A hook clanged the bus's bumper and bit. Two men in dark jackets hauled a nylon line through a metal ring, hands moving like they'd practiced on ships instead of streets. Another ducked under the awning with a coil over his shoulder and fed it forward in loops that learned to behave. Gravel ground under boots and the river breathed cold through the slit of cover.
"Winch online," a woman said—short hair under a helmet, voice clipped clean. She slapped the side of a box truck backed into the pier throat and the truck's drum began to spin, line walking itself tight. "On my count—steady pull. Hold the roof."
The awning shivered under pressure like it wanted to play drumhead. The big light to the south brightened again, then thinned, patient.
"Stay down," the man at the door repeated for the kids, not loud, right in the ear of the situation. "Hands on backpacks. You move when I tell you." His jacket didn't have letters on it, just a dark patch that meant authority without bothering with a word.
The line took up. The bus squealed as the bumper remembered it had screws. The driver held the wheel straight and kept his foot ready without being told. Hawke leaned across the aisle and shouldered a seat frame to put mass forward where mass belonged. Peter did the same on the opposite side. Flash wedged himself by the rear wheel hump and locked his legs so he was part of the chassis.
"Pull," the woman said.
The truck's drum hummed and the bus slid deeper under the awning and into the rectangle of shadow beyond. The light outside washed the edge of the roof and left a blister the size of a hand. Someone swore in a different language and thumbed a fire blanket up to the awning lip to keep the next lick honest.
"Again."
The line hauled. The bus crawled. The kids stayed small and round-eyed between vinyl. The floor carried the vibration into shins and knees and made everyone the same shape for a second: waiting.
"Hold," the woman said, palm up.
The winch settled, engine ticking. A second team in helmets jogged past with a folded black tarp that unfolded into something clever—ribbed aluminum poles and matte fabric that turned into a low tunnel when they snapped it onto the awning's inner edge and the warehouse door beyond. The tunnel made shadow between worlds. A man with a roll of dull tape sealed the tunnel's seam to the bus roof with fast strips that worked because someone had made them to.
"Your evac lane," the door man told the driver. "We'll feed them through in columns, ten at a time. Nobody stops under the gap. If you need a bathroom break you can file a complaint when the sky is done auditioning."
"Copy," the driver said, and meant it.
The woman in the helmet glanced at Hawke's hand. "You're bleeding through that."
"It's fine," Hawke said.
"Define fine."
"Later."
She didn't waste more syllables. "You three—" she flicked her chin at Hawke, Peter, Flash "—you're column captains. You take a rope, you get ten each, you do not break contact. We've got med and water in Bay Three. Keep heads down through the tunnel. We're hot out there."
"Hot is a word," Peter said, and swallowed air around it.
The man at the door yanked a duffel open and pulled out three lengths of rope knotted every foot like a giant's counting string. "Hold between knots. If anyone lets go, you stomp their hand and put it back." He passed them out without ceremony. "You—burned hand—use the other. No hero grips."
Hawke looped rope around his left wrist and took the lead position. The bead inside moved once and came still; not the same notch as before, a new point that matched the shape of this room.
"Column one," the woman said, snapping her fingers toward the front most seats. "Let's make a snake."
Kids uncurled. A small boy with a dinosaur on his shirt stood and kept his hand on the seat because his legs shook. Hawke brought the rope to him and put it between his fingers, then set those fingers around a knot. "This one," he said. "Hold like the bus is a boat."
"Okay," the boy said, eyes on the rope like it was the only honest thing in the room.
Peter moved down the aisle, voice low and efficient. "Hands on the rope, not on your phones. If you drop your phone I won't cry. You might. We can be different people."
Flash talked less, more with palms and chin tilts, counterfeit swagger burned off. "You—here. You—here. Breathe in, breathe out. Yes, you can."
The tunnel team slapped the last tape down. "Go."
Hawke stepped into the tunnel first and the air changed—cooler and hard with river; a skin of shadow on his arms like paint. The tarp low overhead made sound behave. Outside noise became a wet rumor. The wrong light behind them stayed an idea. Ahead, the warehouse smelled of paper and metal and wet boots.
"Eyes down," the door man said along the line. "Heads to belt height. Move with the person in front of you."
Ten kids passed like electric through Hawke's rope, hands fixed on knots, feet finding the pattern of bodies in narrow space. A small backpack brushed his hip; another bumped his shin; every contact counted. He felt the rope's tug and kept its tension like a tide.
The tunnel kinked where it met the warehouse door. Tape creaked. Hawke put a hand to the frame to keep the angle from stealing someone's balance. The boy with the dinosaur looked up in reflex—waterlight above, metal ribs. Hawke touched the rope beside his hand with his knuckle. "There," he said, and the boy nodded and came back to the knot.
They poured into a bay as organized as chaos could be—pallets into walls, yellow cones marking lanes, a table stolen from an office now wearing water and bandages. Vests moved in the half-dark like helpful ghosts. A woman with a scarf pinned with a safety pin put little bottles in little hands and said "sip, not chug," and kids obeyed because the scarf meant mom even if it lived on a stranger.
