Tidefall

Rin Valen tastes salt the way other people taste coffee: sharp, necessary, threaded into everything she does. The smell is louder down here, in the lower decks where the neon fog never burns off and the water finds its way through every seam like a memory. She hangs upside down from an iron girder two stories below the broken promenade, exo-suit thrusters whispering against the kelp-worn concrete, and the world is a cathedral of dripping light and distant engine coughs. Mako nestles in the crook of her collar, a fish-shaped drone wrapped in scuffed alloy and cracked polymer that chirps in the pitch of a gull. When it clicks, she knows it’s noticed something. When it sings, it has a plan.

The assignment tonight is small: a sealed case snagged under the atrium stairs of a half-sunk gallery where tourists used to gather for the high tide shows. The case is the kind that fetches credits from clean hands and dirty ones alike—glass panes, a stamped crest she doesn’t recognize until she brushes at the algae and there it is, an angular sigil with a faded copper star. Corporations make marks like talismans; they buy neighborhoods and call them progress. She unlatches a magnet arm, lets it snake into the water, and the world goes green and blue and the suit’s HUD paints soft lines across her vision.

A current pushes through the corridor and the atrium breathes like a lung. For a breath Rin is underwater in the dark you get when the surface is above and the surface is a world away. Her gloved fingers find the case. The seal resists; it’s been clamped on tight with old salt and new intent. Mako chirrs and projects a sonar bloom between the columns, tiny flowers of light that map the spaces around her. She shears the final latch with a hooked tool, feels the shiver of success. The case comes free with a sound like a cough. Then the shaft groans and the lights vibrate.

Someone else is in the atrium. Footsteps — slow, deliberate — echo across water and concrete. A hum that doesn’t belong to the city equipment runs through the air, a different signature of power. Rin tucks the case under her arm, tethers herself to the girder, and lets the thrusters kill her swing. The silhouette could be a maintenance crew or a thief; the suit keeps her heartbeat measured. She watches a dark shape move in the water, a silhouette of an exo-suit the way a shark is a silhouette in the sea. Its helmet visor catches the neon like a beetle. Her stomach tightens. She has no time for drama. She has time for pockets and credits and a brother to keep breathing at home.

Mako crawls along her collar, an awkward comfort. "You want this one, or do you want to go fast?" she whispers, though the voice unit only translates to a tinny echo. Goldfish dancers used to perform for tide shows; now Rin trades stories about them for replacement seals and oxygen filters. She glances at the case again. The copper star glints, small and severe. Around the corner metal creaks and two boots slap water. The tide in the atrium shifts, pulling at rope and rag and truth. She hooks the case to her belt and slips into a shadowed passage, the sound of pursuit curling like rope behind her.