Chapter 725 | Pacific Coast Cold Storage

Chapter 725: 725 | Pacific Coast Cold Storage

I let the air out of my lungs and turned Residue Sight on.

The grey industrial wasteland below us lit up like a cheap blacklight poster. Dozens of old smears ran along the boulevard where Aspect-bearing dockworkers and truck drivers had passed through over the last few days, murky yellows and browns the wet fog had washed almost to nothing. None of them matched the van. The heavyset guy with the bad back and the guy in the baseball cap were both Unmarked, and Unmarked people didn’t leave glowing paint on the world when they walked through it.

The boxes in the back were another story.

Leonard Kask’s 397-nanometer black-violet had soaked so deep into those cardboard flaps that it might as well have been radioactive, and underneath it, nine different Branded kids were screaming in color through the styrofoam peanuts. Even through the steel floor of a Ford Transit doing forty miles an hour, that much concentrated misery left a drag mark in the air.

And there it was, crossing the wet black asphalt of the intersection where the van had blown the light: a greasy ribbon of dark purple smoke hovering six inches above the tire tracks, shot through with tiny dying sparks of bone-white and electric blue.

"Got him," I said, and dropped off the weigh station roof into the weeds behind the guard shack. "Come on. He went east behind the containers."

Lamia landed beside me in a deep squat that showed off every ounce of the frightening muscle in her scaled thighs, then bounced back up. Her left boot zipper had popped another safety pin during the bridge crossing, leaving four inches of calf bare against the vinyl, and she didn’t even look down at it.

"How did you do that?" She jogged to keep up as I slipped through a gap in the chain-link and trotted down the service alley between the container stacks, chasing the purple vapor before the sea breeze could tear it apart. "Did you put a tracker on the bumper? Because I didn’t see you put a tracker on the bumper, and I was watching your hands the whole time."

"I’ve got good eyes."

"You’ve got a creepy white mask with no eyeholes in it, is what you’ve got," she muttered, fangs nipping at her lower lip as she skated across a fifty-foot puddle of oily rainwater instead of running around it. "Seriously, how do you see out of that thing? Is it high-tech? Did your rich girlfriend buy it for you?"

"Found it in a gacha machine," I said. It was a hundred percent true, which guaranteed she’d ignore it.

The trail hooked left at the end of the container yard, crossed a set of rusted railway tracks sunk into the cobblestones, and led us three blocks east into a row of huge windowless concrete buildings that smelled like ammonia and dead fish. The fog sat thicker this close to the water. It hung low between the loading bays and muffled the highway behind us.

I held up a fist as we came to the corner of a rusted corrugated fence. Lamia killed her frictionless field just in time and caught the back of my utility jacket with both hands, using me as a brake pad instead of sliding out into the open street. Her chest flattened against my shoulder blades through the neoprene, warm and soft, and I caught cheap strawberry lip gloss and river water before she stepped back.

Across the street stood a two-story concrete blockhouse the size of a football stadium. It was painted a peeling battleship grey, with a faded blue sign bolted over the main office doors: PACIFIC COAST COLD STORAGE.

Forty yards down from the office, a recessed loading dock was cut into the side of the building under a rusted steel overhang. Three of the four roll-up bay doors were padlocked and covered in seagulls. The fourth was cranked halfway up, spilling hard white light onto the wet concrete apron.

Backed flush against the rubber dock bumpers sat the dirty white Ford Transit.

"There," Lamia breathed. Her fingers dug into my sleeve hard enough that I knew she’d forgotten to play the cool master thief. "That’s it. That’s the van."

"Up," I murmured, and pointed two fingers at the low roof of a derelict forklift repair shed directly across from the loading bay.

We went up the side of the shed without a sound. I used two amber constructs to haul myself over the rusted gutter, and Lamia simply walked up the vertical cinderblock on her palms and the balls of her feet like a gecko in a wetsuit. We bellied down on the cold wet tar paper behind a low brick parapet with a straight sightline into the open mouth of Bay Four.

Down on the dock, the heavyset driver had the Transit’s rear doors pinned open and was wrestling the two tape-wrapped cartons off his hand truck onto a blue plastic shipping pallet. The baseball-cap driver was nowhere in sight, probably still in the cab with the heater running and the radio off.

Then somebody walked out of the back of the warehouse into that rectangle of white light, and the second heartbeat under my ribs gave a single heavy thud against my breastbone.

It was a woman in her mid-thirties, medium height, in a crisp disposable blue medical smock tied over dark slacks. Powder-blue nitrile gloves went halfway up her forearms. Her brown hair was tucked into a hairnet, and a clear plastic face shield sat flipped up on her forehead, like she’d just stepped out of an operating room or a clean-room butcher shop.

When I flicked Residue Sight back on, she didn’t glow at all.

No Core signature. No Aspect trace. She was as Unmarked as the men driving the van, except for the smear of that same dead residue from the bottom of the boxes crusted across the front of her smock, like she’d spent the last four hours elbow-deep in whatever came out of those containers once the tape was cut.