The glow hides, the hum doesn't. That's when the suits arrive.
"Heads up," Mia says. "Board liaison inbound."
Great.
Inspector Kade walks like rain dodges him. Coat too nice, shoes too dry for a pier. Auditor eyes: see everything, show nothing.
"Good evening," he says like it is. "Redd. Dilhevia. Voss." His glance tags crate, men, water, back to us.
"Kade," Juno says. No salute. We're not military. Sometimes it feels close.
He peers between boards. The glow plays shy.
"What happened?"
"Unmarked crew moving a crate of city brace gear off Pier Four," Juno says. "Cameras were dead. We intercepted. There's…something under the pier."
"Something," Kade echoes.
"That," I say, because the hum rolls through again and lying feels stupid.
It flashes—just a second. A slick of heat-mirage light under the slats. Enough to make a liar honest.
Kade's mouth doesn't move. "Mmm."
He palms the crate like feeling temperature through gloves. "Names?" he asks without looking up.
We give them. He already knows.
"Bag it," he tells the cops. "Chain to my office."
"That's our seizure," Juno says.
"It's the Board's," Kade says. "Which is to say: mine. You'll get the report."
We won't. Or we'll get rectangles.
Juno picks her battles. I pick the wrong ones.
"Inspector," I ask, "who filed the heavy permit for Pier Four?"
"No such permit exists," he says, too fast.
"Then what is that?" I point at nothing, because it's gone again.
He studies my face. My blade. "Dilhevia," he says lightly, "your brother still on your mind?"
He throws it like a dart. It hits. I keep my face plain. "Always."
"Good work tonight," he tells Juno, which is not an answer. He turns, takes our evidence with him, and walks dry into the rain.
Mia swears soft in Spanish. The harbor starts to sound like a harbor again—wind, rope creak, gulls, people muttering. The men in slickers hum a tune you only hear in your teeth.
We clear the pier. We write the report while it's hot. Body cams off. Paperwork on. The masked caster rants about words we "don't even know." He looks at the water like it's either home or a threat. Hard to tell.
Our van stinks of coffee. Metal bench. Fluorescent headache. Lark nests on a charging perch like a dead gull.
"Smile," I tell Mia. "We saved a crate of bolts."
"We saved a crime scene from ourselves," she says, rubbing grease into her cheek by accident.
"We saved people who'd be in the water if the pier lets go," Juno says, booting a locker shut. "And we did it clean. No stitches."
I don't mention the calf. It won't need them.
Mia's screen pings. She frowns. "Weird."
"What?" Juno asks.
"Someone just dropped footage into my buffer."
She swivels her screen. Grainy body-cam—only not ours. Angle's wrong. Low, end-of-pier level, like a camera at plank height. It shows my hand on the rail, the water's sheen, clear as day.
Audio carries three low notes, hummed under breath. The same three I felt in my teeth.
Mia digs file details. There aren't any. Just a name:
LOOK WHERE THE WOOD HUMS.
No sender. No metadata. The line repeats beneath it, smaller, like a whisper.
Not ours.
Pressure blooms behind my eyes, a storm a day out.
"You good?" Juno asks.
"Yeah," I lie.
I thumb my blade's edge. Clean enough to rack. I don't.
Outside, a gull tries to eat a cigarette butt. Dockworkers shout about overtime. Mia rewinds the clip. The camera angle is wrong twice; once it's level with the deck, later it's five inches higher like the pier took a breath.
"It isn't a city install," Mia says. "If someone seeded cameras on the pier, there should be a device registry hit. There's nothing."
"Freelancers?" I say.
"Freelancers don't get invisible serials," Mia says. "Kade gets them."
Juno rolls her shoulders. "We don't pick a fight with Kade."
"Not a fight," I say. "Questions."
Juno eyes me. "You're going to pick a fight with Kade."
Outside, harbor cops load the slickers into a van. Mr. Shades hums those three notes again. The tune matches the deck's low throb from earlier.
