The fire behind, carrying silence like a burden they had chosen. The street took them in a rush of heat that made skin taste like pennies. Windows across the block blinked awake, some from heat, some from nosy habit. A siren tried a note and found the rest of the song. Ash came down like cheap snow.
"Left," Madison said, already hoarse, already counting doorways and cover in the twitch of his eyes. His right knee dragged half a beat late; he didn't let the rhythm show up top. "Alley."
Riley coughed into the crook of her elbow and came away black. "I can't feel my teeth," she said, then tried to pass it off as a joke. "Good sign, right?"
"No shouting," Margo said, not unkind. She had a hand pressed to the strap of the med-bag like it was a person who needed reassurance. The bag clicked softly with vials and gauze, a cheap saint's reliquary.
They hit the alley. It smelled like warm trash and yesterday's rain that never got the memo. A rolling gate at the far end sat half off its track, as if it had tried to run and thought better of it. Beyond, a sliver of the river road and the low thunder of engines not meant for city streets.
Gavin put a palm to the gate's corrugation. The metal held a patient heat that said it had loved the sun all day and resented being asked for more. "On three," he said.
Madison grunted ready. Margo took the bottom edge. Riley flattened herself against the bricks, eyes on the mouth of the alley. A figure at the curb glanced in, saw four silhouettes where there should have been none, and decided to want a different story.
"One," Gavin said, and they all lifted on two.
The gate rode up with a noise like a bad idea clearing its throat. They slid under into the throat of the river road. The city's breath moved different here, cooler, the kind of wind that knows how to gossip. A billboard up the block still had a face on it, glossy and oblivious, selling toothpaste to a world that had better things to worry about.
Riley touched Gavin's sleeve like she was checking he was still there. "We're really not going to say it?" she asked. Not the details. Just it.
"We're really not," Gavin said. He heard the weight of the line. He felt it in the meat behind his ribs, where a confession might usually go to stretch its legs. "Not here. Not now."
Margo tested the wind with her chin up, eyes half-closed. "They'll guess anyway," she said. "People don't wait for words when there's smoke to read." Her mouth flattened into a rueful shape. "That shepherd… he made sure of that."
Madison didn't add to it. The silence they'd chosen felt like a fifth person in the formation, the one who walks a step behind and keeps the secrets honest just by being counted.
Ahead, the river road dipped into a parking ramp that had long ago decided it was a harbor. Water lapped in the shadows, reflecting the tower's orange in nervous shivers. A National Guard truck growled along the upper deck, taillights a pair of watchful eyes.
"Ramp," Madison said. "We go under and out by the cut."
"The Ledger Man won't like the hour," Margo said.
"He likes cash better," Riley said, more bravado than math.
Gavin didn't disagree. He took the lead and the silence came with him, heavy as a tool he didn't remember learning to use.
They slid down into the ramp. The first level had grown a skin of water that took their reflections and made them liars. Oil fanned into bruised rainbows. A sedan shoulder-deep in the flood blinked its hazard lights, small—defiant or unaware. On the far side, two stacks of pallets and a snapped beam made a clever barricade that wasn't clever enough.
"Lights," Riley whispered, and pointed. Past the barricade, under the low concrete, a wedge of glow quivered. Not the clean white of emergency rigs. Candlelight. People.
Madison's jaw set. "Guard patrol up top in ten," he said, listening the way old soldiers do, body registering vibrations as speech. "We move now or we freeze and pray."
"Moving," Margo said. She went sideways along the wall to take a look without being a picture. Gavin heard the breath she held. He heard her let it go. "Family," she reported softly. "Two kids. One crying quiet on purpose." A pause. "Mom's got that stare like she's been bargaining with the day and coming up short."
Riley's hand fluttered at her belt. "We don't have time," she said, hating the math even as she did it.
"We make time," Madison said. He rolled his bad knee once, twice, and changed the way his weight sat on the world. "Gav?"
Gavin looked at the barricade. The beam had split along the grain, the kind of flaw you can convince to be a hinge if you promise to hurt with respect. "On your call," he said.
