
"Magnet and glue," Jax said. "Light power, just enough to blink when it has company."
"Transmit," James said.
"When it wants to be found, yes," Jax answered. He dropped the dot into a ceramic tray. "Someone wanted the bread crumbs warm, not smoking."
I let a breath out I had not realized I was holding. "So they know where we are."
"They knew where you were," Jax said. "Now we decide what they know next."
James nodded once. "Two plays."
Jax's mouth tipped as if he had been waiting to hear it. "One, we dead it and go quiet. Two, we make it sing somewhere you are not."
James looked at me then, not a test, just a choice he would let me see. "Pick."
The corridor hummed. Somewhere a lift clanked to life and stopped again. I looked at the dot in the tray, small, ordinary, mean. "Make it sing," I said. "Give them a song they want to follow."
Jax's grin was quick and gone. "Good ear."
He reached into the tray with tweezers, adjusted something with the tip of a blade, and the blue screen on the scanner pulsed once, a tiny heartbeat. "It is eager again. I will send it to a place that does not love company."
"Old tram yard," James said.
"Perfect," Jax answered. He closed the tweezers around the dot and slipped it into a small plastic vial, then into his pocket. "I will put it on a courier who looks like he hates his job."
James lifted the case and set it back in front of me. "We move the car."
Jax crossed to a rolling door and hauled it up. The bay opened onto a sliver of lower street where a battered van sat idling, paint the color of dirty bone. He tossed James a key ring that looked like it had lived in his pocket for a decade.
"You can lose three tails with this," Jax said. "Four if they are proud."
James took the keys and gave the bay one last scan with his eyes. "Nichole."
Jax nodded. "She smiled in the wrong place last night. Twice."
Something in my chest pulled tight. "Is she with them."
"She is with herself," Jax said, which felt like the truest and least helpful answer I could have gotten. "That can look like anything depending on the light."
James closed my hand around the handle of the case. "We change the light."
Jax dropped the bay door to a slit and crouched to look out. "You have six minutes before a rubbish truck makes this street a parade. Take the tunnel to the right, up the service ramp, into the van, left on Hoover, right on Third. Do not stop for a red unless it talks to you."
"And you," James said.
"I will sing to the yard," Jax answered, already moving, already a different shape.
We went the way he said. The service tunnel breathed cold around us, new concrete over old. The ramp lifted us into a rectangle of gray morning and exhaust. James opened the van's passenger door, checked the footwell by habit, then nodded me in. He slid behind the wheel and the van rumbled like a patient animal.
We pulled into a slow left and the city received us like we belonged there. The windows were dirty in a way that turned the world soft at the edges. A bus wheezed past, a woman in a red coat stood under an awning with a paper cup, a kid dragged a backpack two sizes too big down the block as if morning had surprised him again.
"If the case is the point," I said, "what is inside it that makes a city follow us."
James watched a light change that no one cared about. "Sometimes the point is the person holding it."
Silence worked between us while the van counted intersections. The weight of the case sat on my thighs like a verdict. "You could carry it yourself," I said.
"I am busy carrying other things," he answered, and the corner of his mouth lifted the smallest degree. "You are steadier than you think."
We cut right on Third into a corridor of old warehouses, brick scabbed by years. The morning opened in the gaps between them, a bright that did not warm. James slowed without looking like he had, scanning roofs, counting alleys, the map in his head moving faster than the van.
"What happens at the yard," I asked.
"Nothing good for anyone who is not us," he said. "And a message for the ones who think they are."
The light at the next corner turned yellow and held too long. James eased the van to a stop a yard short of the line, not touching the brake harder than needed. He looked past me, into the side mirror, into the space beyond my window where a reflection blinked then went still.
"Kristina," he said, and my name felt like the start of a sentence he had not decided how to end. "If I say get out and walk, you take the case and go into the first door with a letter above it."
I looked out. The warehouse row wore painted letters five stories high, a fading alphabet that made sense only to trucks. "Which letter."
"Any letter," he said. "Then you go through a second door. If there is not a second door, you find a stair and make one."
I nodded, and my hands stopped shaking without me telling them to. The light moved from yellow to green like it had remembered its job. James rolled us forward.
A block later the radio on the dash, a cheap thing with a cracked face, hissed to life with no station on it. A burst of static, then a voice I knew even under the static, easy and bright like it was selling clean weather.
"You picked a noisy morning," Nichole said. "Tell your friend with the bad van to signal before he turns."
James did not look pleased or surprised. He tapped the side of the radio with one knuckle and the static softened. "You are up early."
"You are late," she said, and I could hear the smile that meant nothing she said was about the time. "And you are not alone."
James's eyes stayed on the road. "If you are selling me a map, hang up. If you are selling me a mirror, talk fast."
"Mirror," Nichole said. A pause, then a breath I could hear. "Two behind. One tall, one careful. The careful one has a friend who likes rooftops."
My throat went dry in a way that felt familiar now. James kept the van in the lane like he had learned here. "And you."
"I like windows," she said. "I am not your problem today."
"Today," James repeated.
Nichole laughed an inch away from the speaker. "Do not go to the yard," she said. "They bought tickets."
The light ahead turned red. James let the van crawl the last feet to the line and stop with the kind of calm that made my bones believe him. "Where then."
Nichole's voice softened, different, close to something like honest. "Pick any letter," she said, almost amused. "Then pick a second door."
