Chapter 727 | The Light Above Bay Two

Chapter 727: 727 | The Light Above Bay Two

She reached the rusted iron ladder on the south edge of the roof and stopped, one boot hooked over the top rung, her gaze dragging back toward the concrete blockhouse across the street.

"Wait," she said.

I paused two steps behind her with my hands already in the pockets of my utility jacket to keep the drizzle off my knuckles.

"We’re not waiting for a shift change, Lami. I have homeroom with a woman who uses a stopwatch like a medieval torture device, and if I show up late again she’s going to make me carry Caden up a hill."

"No, look at the bay." She pointed one fingerless glove at the loading dock. "The light above Bay Two just came on."

I went back to the parapet and crouched behind the wet coping stones, weight on the balls of my nephew boots, and flipped Residue Sight on again.

For a second my optic nerves gave a nasty throb behind my temples. I’d been cranking the sight to full and killing it again since the bridge, cycling the effect more times in thirty minutes than I probably should have in a week.

The grey morning washed out into high-contrast monochrome, edges sharpening into something closer to an X-ray than natural vision. The front of Pacific Coast Cold Storage lit up like a butcher’s block under a blacklight.

Every surface threw spectral signature back at me in overlapping layers of color nobody without a detection-class Aspect should have been able to see. Walls, pavement, steel frames, rubber bumpers. All of it glowing.

The loading dock looked worse than I’d expected.

The concrete apron in front of all four roll-up doors was coated in a crust of old Branded residue that went back so far the bottom layers had decayed to the color of dried rust, the kind of staining you get when biological material sits long enough to petrify into the substrate.

It was the same spectral pattern I’d seen on the clinic card under the bus-shelter lamp on Sunday night, the one Carmen had been carrying when she came through my window asking for help she didn’t want to explain.

Only instead of being trapped in three inches of cheap pulp, it was smeared across forty feet of reinforced loading dock in broad, overlapping streaks that had no business being there unless someone was running something steady.

It was ground into the rubber bumpers where trucks backed in. It was caked along the steel guide tracks of the bay doors, where pallets had banged the frames through months of deliveries.

Maybe longer.

That kind of buildup meant a steady operation instead of the odd drop-off, the kind of volume that required infrastructure and a buyer list big enough to justify keeping the lights on. And the spread of colors told me it didn’t all come from one source.

"What are you doing?" Lamia dropped down next to me so close that the wet rubber of her modified diving suit squeaked against my knee.

"Looking," I said. The Veil’s modulator scraped the word out in that gravelly baritone while I tracked the layers across the street. "Hold still for thirty seconds."

Under the faded browns and rust from spring and summer were dozens of newer streaks, where leaking boxes or badly sealed bags had sweated their signatures through the cardboard onto the blue pallets. I saw dull olive green from a reptile-class kid, a jagged splash of electric cyan that had to be an elemental mutation, and milky smears of bone-white that matched the spur sticking out of Carmen’s apartment door on Moss Street. This dock hadn’t just taken a Friday delivery from Kask. It had been taking deliveries from half the clinics and back-alley buyers in the county for months, enough shed juvenile biology to build a small army of twelve-foot horrors, if whoever ran the clean room inside knew how to stitch the pieces together.

Below us, the steel door of Bay Two rattled up on its chain hoist and stopped about four feet off the concrete.

A second van backed up to the bumpers, a beat-up Chevy Express with a commercial plumbing magnet slapped crooked on the side panel. Its reverse alarm never beeped. Somebody had snipped the speaker wire. The rear doors swung open from inside, and a guy in a grey hoodie shoved a single metal medical cooler across the tailboard just as the woman in the powder-blue smock came out of the dark with her clipboard.

She didn’t open the cooler this time. She clicked her pen, signed the top sheet of the driver’s manifest, tore off the yellow carbon, and dragged the aluminum box back across the concrete by its side handles until her heels cleared the threshold. The bay door slammed down. The lock engaged with a heavy metal thud, and the Chevy pulled out onto the wet cobblestones heading east toward the rail yards instead of the bridge.

I blinked Residue Sight off before the headache could settle in and let the world drop back into ordinary California November.

When I turned my head, Lamia wasn’t watching the van.

She was crouched on the parapet with her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her shins so tight the faux-leather corset belt at her waist creaked. The cutout panels on the hips of her DIY wetsuit gaped open to the cold rain and showed the smooth iridescent scales running down the outside of her thighs, emerald and black, each one catching the grey harbor light like polished oil.

Her asymmetrical black bob was plastered to her cheek on the long side. The cheap aviator goggles sat crooked on her forehead and left her face bare to the weather, and there was no performance left on it. The breathy femme fatale pout she rehearsed in her bathroom mirror was gone. So was the panicked flail she did whenever she tripped an alarm on the Strand.

She was a girl from Halverson Avenue staring at a two-story concrete freezer full of kids’ teeth, deciding in real time what kind of person she was going to be about it.

"That wasn’t Kask’s truck," she said. Her voice had gone flat and quiet, and there wasn’t a trace of the lisp in it.