The city rose from the sea like a fever dream—a sprawling, chaotic sprawl of rusted cranes and shipping containers, of neon signs flickering in the humid dark and shantytowns climbing the hillsides in a tangle of corrugated iron and desperation. The port of Santera had no official name on any map, but it was known to every smuggler and mercenary in the hemisphere as the place where things fell off the grid. It was a city built on the bones of a hundred forgotten empires, and it smelled of diesel and salt and the faint, sour sweetness of rot.
The team approached in the small hours, their boats cutting slow circles through the black water as they waited for the signal. They had changed their running lights and covered the hulls with tarps to break up the silhouettes. The wounds from the cha
