Chapter 22 - Lion’s Gate
567 Words
The port breathed in grit and salt.
Cold daylight leaked through grimy skylights of the warehouse, turning dust motes into slow, drifting stars. Outside, gulls stitched torn cries across a sky the color of old steel. Diesel throbbed somewhere out of sight. Water slapped pilings in a tired rhythm. The air smelled of rust and faint jasmine.
Emma moved through lanes marked for forklifts, the world laid out in sodium flicker and yellow paint. Camera blind spots. Catwalk shadows. The odd echo of a space too large to be kind. Alexander held position a pace behind—in her sightline if she turned her head, her anchor if she didn’t.
“In my sight,” he murmured anyway, an oath and a rule knitting together.
A figure separated from a crane booth. Hood, dark visor, ivory sleeve. Proxy, not queen. He said nothing, only extended a velvet pouch. Inside lay a metallic micro-key—toothed, odd.
“The rack,” he grunted, chin-jerk toward a dust-furred server cabinet wedged between containers.
Emma seated the key. The display flickered, demanded a code she knew the shape of—the pattern coiled in her father’s watch and microfilm. The Aether directory bloomed.
“I’m cloning,” Lucas said, breath low and careful. “If they purge, I need sixty. We’ve got payoff routes, vendor invoices—control tags. Echelon → Hale shell. One redacted payee, codename SABLE.”
The warehouse took a breath.
Then exhaled chaos.
A clunk punched through the floor. Siren, thin and mean. A thermal spike strobed red on the server display. Ceiling vents exhaled a halon substitute—not lethal, just wrong in the lungs.
“Purge!” Lucas snapped. “I need sixty more seconds!”
Emma’s eyes ran the room the way hands run piano scales. Options hummed. Her gaze landed on a forklift nosed into a charging bay, its battery Anderson quick-disconnect bright as candy.
“Cover me,” she said. Not a question.
“You have it,” Alexander answered, already stepping between her and the open lanes, already tracking angles, already making himself large enough to draw eyes that might be aiming down sights.
Emma popped the forklift’s quick-disconnect, snapped the Anderson plug into the rack’s UPS bypass, and bridged power through the charger lead. Sparks spat, screen fluttered—then steadied.
“Cloning… eighty-seven… ninety-two—Bag it!” Lucas’s voice clipped.
Alexander didn’t fumble. Drives out. Padded sleeve sealed. Bag cinched. Movement clean as a reload.
SABLE’s voice bled into the warehouse through a tired PA. Calm, almost indulgent. “Option C: cut the Bride.”
A red dot bloomed on Emma’s sternum. It slid upward with the patience of a lit fuse and settled above her collarbone. The dust in the light looked like ash.
Alexander moved faster than thought, body interposed, command breaking ragged over concrete. “Sniper! Positions!”
Outside, a sharp crack cracked again through the gulls. Glass spidered along a high window. Shards came down like brittle rain, ringing against metal, skittering across concrete.
When the echo died, something small and white clinked at Emma’s shoe. A knight token lay there, innocent as a coin.
Lucas’s voice returned, thin with adrenaline. “We got names on the redacted line from the clone,” he said. “The financial trail…”
A heartbeat’s gravity. Then:
“One of them sits at your table.”
- Writer
