SCUMBACK

Chapter 1

Rain had been threatening Meridian City all evening, and now it finally came down in earnest, hammering the corrugated roofs of the Docklands warehouses until the whole district sounded like a drum. Ryu Han stood in the shadow of a rusted shipping container, soaked to the bone, watching a door on the far side of the loading yard with the kind of desperate focus he usually reserved for lottery numbers.

He was not, by any honest account, a good cop.

Ryu Han was, in fact, something of a legend at the Fourth Precinct though not the kind anyone wanted etched onto a plaque. He'd once let a suspect escape through a window he swore was painted shut. He'd once shot out a patrol car's own tire during a foot chase. He was handsome in the unbothered, symmetrical way that made witnesses trust him completely and superior officers trust him not at all, and in three years on the force he had exactly one commendation, awarded everyone suspected out of pity.

None of that mattered tonight. Tonight, Ryu had a name, a warehouse, and a feeling in his gut that this was finally it.

"Come on," he muttered under his breath, fingers flexing around the grip of his sidearm. "Come on, come on."

The name was Feng Li — low-level courier, Black Lotus affiliate, the kind of small fish the department normally didn't bother chasing personally. But three cold cases in as many months had all touched the edges of Black Lotus without ever landing a body, a face, a single solid lead, and Ryu had spent his last two off days combing through shipping manifests until his eyes ached, chasing the ghost of a pattern nobody else had bothered to notice.

If I catch this man, he thought, watching the warehouse door with rain running down the back of his collar, I'll finally get promoted.

He pictured it before he could stop himself — the captain's grudging nod, his name read out at a briefing without a laugh trailing after it, Yuna's father looking at him for once without that particular flavor of disappointment reserved exclusively for Ryu. He pictured Yuna herself, arms crossed, unimpressed as always, and imagined just for a second the look on her face if he actually did something that mattered.

The door creaked open.

Feng Li stepped out backward, dragging a crate that was too heavy for one man and too quiet for anything legal. Ryu's pulse kicked up. He didn't call for backup. He told himself later he meant to, that the radio was simply slow, that the moment simply didn't allow for it but the truth, if he'd been honest with himself, was that Ryu Han did not want to share this one.

He moved.

Feng Li heard him before he saw him — the scrape of a boot against wet concrete — and bolted, abandoning the crate entirely, sprinting into the maze of shipping containers stacked three high across the yard. Ryu went after him without hesitation, boots slapping through puddles, breath tearing at his throat, every instinct in his unremarkable body screaming that this was, finally, his moment.

"Police! Stop!"

Feng Li did not stop. He cut left between two containers, vaulted a low stack of pallets with a grace that should have told Ryu something, should have told him that a low-level courier didn't move like that, didn't have that kind of precision under pressure and dropped into a narrow alley of stacked freight that dead-ended against the seawall.

Cornered.

Ryu slowed, gun raised, chest heaving. "It's over. Hands where I can see them."

Feng Li turned.

He wasn't smiling exactly, but there was something in his expression that didn't belong on the face of a man with nowhere left to run — a stillness, an amusement, like he was the one who'd led Ryu here rather than the other way around. Rain sluiced down the narrow alley between them, caught orange in the sodium light of a lamp overhead, and for one absurd second Ryu thought he saw something move beneath the man's skin, like water under ice.

"You shouldn't have followed me here," Feng Li said. His voice had changed deeper, layered, wrong in a way Ryu's brain refused to process fast enough. "None of you ever should."

"Hands," Ryu said again, though his voice wavered now, some animal part of him already understanding what his mind hadn't caught up to. "Hands, now."

Feng Li raised them and the air between them tore.

There was no other way Ryu would ever have been able to describe it, in the half-second his mind had left to describe anything at all. The rain around Feng Li's raised palm simply stopped falling, suspended, and then reversed, and then became something else entirely a spear of pressurized water, silent and impossibly fast, closing the eight feet between them before Ryu's mind had even finished registering the word 'gun was useless'.

He didn't feel the impact so much as he felt the world tilt sideways.

His back hit the shipping container behind him hard enough to dent the steel. His gun clattered somewhere he couldn't see. Ryu Han — mocked, useless, hopeful, thirty-one years old and one bad decision from a promotion he would never collect — slid down the container wall into the flooding gutter, and stared up at a sky gone soft and gray at the edges, rain falling directly, gently, into his open eyes.

'I caught him,' he thought, distantly, absurdly. 'I actually caught him.'

Feng Li crouched beside him, unbothered by the blood mixing into the rainwater, studying Ryu's face with something almost like curiosity the way a man might study an insect that had wandered somewhere it plainly wasn't equipped to survive.

"Poor thing," Feng Li said, not unkindly. "You picked the wrong week to be brave."

Ryu tried to speak. Nothing came out but a thin, wet exhale.

Somewhere very far away, sirens were finally starting — too late, always too late, the story of Ryu Han's entire unremarkable career condensed into one final, fatal joke. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, then to a pinprick, then to the rain itself, each drop enormous and slow and strangely beautiful as it fell toward him out of a sky he would never see again.

The last thing Ryu Han felt, before the dark closed over him completely, was not fear.

It was fury bright, useless, and entirely his own at a life that had never once given him the chance to prove it could have been more than this.

Then there was nothing at all.