Dead Harbor at midnight was a graveyard of iron and salt.
The abandoned shipping terminal stretched along the black water like a skeleton picked clean by scavengers, its cranes frozen mid-swing, its warehouses gutted and silent. The fog that had been pressing down on the city all week had thickened to a dense, clinging mist that swallowed sound and distorted distance. Vance Okonkwo stood at the edge of the container yard, his coat collar turned up against the cold, his service weapon a familiar weight beneath his arm. He had been here before—eight years ago, when Deji first vanished, when the trail was still warm and the department still pretended to care. He had walked this same asphalt, searched these same containers, found nothing but rust and shadows and the slow erosion of hope.
Ton
