Vesper Street was a row of storage units behind a shuttered freight depot, and unit forty-one was at the end, and the brass key his mother had carried for thirty-one years turned in the lock like it had been oiled yesterday.
Caleb went in alone. He had told the team he was running down a lead on the Lagos piece, which was true enough that it wasn't quite a lie.
He had come at the gray hour before morning, when even a watched man could move unwatched, and now he stood in the dark of a unit that had been paid for and never entered since before he was born.
He found the light. A single bulb, warm and old.
The unit was not full. That was the first thing that landed wrong, because he had braced for a hoard, for a wall of the work's machinery. Instead there was one thing in the middle of the concrete floor.
A crate, wood, plain, the size of a coffin stood on its end, and on the front of it, in his father's blocky engineer's hand, a single word in faded marker.
*FIRST.*
