Night at the port had the particular honesty of places that knew how to hide. Rain peeled off the faces of rusted cranes and stitched the dock lights into long, trembling blades. Jaxon Hale hugged the cold corrugation of a container roof and watched men move like they had script and no conscience. He had learned long ago to read people by the weight of their steps and the way they kept their heads down; tonight the steps matched the kind of trade that traded futures instead of steel.
Kade's voice came soft over the feed, threaded with too much caffeine and amusement. 'North gate clear. Eyes sweep on a thirty. Two boots on perimeter, one dog on a slack lead. Manifest lines up. You still seeing H-14?'
Jaxon didn't bother to answer right away. He felt the rain on his collarbone and the familiar hollow behind his sternum where the memory of a failed operation had lodged like a splinter. That memory was a compass that had never pointed north for him; it kept turning to injury, to children he could not save, to the cheap calculus of choices made by others. All he had left were metrics he trusted: muscle memory, timing, and the cut of the wind across the stack.
He dropped off the ridge with the sound of wet metal and practiced silence. The shipping yard spread beneath him as a grid of low lights, cranes like slow, indifferent predators. Down on the ground two men in neutral jackets argued over a crate number, cigarettes stubbing brief daylight against the dark. Kade's fingers worked in another city, a ghost on a keyboard, nudging blind spots open and closing others. 'You get to the manifest crate, pull the left panel. Hardware will be recessed behind the cross-bracing. No prints, no contact flow. I burn traces on my end and we cut before their PT name hits the mesh.'
Jaxon moved with the economy of someone who had spent nights slipping past alarms that expected brutality and found finesse. He used the shadows between stacked containers like a surgeon used clamps. Each step had a purpose. The air smelled of diesel and salt, and for a moment the world narrowed to the pad of his boots and the soft pulse in his earpiece. The plan was simple on paper: intercept a black-market transfer, extract a compact relay node, and vanish back into the anonymous hours. That simplicity had a way of lying.
At the container row, he heard the soft mechanical whine of a patrol drone on repeater duty and felt Kade's tiny laugh at the end of a sentence. 'You love this, don't you?' the hacker said. 'You hate the paperwork but you love the storm.' Jaxon let the ghost of a smile go unused. Storms clarified things, he thought. They stripped varnish off motives. He had no appetite for being seen when the lights blinked; there were too many people who would rather tie a scapegoat to a noisy wire than straighten their own collars.