"Bay Three," a man pointed. "Go around that forklift, left, keep going until someone smarter than me stops you. Column two—go!"
Hawke passed his rope to a vest with a nod and turned to re-enter the tunnel for the next column. A shriek like sheet metal splitting arrived from the south and the tarp trembled. The woman with the helmet shouted "Hold!" and put her hand on the awning pole. Dust lifted from somewhere they couldn't tackle. Ground vibrated tired.
Peter came out next with his snake of ten. His mouth ran orders his body had memorized this last hour: "Hands—heads—turn—eyes on the rope—good." The rope shivered too; he kept it true. He looked over Hawke's shoulder as he went by, the quick check they had both learned: here, here, still here.
Flash followed with his set, the last row of the bus on a string. He kept his face at the level of the scared so they would see calm in profile instead of terror in full. A girl with wet hair tripped; he took the weight without making it an event and moved her hand to the next knot.
"Break there," the woman said once the bus had emptied to seats and debris and the driver and the three of them. "You four—inside, now. We need the lane."
"What about the bus?" the driver asked, as if the idea of leaving his machine untended hurt a small part of him.
"We'll pull it through after we move the bodies," the door man said. "No offense."
"None taken."
They hustled into the warehouse. The tunnel team pulled the tarp back into the shadow to make the mouth smaller, tape tearing with that animal sound. Someone dragged a roll-away rack across the opening as a temporary rib. A pair of hands in gloves shoved a steel door along a ceiling track, half shut, then left it resting like a drawn eyelid in case someone needed a sprint line.
"Bay Three," the woman repeated, pointing down a long corridor of pallets. "Triage. After that you're on resupply or watch for a breach. Do not freelance. If you're in the way, I'll move you like furniture."
"Copy," Peter said, because words sometimes lined up a spine.
They turned through where arrow tape told the world how it should spin and entered Bay Three—a larger rectangle with its own dock door rolled down and a cluster of bodies on mats laid end to end. The room had a low bruise of noise: radios hissing shorthand, water doing that drum-on-cardboard thing, a low howl from the south that arrived on delay. A medic with a knit cap raised a hand at them without looking up from the cut he was taping on a forearm that looked like it had been invented to bleed.
"Put the ropes there," he said, nodding at a crate. "If you're bleeding, get in line. If you're not bleeding, pick a thing to carry when I tell you to carry it. If anybody feels faint, sit down before gravity introduces itself."
"I got burn," Hawke said.
"Join the letter B," the medic said. "B is for burn. B is for back of the line. That bandage looks fresh and not smoking. You'll live longer than the shouting."
Peter's hand shot up on instinct, like a student. "He's also—um—effective."
"Good," the medic said. "Be effective at moving water. Cases are over there, stairs up to mezz—no, you—" he cut his glare to Flash, who'd been halfway to the stack already "—you get the heavy cases. You look like regrets with legs. Make yourself useful."
Flash grinned without shine and shouldered a stack of bottles two at a time. Peter took a lighter crate and fell into pace. Hawke hit the burn line because the rope mattered less than a hand that could still close. The line crawled. A girl with a scraped cheek got a butterfly bandage and a sticker on her shoulder she would deny later. A boy with a split knuckle insisted it didn't hurt until the alcohol introduced itself. An older kid with a football shirt hid his eyes and then stopped hiding them. The medic patched, taped, told a joke to one and a lie to another and kept a count in his head he didn't share.
When Hawke reached the front, the medic peeled the wet wrap back and made a face at the hand, not at Hawke. "You have a hobby?"
"I had one," Hawke said.
"Stop putting it in beams." The medic rinsed, blotted, salved, wrapped in something better that came in a foil pack. His hands were fast. "Use it, but don't use it stupid. Can you count to ten?"
"Yes."
"Start at nine if you have to. Go move things."
Hawke moved.
A man in a vest handed him a dolly and pointed at a stack of MRE boxes tall as his shoulder. "Kitchen-in-a-bag. Get them to Bay Four. Clear route is back through the tunnel, then left, then under the stairs. Don't look south."
"People always say that," Peter said from behind, setting bottles on a folding table. "Then I look south."
"Don't be that guy," the man said, and was already telling someone else to stop stacking paper towels too high.
Hawke tipped the dolly, found the balance of the load, and walked. The wheels wrote a quick story across concrete and rubber mats. He passed the tunnel mouth. Tape fluttered there, smaller now, ribs settled. A high whine scraped air and then cut off, replaced by the heavier thump of rotors peeling low. Someone on a radio said "copy" and someone else said "no joy" and the warehouse made it all one sentence.
Bay Four was a long rectangle with an office in a glass box that someone had papered from the inside with notices and a cartoon of a dog wearing a helmet. A woman in a high-vis vest waved him into an aisle where boxes could become lunches. "There," she said. "Thank you. Back the dolly into that corner. Take this—" she shoved a red crate into his hands "—back to Three. Bandages and sugar water. Now."
