POV: Aria
I spent two days telling myself the voice on the earpiece was a bluff.
It wasn't. I knew that now. But after Tuesday I drove home with the engine too loud and the windows down and I didn't call Dez until Wednesday morning, which was long enough to convince myself I had a plan and not just a bad feeling wearing the shape of one.
The plan was this: find out what we were actually walking into before we walked into it. Not brave, just necessary. You didn't steal blind. That was a rule I made the first year and I'd kept it every time except once, and that year cost me six months and two people I hadn't fully gotten back.
Sofia volunteered before I finished the sentence. That was her thing she got quiet in every room and loud when it counted, and right then I needed both. Mika wanted to come. I told him no and he looked at me the way he did when he knew I was right and hated it. Dez said nothing. He'd been saying nothing a lot since the garage.
The four of us went anyway. Old habits.
The warehouse was in a part of the waterfront the city had been meaning to fix for about fifteen years. One access road. Chain-link on three sides. The kind of place that looked abandoned until it wasn't. We parked a block over and went in quiet, Sofia first because she was the smallest and the smartest and she moved like she wasn't moving.
I followed her to the east side fence line and crouched. The ground was wet from something earlier. I didn't think about it.
Inside, two men stood by the main door, one walked the perimeter, one was on the roof with his back to us. Cheap radios. No cameras I could see on that side. The vehicles in the lot were unmarked, older models, and one of them had a rear light out. Small outfit. The kind that ran a neighbourhood, not a city.
"Count?" I asked Sofia, low.
"Eight, maybe nine," she said. "Nothing military."
That was exactly what I wanted to hear.
I should have felt better. I didn't, but I filed that away and kept watching.
We stayed twenty minutes. Nobody changed position in a way that suggested training, nobody swept the fence line, nobody was doing anything that looked like guarding something valuable. The crates in the loading bay were stacked without any real system. Two of the men were on their phones. One of them was eating.
"This is nothing," Mika said from behind me.
He'd come anyway. I wasn't even surprised.
"Go back to the car," I said.
"Aria."
"Mika. Car."
He went. Dez let him.
Dez moved up beside me. "He's right though."
"I know."
"So why aren't you relaxed?"
I didn't answer that. I watched the man on the roof shift his weight and look at the water and check his phone. He was bored. Whatever was in those crates, he didn't know it mattered.
That was what was bothering me, I realised. When something was worth protecting, the people doing it usually knew.
These people didn't know.
So either the shipment wasn't in there yet, or these people were not the real security.
Sofia grabbed my arm.
She didn't grab. That wasn't something she did, so I looked at her fast.
Her eyes were on the loading bay. One of the crates near the back had shifted from where it was twenty minutes ago, or the light had changed, or I'd missed it before. She was pointing at the side panel now facing us.
I looked.
There was a symbol on it. Stamped, not painted pressed into the wood the way you'd mark something you wanted to stay marked. It was small. A circle with something inside it. I couldn't make out the detail from there.
"You know that?" I asked her.
Her jaw moved but nothing came out for a second.
"Sofia."
"I've seen it once," she said. "In a photo. My cousin worked the docks in Santos three years ago. He sent me a picture of a container before he stopped answering his phone."
The back of my neck did something I didn't like.
"What kind of container?"
She looked at me, and I read her face the way I'd learned to over four years of working beside her, and what I saw was not the careful, controlled Sofia who volunteered first and panicked last. What I saw was someone doing the math on something they were hoping not to find.
"The kind that doesn't carry cargo," she said.
I turned back to the warehouse. The men were still bored. Still eating. Still not watching the fence line.
None of it looked different and all of it felt different, because I'd been thinking about it the wrong way since Tuesday. I wasn't set up to steal from a small operation. I was set up to walk into something that someone needed a fast driver to move quickly and without questions, and the voice on my earpiece had already known my name before I said a word.
"We pull out," I said.
"Aria," Dez said.
"Right now. All of us."
Nobody argued. We moved back to the car fast and quiet and I didn't run, because running drew eyes, but I wanted to. I drove two miles before I stopped at a red light and breathed. Sofia was in the back seat and she hadn't said anything and she wasn't looking out the window. She was looking at her hands.
I watched her in the mirror.
"Your cousin," I said. "Did he ever turn up?"
She didn't answer.
That was its own kind of answer.
I pulled forward when the light changed and thought about the voice that had already been inside my channel, and the number that was double anything reasonable, and the way Rael's people had set it up so clean and fast that I'd said yes before I understood what yes meant. I thought about Sofia's cousin and the symbol pressed into the wood like a brand.
My phone lit up on the seat.
Unknown number. One message.
You saw the symbol. Good. That means you understand what you're carrying. Call it off and we release the name of every person in your crew to the people who own that warehouse. Run and we do it faster.
I read it twice.
Then Mika's phone rang in the back seat, and when he picked it up the voice on the other end was already talking, and it was the same voice from my earpiece.
It knew exactly where we were sitting.