True North

Chapter 5

The drills started the morning after the safe, and they didn’t let up.

Jo ran him through footwork until his legs burned, through lock work until his fingers ached and every tumbler in the cannery had a story to tell him, through drills that made no sense to him in the moment and only came together hours later when his body did something his mind hadn’t caught up to yet. Some nights he dreamed in patterns instead of pictures, numbers sliding into place behind his eyes like something remembering itself. Gideon Marsh watched most of it from the doorway with his arms crossed, saying nothing for the first two days beyond the occasional grunt of disapproval.

“He moves fine for a guy without a single day of real training,” Gideon said to Jo on the third day, like Nolan wasn’t standing close enough to hear it. “Doesn’t mean the dead man’s kid can handle himself when someone’s actually trying to put him down.”

“Then find out,” Jo said.

Gideon didn’t need telling twice. He came off the wall already moving, a mock blade low in his hand, full speed with none of the careful pulled punches Jo had used on him all week. Nolan didn’t have time to be afraid of it. His body simply answered, the way it had answered in the parking lot, the way it had answered with a knife an inch from his eye, slipping the first strike, then the second, weight shifting before Gideon had fully committed to any single line of attack. Gideon adjusted, faster, angrier, and Nolan kept not being where the blade was, until Gideon overextended on a fourth strike and Nolan’s leg swept both of his out from under him in one clean motion, dropping him hard onto the mat.

Gideon lay there a second, catching his breath, staring up at the ceiling.

“Huh,” he said finally, and there was something almost like respect buried in it. He let Nolan pull him up. “Fine. Maybe there’s something in there besides ghosts.”

-----

Jo gave him the real assignment two days later, spreading a set of building schematics across the cannery’s workbench.

“Calloway Maritime runs a data annex three blocks from the main tower,” she said. “Separate building, lighter security, because nobody thinks the boring paperwork needs guarding as hard as the executive floors do. I want the manifests in there, specifically the ones on the smuggling routes I told you about. If the cargo weights have been falsified the way I think they have, that annex is where the proof lives.” She tapped a point on the schematic, a server room two floors up from the loading dock. “This is the same thread your father was pulling on when he died, Nolan. I don’t say that to pressure you. I say it because you deserve to know what you’re walking into.”

Nolan looked at the schematic a long moment, at the small square marked server room like it was any other room in any other building. “Then let’s go get it,” he said.

He went in a little past midnight, dressed like a contractor doing after hours maintenance, Jo’s borrowed badge warm in his pocket. The instincts came easier now, or maybe he’d simply stopped fighting them. He knew, without being told, exactly which hallway camera had a blind spot wide enough to walk through, knew the rhythm of the first guard’s patrol well enough to be somewhere else entirely every time the man rounded a corner, knew how to hold himself so the second guard’s eyes slid right past him in the elevator like he belonged there. The server room door had a keypad he’d never seen before in his life, and his fingers moved across it anyway, unhurried, certain, until it clicked open like it had been waiting for him specifically. Inside, rows of servers hummed in the dark like something breathing, and he found the right drive in a rack of a hundred identical ones without hesitating, his hand simply knowing which one before his eyes had finished reading the labels.

The drive was small enough to fit in his palm. He had it in under ninety seconds.

For a few minutes, walking back out through the loading dock into the cool night air, it felt clean. It felt like maybe he was good at something again.

Then a car door closed somewhere behind him, unhurried, and a voice he’d never heard before said, “That’s not yours to carry.”

Corbin Wren stepped out of the shadow of the loading dock with four armed men fanning out behind him, moving like they’d done this a hundred times and were mildly bored by it. He was younger than Nolan expected, dressed like money that had never once had to work a room to get what it wanted, and the men behind him carried themselves with the particular stillness of people paid enough to not be nervous. He didn’t so much as glance at Gideon, who’d been covering the exit and now had a gun half raised with nowhere useful to point it. Wren’s eyes were only on Nolan, and on the drive in his hand.

“You must be the dead man’s kid,” Wren said, almost pleasant about it. “I’ve heard about your parlor tricks. Catching knives. Cracking safes you’ve never seen before. Very impressive, for a ghost story.” He held up a small black device, no bigger than a lighter, and smiled in a way that didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes. “Let’s see how well the trick works against this.”

Nolan didn’t even see him press anything. He just felt the drive go hot in his palm, a single sharp pulse, his arm going numb to the elbow for a heartbeat in an echo of the same heat that lived in his scar, and somewhere above them the whole annex seemed to shudder at once, lights flickering, a low electrical whine climbing through the walls before the alarms tore open the night. The drive in his hand was dead weight now, wiped clean, whatever proof it had carried gone with it.

Wren was already turning to leave, entirely unhurried, like the alarms belonged to someone else’s problem. “Tell Jo I said hello,” he said over his shoulder, and then he was gone, his men peeling off into the dark behind him, and nobody so much as tried to stop them.

Jo swore, low and vicious, staring at the annex like she could see straight through its walls to whatever had just been erased inside it. Weeks of watching this annex’s patterns, and Wren had walked in like someone had handed him the schedule directly. “He knew,” she said. “He knew exactly when we’d be here. That’s not luck. That’s not even good guessing.”

Gideon rounded on Nolan before the alarms had even started to fade into the distance, his earlier respect gone, replaced with something harder and more suspicious.

“So which is it,” he said. “Did that leak come from you? From whatever half trained instincts are rattling around in your head that none of us understand yet? Or is there someone else in this picture we haven’t even considered?”

Nolan opened his mouth and found he had no answer that would satisfy either of them, not one that made any more sense to him than it would to Gideon. Nobody answered. The question just hung there in the alarm-lit dark, unresolved, while somewhere behind them the annex kept screaming into the night.