Part 1
Kae said no. Not without Vess.
Dak stood in the shallows beside the pitch-dark hull, water to his shins, and waited the way fishermen wait — body loose, eyes hard.
“Three went up the ridge path.” He kept his voice flat. “Ren got within forty meters. Bureau grey at every approach — they’ve pulled security off the harbor road and ringed the building.”
“Then find another route.”
“There is no other route.”
The cove smelled of wet basalt and rope tar. Behind them and above, a lantern beam swept the upper terrace in slow arcs — not searching the cove yet, but mapping the slope. The light touched the volcanic lip that hid them and moved on.
“Corren’s requisitioned a launch from the eastern settlement.” Dak’s hand found the gunwale beside hers. “It reaches him in the afternoon. After that, Vess is at sea and the only place he stops is Hursh.”
She thought of Corren’s voice in the office — the careful, warm way he’d laid out what happened to people who complicated Bureau timelines. He hadn’t used the word capital. He hadn’t needed to. The shape of it had been in every pause.
Maret crouched at the stern, palms flat on the hull’s ribs, reading something through the wood. Ren sat amidships, breathing hard from the ridge, a dark scrape across her jaw.
“The tide turns in an hour,” Dak said. “We miss this window, we sit here until the next one. Every sweep gets closer.”
The lantern swept again. Closer.
Kae felt the basalt vibration through her boots — the sustained low note that no longer came and went but simply stayed, the island humming its own dissolution into her soles.
“We have until early afternoon to get him out of that building,” she said. “So tell me what we haven’t tried.”
Her hands did not leave the gunwale. She did not step into the boat.