Page 14 of Fated to the Fang

I remember the three lines cut fresh into the brick, and how I have kept her alive so far. Keeping her this way is to keep her breathing.

The dark is where they hunt now. They have taken my one defense and made it the road to her.

Watches won't protect this. Walls neither. I have stood at arm's length from her because the alternative is letting myself want a future with her in Crimson. I believed distance would stop the bond. Protection for her. Without fate intercepting. But they're using the distance against me. I can't keep her safe from out here anymore.

11

AVERY

"Drainage?" The market hand keeps hosing fish scraps. "Nothing runs under here. Floor's been dry since the cannery shut."

"That's what the schedule says too." I hold up the photocopy. "Except it puts a service hatch right about where you're standing."

He waves the hose off to one side. Set in the concrete is a steel plate with a recessed ring, half under a pallet of empty crates.

"Huh. Never clocked that."

"Mind if I look? Old runoff could be pushing into my grid. Matters for the seals."

"Your funeral, Doc. Pallet's heavy."

It isn't, though—it slides too easily, and the drag marks under it are fresh against the grime. The padlock on the hasp hangs open, its shackle oiled, newer than anything around it. Nobody greases a lock on a line that everyone calls dead.

I go down. The stretch is honest, a sump channel ankle-deep in old water. Dry boot prints track through the wet, both directions, more than one set. A ledge has been wiped clean by something carried past it. I stop telling myself this is fine.

The channel curves and opens into a room that was never on any sheet. It's braced and dry, cannery rails still bolted to the ceiling. Hooks hang from the rails, and several aren't rusted where rope and webbing have lately scraped them bright. My light swings down, and my stomach drops. A crate. Half-open. Full of seal tags.

I lift a handful. Flipper bands, collar tags, dozens, most cut clean from their straps. Forty of this exact housing are in my current north headland data set from the spring deployment.

"You took the seals," I say to the empty room, because saying it makes it reality. "Stripped the tags. Dumped them where the tide never reaches."

Not predation. Not disease. Collection.

On a plank shelf, weighted under a stone, a laminated map. I turn it over and I'm looking at my own grid, my own routes, the aggregation sites I logged in confidence. The annotations aren't mine. A cramped hand, three of my sites circled, a column of tally marks beside each transect. They haven't been guessing where I'll be. They've got the map.

A heap of fabric is behind that. Torn waterproof jackets, two tourist ponchos off a gift-shop rack. One collar still carries a stitched tag—Saltline Charters, an outfit that runs the cove tours. Slashed, not weathered. No bodies.

Behind the jackets, half tucked under a crate rail, is a laminated staff badge with the clip snapped off. The photo is water-blurred, but the name still reads clearly. Tracy Moss.

I know the name. Nora said it two days ago when I asked why she was covering tables alone. Seasonal help. Saltline weekends. Café mornings. Gone long enough for Nora to worry, not long enough for anyone with a form to call her missing.

I photograph the badge where it lies before I touch it. The seals were proof of the theft. The jackets were proof of people. This is worse. This is a name.

A page is pinned above, damp and curling. I read it out loud to keep my hands steady. "Tags. Jackets. Film. Mouths." Numbers beside each. An inventory. Whatever works down here keeps numbers like me.

I photograph it all. Then I dig until I find a collar tag cracked through its housing and thumb the serial against my field log. CH-N-022. A juvenile female. Last live ping eleven days back. I close my fist on it and zip it into my chest pocket.

Suddenly, I hear voices, deep in the far passage, past the rails. Low, calm.

"—the count's short."

"Then we go again. The market's quiet on Sundays."

"And the woman?"

"Observed. Not touched. That order is the same."

Under the words, a wet dragging sound that doesn't match feet.