"Then on mine," Madison said. He limped into the water and put both palms to the broken timber. The cold went up his forearms like a rumor with teeth. He breathed out through it. His shoulders did work they'd done in other lives under other roofs. The beam didn't move. He said please and made it sound like physics. The beam considered. It gave a half-inch of apology.
"Again," Gavin said, sliding in to brace, the water biting his shins. He got his fingers under the lip of a pallet and found the spot where warp turned to leverage. "On three this time."
"Two," Madison said, and they both lifted.
The barricade peeled. A woman's face flashed in the gap, hair plastered, eyes too wide and too focused. She did not waste the gap. She shoved a boy through with hands that had already forgiven themselves for bruises. Riley caught the kid, made a face at him that wasn't soothing but was honest, and that did the job better. The second child slid under, coughing, and Margo scooped her up with the kind of gentleness you only learn in rooms where it often doesn't matter.
"Go," the mother said. "He'll follow. He—he's slow." She swallowed. "He doesn't like stairs."
A shape moved behind her. A man, older, one shoulder lower than the other, a long day welded to his spine. He put his hand on the beam like it was a friend he trusted not to leave. "You're making noise," he said, mild, and then smiled at the absurdity of advising people saving his family.
"Learning," Madison said, and shifted. His right knee sent a telegram to his hip—strike enters second day—and his hip replied with an ache that felt like a foreign language.
The man squeezed through, then the mother. Gavin let the pallet fall back the smallest amount that didn't invite regret. "Straight out," he told them quietly. "Stay close to the wall. If you see a truck, become a shadow and let it pass you like you aren't a story worth telling."
The mother nodded once, the quick bow of someone who'd bow to anyone if it bought her kids another hour. She started toward the outer mouth. The boy looked up at Riley with that complicated gratitude kids have when the world breaks and an adult decides to be a hinge instead of another breaking.
"Go," Riley said, softer than the word wanted to be.
They went. Madison watched the truck's taillights skim across the concrete above and took the beat he had calculated. "Now," he said, and they took their own exit like their feet had been planning it without telling their heads.
At the ramp's lip, the river cut breathed cool and said keep your mouth closed unless you want the city in your lungs.
On one side, a chain-link fence let the water talk to the air and the air complain about it. On the other, a shack that had once been a bait shop now did accounts in favors. A dock lamp dithered and stayed on.
The Ledger Man sat in a folding chair with a ledger for a lap and a pencil shaved to a toothpick. He wore a hunter's cap with the ear-flaps down, as if he refused to believe the season had changed without his permission. He watched them the way cashiers watch a rush: with patience that isn't kindness.
"You're late for the quiet crossing," he said, not looking up from his page.
"Tower burned," Margo said, as if it were a weather report.
He made a noise that wasn't surprise. "I heard a sermon in the wind," he said. "Didn't like the doctrine."
"We need the boat," Gavin said. The chosen silence sat down beside his words and folded its hands.
"Everyone needs the boat." The Ledger Man tapped the pencil. "Tonight, price is a truth I can sell later. Pays better than cash. Cash doesn't gossip."
Riley's shoulders went tight. "We don't have that kind of truth," she said, too quick.
"You have exactly that kind," he said mildly. "Look at you. Covered in the kind that leaves a taste." He squinted past them at the skyline and decided to be generous. "I'll take a thin slice. Something that lets me be right in front of the right person tomorrow."
"Not about the tower," Gavin said.
The Ledger Man measured him, then the others, then the space between them where people who've chosen to keep a thing unsaid make a kind of weather. "Fine," he said. "Different truth."
Riley looked at Margo, then at Gavin. "Give him the shepherd's before," she suggested. "The part nobody listened to because they wanted the fireworks."
Gavin rolled the thought around as if it might bite. "He started on mercy," he said at last, low. "Said he'd tried it and it never paid back. He said mercy is a credit card; it buys time you can't afford."
The Ledger Man's pencil paused. "That's a nasty sentence," he said, approving. "It'll spend in three neighborhoods."
"Boat," Madison said, voice fraying. His knee had begun to insist it belonged to someone less ambitious.
The Ledger Man flipped his ledger shut as if closing a law. "Dock two," he said. "Take Beetle. She leaks if you don't love her. There's a bucket to teach you how."