The line went dead. James let the silence ride for one more breath, then cut the van into a right that should not have cleared and did. The painted letters rose around us again. We were back in the alphabet with the morning on our heels and someone counting our steps.
"Second door," he said.
I closed my fingers around the handle of the case. "Any letter."
"Any letter," he said, and the van carried us forward into the mouth of the next turn.
The train yard stretched out in rust and shadow, its rows of steel and weather-worn freight cars disappearing into a haze of diesel and morning fog. From where we crouched behind a stack of shipping crates, the place looked abandoned, but James had already pointed out the signs, scuff marks in the gravel too fresh, an open latch on a car that should've been locked, the faint smell of warm exhaust in a place that hadn't seen an official run in days.
"Two minutes," he murmured, eyes tracking along the rail lines.
I shifted my grip on the case, trying to ignore the weight of it pulling on my shoulder. Every sound seemed louder here: the groan of settling steel, the creak of metal expanding under the first touch of sun, the crunch of gravel under our boots when we moved.
James pointed toward the far end of the yard, where a narrow maintenance corridor cut between two rusted cars. "That way. Keep low."
The ground was slick from the night's damp, patches of oil spreading rainbow sheens across puddles. My breath misted faintly in the cool air, disappearing as quickly as it came. Halfway down the corridor, James stopped, pressing a hand to my arm.
A voice drifted from ahead, low and muffled, the cadence of someone talking into a comm. I couldn't make out the words, but the tone was enough, steady, controlled, like they were delivering information, not asking for it.
James moved us sideways into the shadow of a maintenance shack, the corrugated metal walls smelling faintly of rust and stale smoke. He tilted his head toward me. "Three of them," he said. "Two watching the cars, one on the far exit. That means we're funneled."
"What's the plan?"
His eyes flicked toward the top of the shack. "Get above the funnel."
I followed him up the side ladder, the metal cold under my hands. From the roof, the yard looked different, patterns I hadn't seen from the ground emerged in the lines of cars and the gaps between them. The men weren't moving much, but they didn't need to. They were already positioned to catch anyone walking out in the open.
James crouched beside me, scanning. "We go over the cars. Quiet, fast. They're looking for movement at ground level."
We moved, the steel beneath our boots humming faintly with each step. Below, one of the men shifted, glancing toward the far end of the yard as if he'd felt something change in the air.
By the time we were halfway across, the sound of an approaching engine cut through the morning stillness. It wasn't close yet, but the way James' pace quickened told me it mattered.
"That's our window," he said.
And then we dropped down the far side, boots hitting the gravel soft as we could manage, slipping into the thin strip of shadow between two cars.
The engine's growl deepened, rattling the steel around us. Somewhere on the main line, a freight was closing in, the sound swelling like a tide. James didn't look back; he moved us in the opposite direction, using the noise to blur our steps.
The shadow between the cars narrowed until the light at the far end became a thin stripe across gravel. James slowed. His head tilted, the way it did when he was listening for something the rest of the world was too loud to notice.
"Stop," he said, low.
I froze. The sound of the train surged, a metallic scream and clatter, but beneath it, just barely, was the scrape of a boot on stone, close enough to feel the vibration in the rails under my feet.
James moved first, stepping into the light like it belonged to him. The figure waiting there didn't flinch. Tall, coat hanging open, one hand loose at his side, the other just inside the edge of his pocket.
"You made better time than I thought," the man said. His voice carried easily over the train's thunder, which meant it wasn't his first time talking in places like this.
"You've been standing still a long time," James replied.
"That's the trick," the man said, eyes cutting briefly to the case. "You let the right people come to you."
The freight screamed past on the main line, throwing a gust of oily wind into the narrow space. I gripped the case tighter. James didn't answer him, not with words. He stepped forward, making the space between them too small for anything but a decision.
The man's smile was quick, wrong. "You don't have the time for me today."
James' hand twitched toward his coat. "You don't get to tell me my time."
The man's other hand came up then, palm open, a small black fob sitting in the center. "It's not a tracker. It's worse."
The words hung there, just long enough for me to feel the shape of them without knowing the meaning. James didn't take the bait.
"Move," he said.
The man did, backward, one step, then gone into the blind space between cars. By the time the train passed and the yard's silence returned, he'd left nothing behind but the faint smell of cold smoke.
James looked at me, the set of his jaw making the choice for both of us. "We're not going to the yard."
James turned us away from the yard without a word, cutting down a side corridor of rusted fencing and forgotten freight. The noise of the passing train faded behind us, replaced by the damp quiet of a section of the city that felt older, heavier. My fingers tightened on the case, each step carrying us further from the open spaces where eyes could find us.
"What did he mean, worse than a tracker?" I asked.
James kept walking. "If you have to ask, you're better off not knowing yet."
We passed an overturned cart, a scattering of old manifests curling in the moisture. James paused at a gate locked with a chain, slipped something small from his pocket, and the lock fell open without a sound. On the other side, an access tunnel yawned, the air inside colder and laced with the tang of oil.
The moment we stepped in, a faint, rhythmic pulse reached my ears. Not mechanical. James froze, listening, then pulled me back into the shadow.
"He's already here," he said quietly.
I didn't ask who. Somewhere deeper in the tunnel, something moved, soft at first, then quicker, tapping against the concrete like someone began a light jog. "Get behind me," he murmured.
My pulse quickened, and in the dim light ahead, a sliver of movement cut through the dark.