The docks smelled like diesel and salt rot. Breakwater's lungs. Everything that fed the city passed through here—cargo ships stacked high with containers, barges sagging under scrap, fishing trawlers with more rust than hull. At night, the water looked black enough to swallow whole ships without leaving ripples.
Ash hated the docks—too many eyes. Too many factions sniffing around. He preferred jobs in alleys, abandoned lots, places you could vanish. The docks were wide open—no walls, no shadows, just water and floodlights.
But Salvo had said midnight. And Salvo didn't leave room for a no.
Cass was already waiting when Ash and Mina slipped past the checkpoint chain-link. She leaned against a shipping container, arms crossed, pistol holstered loosely, smirk bright in the arc-light glare.
"About time," she said. "Was worried you'd grown a conscience."
Ash shot her a look. "Don't start."
Cass's eyes flicked to Mina, who clung close to Ash's side, sketchbook hugged under her patched jacket. "Brought the kid? Thought you'd at least stash her somewhere first."
"She stays quiet," Ash said.
Cass grinned. "Quiet I can work with."
Mina didn't react. She just watched the shifting cranes overhead, her eyes following the slow ballet of metal arms unloading cargo. Pencil already in hand, sketching on instinct.
Ash tried not to think about it. Tried not to picture what she'd put on the page when the night turned bloody.
The job brief was simple on paper. A cargo container had gone "missing" in transit—megacorp inventory gone astray, dock workers on the take. Salvo had buyers lined up, but he needed it pulled before COA patrols traced the leak.
Find the container, secure it, deliver it to a secondary truck parked under Pier 17. No witnesses, no trail.
Easy, Salvo had said.
Ash didn't trust easy.
They moved between stacked containers, shadows in the glare of the floodlight. Cass took point, boots light on wet steel, humming tunelessly under her breath. Ash scanned the walkways, every muscle coiled tight. Mina kept pace between them, small enough to vanish into the gaps, quiet as breath.
"Container C-71," Cass murmured. "Red stripe. Should be near the loading cranes."
Ash grunted acknowledgement. His hand brushed the lighter in his pocket. Habit. Anchor.
The cranes loomed overhead like iron skeletons. Somewhere distant, gulls screamed. The docks were never fully silent—metal groans, chains clanking, water slapping hulls.
Then footsteps.
Ash froze, pulled Mina into the shadows of a stacked container. Cass crouched low, pistol drawn.
Two men walked the dock line—dockhands, maybe, but their posture was wrong. Too alert. Not tired enough for night labour. Their coats bulged where guns rode. Corp security in disguise, or gang muscle with a contract. Either way, trouble.
They stopped near the container rows, muttering low. Ash caught fragments—"shipment," "buyer," "don't screw this."
Cass looked back at Ash, a grin feral in the dark. She mouthed: Fun starts early.
Ash's stomach tightened. He should've walked away.
The men lit cigarettes, glowing sharply in the rain. Ash kept still, every instinct screaming to bolt, to pull Mina back through the chain-link and leave Cass to her chaos. But Salvo's words echoed—no excuses.
Cass shifted, weight balanced like a predator. She wanted to take them. Her eyes gleamed with the reckless spark that always came before the break.
Ash closed his eyes and muttered under his breath. "Damn it."
He gave her a nod.
Cass moved first.
She slipped out of the shadows, steps quick and silent, pistol raised. One of the men barely turned before she cracked the butt of her gun across his temple. He folded with a grunt.
The second swung toward her, hand diving into his coat. Ash was already moving. He hit the man low, shoulder to ribs, knife flashing. The blade pressed cold against the man's throat before his gun cleared leather.
"Easy," Ash rasped. "You're gonna walk away."
The man froze, breath ragged. Ash's knife hand trembled—not from weakness, but from how much he wanted to end this fast.
Then Mina's pencil scratched behind him. Calm, steady, as if she were already recording the moment in graphite.
Ash blinked, steadied himself.
"Walk," he repeated.
The man stumbled back, eyes wide, dragging his partner with him. Cass laughed softly as they vanished between containers.
"Soft touch tonight," she said.
"Not soft," Ash muttered. "Smart."
Cass smirked. "We'll see how long that lasts."
They pushed on, deeper into the docks. Rain slicked steel, floodlights buzzing, the air thick with the stink of fuel and fish.
Mina drew as they walked, pencil racing across pages. Ash glanced once, caught the sketch: two figures standing over fallen men, shadows stretched long across container walls.
She didn't draw faces—just the flame from a lighter caught between them.
Ash pocketed the lighter, jaw tight.
The container was close now. And so was the break he knew was coming.
The rain thickened, mist rolling off the water in low waves. Breakwater's docks always breathed like this at night—like the city itself was exhaling poison.
