Razor Line

The city at two in the morning has a way of pretending it’s asleep. Streetlights haze the fog in halos; the sky is a bruise above a canyon of concrete and glass. Elias Kade rode through that bruise with the steadiness of habit — knees pinched, shoulders coiled for the small, precise violence of his work. He kept his bike lean, low in the lane, tucked under the radar of tower cams and traffic sniffers. Deliveries like the one tonight were choreography: a route rehearsed in the dark, a case that would not be opened for anyone but the man who had the code. No conversation, no signature. Payment in cold credits. Leave and vanish.

He had done this long enough to make rituals of avoidance. He charted his breath against traffic lights, watched the mirrors for the tell of another bike taking an extra long glance, read the way reflections moved on glass. A tuck of muscle, a scar along his left forearm that hummed when rain hit it at the right angle — a souvenir from a job that had closed with teeth and silence. That scar kept his hands steady when the city tried to move him into danger he didn’t ask for.

The drop was under a rail bridge behind an automated textile mill, where the overhead lights blinked and the cameras had been reported as “offline” for routine maintenance. Elias killed his engine a hundred feet out and drifted the bike into shadow. He carried the case in both hands, one hand steady on the strap, the other balancing the weight like a man carrying something fragile that also wanted to bite. The case itself was nondescript — anodized black, corners to absorb impact — the kind of object that belonged in a courier’s hands because it didn’t ask questions.

A figure waited under the bridge, half-hidden by a stack of wooden pallets and smoke from a discarded heater. The man wore a hood and a face-covering, a pale voice that had been run through a cheap modulator when he spoke a code phrase. Elias slid the case to him, watched for a confirmation gesture, for the way men touched the thing they’d been hired to keep. It should have been a five-second exchange and then a walk away. He had counted on that five seconds more than on any payment. It gave him time to be two places at once — to be present and also two moves ahead.

The first gunshot clipped the edge of the bridge like a bad knock on a door. It was wrong in a way that trained ears read immediately: a burst ordered and empty of hesitation. Men moved out of shadow in a line, not one of them a civilian. Someone from the pallets called a name, the modulator gone from the dead man’s throat. Two things happened at once: the hood fell back, revealing the client’s face for a fraction of a heartbeat; and another team of figures — faces covered in matte black — came running from the far end of the underpass, weapons raised.