He went back through, aware of the rhythm in his calves and the mechanics of moving weight in small spaces. The bead inside slid once, a soft tick, and nothing else. He passed Flash on the way; Flash's shirt hung from him like it had accepted he had shoulders. Flash leaned into a load and didn't say a joke and didn't need to.
When Hawke reached the tunnel again, the woman in the helmet stepped in front of him and put two fingers to his chest—no apology, simple redirect. "Hold," she said. "Check your corners."
He did, because she'd lived in rooms like this longer than he had. He caught a shape sitting just inside the tape line, a folded label on the floor—a little square lens on legs, the size of two thumbs. Not a scout like the roof pods, not smart enough for a stalk. A crumb camera. It pulsed a faint wrong glow like a heartbeat that didn't belong to it.
Hawke set the crate down and put the heel of his sneaker on the lens. He waited for the legs to kick so he'd know it had opinions. They did. He pressed until they had no more. He scraped it into a dustpan that had been a dustpan a minute ago and would be a weapons bin in a minute. The woman nodded once.
"Breaches?" he asked.
"Two roof cuts on Bay One. We're sealing," she said. "Three ground contacts at the west door. They don't like doors. They like edges. We're taking their edges away."
"Good plan," Peter said from behind, breath a little high as he shouldered a stack of plastic cups. "Edges have been terrible tonight."
The radio on the woman's shoulder crackled. A voice squeezed through static and city. "Team, heads—beam movement south to east—repeat, the throat is rotating. You've got ninety seconds before sweep."
She looked at the ceiling and did a math her mouth didn't show. "Tunnel team—pack it. Pull the bus," she snapped. "We're closing the mouth."
The winch crew moved like a thought. Tape ripped with conviction. Hands found poles. The tunnel folded itself in one long shrug and became a bundle. The line snapped back up on the drum with a dry chatter. The bus jerked. "Neutral," the woman shouted toward the shadows, and the driver popped the lever and let the machine go wherever rope and men chose.
"Hands on," the door man barked. "Guide the nose."
Hawke and Flash hit the front corners, palms on metal, eyes on the narrow throat. They walked the bus backward under the awning and into the warehouse, tires whining, rim screaming its last. The nose cleared the door by a hand, then two hands, then it existed inside instead of half-in, half-out. The woman chop-signaled. The steel door on the ceiling track rolled shut with a sound like a vault deciding who it loved.
Light still came through the cracks around the frame—wrong, white, present. Pressure crawled under the door like a cat trying to find a gap. The river's breath paused, then resumed.
"Down," the radio said. Then louder: "Down, now."
Everyone went to knees without needing a model. The beam spoke on the other side of the door—no sound at first, then that peeled-tape rip, then heat at the floor, then the rattle in the bolts. Dust lifted in a sheet that turned the air into flour. The roll-up shivered top to bottom and held because bolts still had pride. A line of light drew a long, patient stripe across the lower seam and left the rubber gasket hissing.
Hawke's burned hand stung sudden and sharp; the bandage drank heat and got tight. He pressed his palm to the concrete and let the floor eat some of the burn. Flash's arm was braced along a seat frame behind him, matted hair plastered to his forehead; he was talking with his mouth closed, whispering math at himself. Peter had his face near the floor and one hand on the shoe of the kid nearest him because making contact is a plan when plans thin out.
The beam passed. The pressure eased, then swung away like something considering a second pass and thinking better of the angle. The radio breathed at them for a moment like a person who had run stairs.
"Clear for now," it said. "Teams, status."
"Bay One sealing," someone answered. "Bay Two intact. Bay Three triaging and filing complaints. Bus is in. Mouth shut."
"Copy. Helos are pulling east to pull heat. We've got a window. Move bodies north. Pier evac continues, but expect gaps. If the throat cycles back you will feel it in your teeth before I can say so."
Hawke stood. The bead slid once; he ignored it. The woman in the helmet rolled a shoulder like a boxer between bells. "You—" she pointed at Hawke, Peter, Flash "—you're on the next rope. We're sending a column to the boats. When I say move, you stay low and you do not look at water unless you see a person in it."
"Understood," Hawke said.
"Yeah," Flash said, and swallowed.
Peter looked at Hawke's hand as if to check it hadn't turned into something else while they were busy. "You sure?"
"No," Hawke said. "But we're going."
They grabbed a fresh rope. Ten new hands found ten new knots. The door rolled a foot, then two, then waited for intention. River wind nosed inside and found faces and tried to read them.
"Move," the woman said.
They moved. The door made a mouth and the rope became a spine and Hawke took the first step into the slit. The pier was a throat again—crane shadow, men in vests, the sliver of a boat bumping foam against bumper tires. Above the buildings the seam wrote a new angle across a different patch of sky, patient, unfriendly, choosing.
Half the column cleared the door.
The winch drum howled—jammed with a hopeless clatter—the line went slack, and the door jerked in its track an inch as if something on the outside had just taken an interest in handles.