They moved. Beetle was green under the black, scuffed where other nights had scraped bad decisions off her paint. Margo untied with the muscle memory of someone who'd done this on better rivers under kinder skies. Riley climbed in first, the bucket by her feet, eyes on the water like it had insulted her.
Gavin kept his back to the tower. The silence they carried wasn't lighter for having been respected. It just fit in their hands better.
"Wind's wrong," the Ledger Man called, already opening his ledger again to tuck the new sentence where it would earn interest. "Row the wrong way first if you want to go right. That's true on land too."
"Thanks," Gavin said, and meant it more than he liked.
Row the wrong way first if you want to go right. Beetle proved the rule immediately, drifting stubbornly toward the piles until Margo corrected with a pull that turned her shoulders into a machine. Madison kept low in the bow, jaw set, one hand on the gunwale, the other on his knee as if he could relax the joint into cooperation with politeness.
Ash fell slow and ugly. On the water it made bullseyes that faded quick, like targets refusing to be complicit.
"Left of the pier," Margo said under her breath. "Counter the wind. Riley, bucket."
Riley threw, filled, tossed out, again. She looked good at it for someone who'd never want to be. "I hear voices," she said after a moment, not to be dramatic—just to keep the world described. "On the east bank."
Gavin followed her chin. A slouch of shadows clustered by a burnt-out party barge. The kind of men who don't need uniforms to be a militia. One had a bandage where an ear should be and a rifle slung careless like a declaration.
"Keep heads down," Madison said, which was one of those sentences that should be ridiculous and never is. He went lower. The boat rode a whicker of wave and Riley caught the spill on reflex, fast enough to make the bucket a clever animal.
The rifle cracked. Sound stepped on the river and slipped.
"Miss," Margo said, flat. The word bought a heartbeat.
Riley had a flare pistol in the med-bag for ugly nights. She didn't ask for a vote. She stood, braced, and sent a streak of red up into the ash-snow, a flower nobody could ignore. The flare sang and then hung, indecorous and demanding. Shadows flinched. The wind took the smoke the wrong way first and then, finding itself corrected, went right.
"That buys us three," Madison said. "Maybe four." He didn't say if they value not being seen more than seeing us.
The second shot came late and wild. Beetle's paint chewed a new scar. Riley swore like it was a sacrament and sat, hands steady, mouth set. "I'm done being nice," she said, and the bucket agreed by behaving like a good student.
The current made up its mind in their favor. The west bank softened out of shadow into the kind of shore that can pretend to be safety if you bully it. Margo timed the last strokes so Beetle kissed the tires with manners. Madison was up before the boat had the right to ask it of him, hauling her in, making fast.
They climbed out. Ash made their footprints brave for two seconds and then ate them, which felt like an argument about legacy none of them had time to have.
On the far bank, red faded. The men by the party barge decided the night had given them permission to sit down and nurse their grievances instead of inventing new ones.
Riley was still breathing like a metronome. She looked at Gavin. "When?" she asked. Not if. Not anymore.
"When it's not a match," he said. "When telling it doesn't set five new rooms on fire."
Margo watched his face and saw the place where the words wanted out and the place where he parented them back into bed. "You'll have to pick someone," she said gently. "First listener. Otherwise it curdles."
Gavin nodded. He thought of the Ledger Man collecting sentences like a hobby, of the mother in the ramp, of the boy who'd believed Riley without needing candy to go with it. He thought of the Shepherd's last shape in the fire and the way a crowd can love a lie if it pays in certainty.
"Not him," he said, meaning any man who keeps ledgers for a living. "Not a crowd. Someone who won't spend it."
"Who?" Madison asked. The knee finally gave him an opinion that showed in his face. He didn't hide it. He leaned on the rail and let the night notice.
Gavin's eyes went across the river to the smear of the tower's smoke, then down to Riley, who was busy coiling Beetle's rope as if neatness itself could be a shelter. "Her," he said. "When we make a room that won't echo."
Riley didn't look up. "I can wait," she said. "But I won't let you keep it so long it turns into something it's not."
"Good," he said.
They stepped off the dock together. The silence walked with them, not lighter, not heavier—just theirs. Behind them Beetle bumped the tire once, like a friend asking if they needed one more thing before she went home.