"Ask him," Juno says, chin toward the cuffs.
I step out. Rain needles. Shades smiles with small square teeth.
"Who sent you?" I ask again.
He shrugs as far as zip-ties allow. "You'll figure it out. Maybe."
"You know what's under the pier."
He looks at the water. "You don't even know the words," he says, amused. "You think it's a lock. Or a brace. You hear a hum and think machine. Cute."
"What is it?"
His smile gets sharp. "Hungry," he says.
"Okay," I tell him. "Enjoy central booking."
Back in the van, Mia scrubs through the clip frame by frame. The glow kisses the pylon wraps like heat across oil. When a wave hits, the shimmer collapses into hexes, then smooths again. Not rope. Not glass. Lattice.
I freeze on a frame and pinch zoom. There's wax residue on a dolly wheel in the background of the shot. Citrus-metal smell sticks in my memory.
"See that?" I ask.
"Yeah," Mia says. "Wax. Not shipping-grade. Lab can break it down—if Kade hadn't walked off with our crate."
"We still have the wheel," I say. I pop the van door and jog to the dolly. A smear like candle tears clings to the rim.
Back in, Mia peels a sample into a vial. "I'll run a quick nose," she says, slotting it into a reader. "If it's commercial, I can match the profile."
Juno folds her arms. "We're not supposed to lab things on our own."
"We're not supposed to let a pier eat civilians," I say.
Mia's reader chirps. "Citrus carrier, trace iron, resin binder. Cheap hardware-store blend, not industrial. Used to seal wood fast and dirty."
"Seal what?" Juno asks.
"Seams," Mia says. "Cracks. Things that want to leak."
The van feels smaller.
"Run the badge we peeled," Juno says, businesslike. "Whoever wore city plastic under a sticker had a real employer."
Mia taps. The system coughs back a skeleton record and a redacted job title. "Badge belongs to [[K. Perales]], City Works—Marine Maintenance. Record flagged 'inactive—payroll hold.' No reason listed."
"Payroll hold?" I say. "He quit or someone cut him loose."
"Or they're ghosts on paper," Mia says. "Kade-style."
"Stop," Juno says, not unkind. "We don't build conspiracies. We build cases."
Cases need evidence. Evidence just walked away in a dry coat.
I look at the message again.
LOOK WHERE THE WOOD HUMS.
"Lark," I say. "Infra on the pier. Slow sweep. Start at the pylon wraps."
Mia whistles. "You trying to get my drone chewed?"
"Slow and high," I say. "If it's a machine, we see heat. If it's…not, we see…something."
"Words for what you're standing on," Juno mutters.
"Ken doesn't care about names," I say. "It cares about touch."
She watches me a beat, then nods. "Do it."
Outside, Lark lifts. Its lenses click, switching bands. On our screen, the pier blooms in false color—hot engines, cold water, human bodies as softened heat. Pylons read as cool wood—until the wraps. The lattice flares faintly, not heat exactly. Like static if static had a color.
Mia zooms. The lattice isn't wrapped around the pylons; it grows out of them in thin struts, cross-bracing at irrational angles, like a spider learned geometry and got bored.
"Not city," Juno says.
"Not industrial," Mia says.
"Hungry," I say.
The lattice brightens one tick when Lark drifts closer. My molars hum.
"Back it off," Juno says.
Mia does. The lattice dims.
Somewhere behind us, a gull laughs at a joke it doesn't understand.
My comms hiss. A text pops: no sender, no route.
LOOK WHERE THE WOOD HUMS.
This time there's a dot map attached. Three blue points blink along Pier Four. One sits dead under where I leaned out.
Mia isolates the coordinates. "No registry cameras there," she says. "No power drops, no mesh nodes."
"Then who's sending it?" Juno asks.
I look at the pier.
"Maybe the wrong question," I say. "Maybe it's who's listening."
The map pings a fourth blue point—inside our van.