Cass whistled a tune as she padded ahead, pistol tucked away again, shoulders loose as if they weren't walking a knife's edge. Ash trailed her, every muscle tight. Mina moved in the narrow space between, sketchbook already open, her hand scribbling shapes by instinct.
"You ever get tired of that sound?" Cass whispered, nodding at the pencil scratch.
Ash shot her a look. "Better than your whistling."
Cass grinned, teeth flashing in the arc-light glow. "Fair."
They moved between stacked containers, each one looming like a wall of rust and steel. Numbers and stripes glared in chipped paint, meaningless to anyone not on the payroll. Cass led them unerringly toward the red stripe—C-71—Salvo's prize.
Ash's gut knotted tighter the closer they got. Jobs never went clean when Salvo called them "easy."
They froze at the groan of hydraulics overhead. A crane arm swept past, cables taut, carrying a container the size of a building block. Its shadow smothered them as it creaked overhead. Mina stopped, staring up, pencil racing across her page.
Ash glanced down as she tilted it toward him. The sketch showed the crane not as it was, but as it might be—snapped cables, the block falling, crushing everything beneath.
He stuffed the image back down before it could root in his chest. "Keep moving," he muttered.
Mina obeyed without a word.
Halfway down the pier, voices rose. Three men in dock coats, silhouettes in the mist, leaned against a forklift. Their laughter cut sharply across the rain. One of them held a bottle, another gestured widely, while the third kept scanning the rows of containers as if he knew trouble was close.
Cass crouched low. "We cut left, swing wide. Easy."
Ash squinted. "Or?"
Cass smirked. "Or I walk over, smile pretty, and ask for directions."
Ash glared. "You'll get us shot."
Her grin widened. "You've got no faith in me."
"I've got memory," Ash hissed. "We circle."
Cass rolled her eyes but followed. They slipped into a side row, ducking behind rusted walls, Mina ghost-quiet between them.
The men's laughter faded behind.
But the silence ahead wasn't better.
A drone buzzed past overhead, red eye sweeping the dock lanes. Ash yanked Mina against the steel wall, pressing her into the shadows. Cass leaned close on the other side, breath warm at his ear.
"COA model," she whispered. "Recon, not armed. Yet."
Ash's hand tightened on his lighter instead of his knife. He hated drones—cold, patient, recording everything for someone who never touched dirt.
The drone hovered, lens panning. Mina's pencil didn't stop. She sketched its outline against the mist, the red glow bleeding into her page like an open wound.
Ash swallowed the urge to knock the book away. He kept her tucked against him until the hum drifted off into the fog.
Cass smirked as they peeled free. "See? Smooth sailing."
Ash shook his head. "We're not through yet."
Finally, the container loomed into view. Red stripe. C-71. Salvo hadn't lied about the target, at least.
It sat at the end of a row near the pier's edge, half-lit by a flickering floodlight. No guards, no locks, obvious. Too easy.
Cass's grin widened. "There she is."
Ash's stomach sank. "It's wrong."
"Wrong?"
"Unwatched. Unlocked. Like someone wanted it gone."
Cass tilted her head. "Which is exactly what we want. Don't overthink it, Moreno."
Ash crouched and ran a hand along the container latch. No seals. No alarms. Just a steel door waiting to be pulled open.
Behind him, Mina set her sketchbook on her knees, pencil flying. Ash glanced once—and froze.
She wasn't drawing the container. She was drawing shadows—figures in the mist, guns raised, closing in.
Cass noticed his stare. "What's she got now?"
Ash didn't answer. He stood, lighter rolling across his knuckles, eyes sweeping the mist.
The docks were too quiet.
"Alright," Cass said, stepping past him toward the latch. "Let's crack it open, load the truck, and get gone before the night gets uglier."
Ash caught her wrist. "Not yet."
She raised an eyebrow. "Paranoid much?"
"Alive much?" Ash shot back.
Mina closed her sketchbook with a snap. Her wide eyes locked on him. Waiting.
The floodlight buzzed, flickered, then died—plunging the pier into darkness.
Ash's stomach clenched. He knew what came next.
Cass swore under her breath. Ash's lighter clicked once, flame sharp against the night, but he killed it fast. No point advertising their position.
Then came the sound: boots slapping wet steel, close and fast.
"Move," Ash hissed.
Figures emerged from the mist—three, maybe four. Guns glinted in the thin neon bleed off the city skyline. Rival crew, maybe. Or COA contractors in civvies. Didn't matter.
Cass drew first. A single shot cracked, muzzle flash strobing the rain. One man dropped, his gun skittering across the pier.
The others charged.
Ash shoved Mina back against the container, his knife already in hand. The first man barreled into him, gun raised too slow. Ash drove the blade up under his ribs. The man's breath burst out in a wet gasp, hot against Ash's cheek, before Ash twisted free and shoved him off. Blood sprayed dark across the mist.
Cass barked a laugh, almost giddy, as she danced past another, heel smashing into his knee like she was keeping rhythm with the fight. He crumpled, cursing, and she put a round through his chest before he hit the ground.
The last came straight at Ash, wild-eyed, swinging a length of pipe instead of a pistol. Ash ducked, the pipe whistling past his ear, and slammed his knife into the man's thigh. The scream was short—Cass silenced it with a bullet.
Silence crashed back, broken only by the hiss of rain on steel.
Mina hadn't screamed. She crouched tight against the container, sketchbook clutched like a shield. Her eyes glowed wide in the strobe of gunfire, fixed on Ash.
Cass exhaled, blowing smoke from the muzzle. "That all of them?"
Ash wiped his blade on a dead man's coat. "For now."
The container sat heavy and silent beside them. Its red stripe seemed darker now, blood instead of paint.
"Still want to crack it?" Ash muttered.
Cass grinned, breathless, hair plastered to her forehead with rain. "Now more than ever."
She hauled the latch. Metal screamed as it gave. The doors yawned open.
Inside—crates. Stencilled corporate seals, half-smeared with water. Weapons. Boxes of them. Carbines, sidearms, ammunition stacked in neat rows. Enough firepower to light half the city.
Ash's stomach dropped. "Salvo didn't say."
Cass whistled low. "He never does. But this—this is pay."
Ash stared at the rows of steel and death. He could already see the fallout: gangs armed to the teeth, COA crackdowns, whole blocks turned into killing fields. And his fingerprints were all over it.
Mina's pencil moved faintly against the page. Ash turned—she'd drawn the container open, crates sketched in black lines. But in her drawing, flames licked the edges, fire eating everything inside.
His chest tightened. He snapped the book shut in her hands, harder than he meant to. Mina flinched but didn't protest—just tightened her grip on the cover, as if even silence belonged to him now.
"Not now," he muttered.
Cass snorted. "Kid's got better instincts than you."
They worked fast. Ash and Cass dragged two crates onto a dolly, rolling them toward the pier's edge where the truck should have been waiting.
It wasn't.
The space under Pier 17 was empty. No truck. No headlights. Just black water slapping wood.
Cass's grin faded. "That's a problem."
Ash scanned the fog, stomach sinking. Salvo never left loose ends. If the truck wasn't here, it meant someone else had moved it—or Salvo had written them off.
Behind them, a groan. The container doors rattled, as if something inside had shifted.
Ash's knife was back in his hand before he thought. "Cass. Move."
She swung her pistol toward the sound. The doors banged again. Then silence.
Mina's pencil snapped in half.
A shot cracked from the mist. Splinters jumped from the container beside Ash's head. He dragged Mina down, rolling her under the dolly as more shots barked.
Cass fired back, blind into the fog. A cry answered, sharp and cut short.
Ash's ears rang. He tasted rust and salt. Mina clung to his jacket, silent but shaking hard enough to rattle her bones.
Another shadow lunged through the mist. Ash rose with it, blade flashing. He caught the man's wrist before the gun cleared leather, slammed him against the container, and drove the knife up into his throat. A hot spray hit his hand, and the man collapsed without a word.
Cass dropped another with two quick shots. Her laugh was gone now, replaced by hard, controlled breathing.
Then the pier fell quiet again. Just rain. Just mist.
Ash's chest heaved. His arms shook from the knife's grip. He looked at Cass. She looked back, eyes wide, face pale under the rain.
"Salvo set us up," she said flatly.
Ash nodded once. "Or sold us out."
Mina crawled from under the dolly, sketchbook in her lap, despite the broken pencil. She smeared the lead with her fingers, shaping shadows on the page. When she held it up, Ash saw three figures: two standing, one crouched between. Behind them, fire rose from the docks, black smoke swallowing everything.
He swallowed hard. "We're done here."
Cass spat into the water. "Not without pay."
"Forget the pay," Ash snapped. "This wasn't a job. It was cleanup."
Cass's jaw worked, teeth grinding, but she didn't argue.
Ash scooped Mina into his arms, lighter pressing cold against his thigh. He turned away from the container, the crates, and the bodies cooling in the rain.
"Let's move before the whole pier lights up."
They vanished into the mist, sirens already rising in the distance.
Ash's arms ached, Mina's silence heavier than her weight. Cass walked at his side, pistol still loose in her hand, eyes scanning shadows.
Behind them, the container sat open. Rain pooled on steel. Weapons gleamed under the flickering floodlight.
Ash didn't need Mina's sketches to know how the night would end. In his head, the crates were already burning, steel warped, ammo cooking off in bursts of flame.
Fire. Always fire.