Chapter 127: Riverfront

The drive down to the river was slow and quiet in a way that made my chest ache. The city was a ribbon of light and shadow, buildings like teeth above the dark water. We moved like ghosts between the sleeping streets, four cars tucked far apart so we wouldn’t look like a convoy. No music. No jokes. Just the low hum of engines and the weight of what we’d promised to do.

Aidan drove. He never made small talk on these runs — not because he was moody or distant, but because he wanted every one of his senses free. I sat beside him, knees pressed together, trying to breathe like it was a thing I had to practice. Rhea and Echo were in the back, whispering over the journal; Ethan rode in the second car with Callum and Elena, who muttered the entire time about caffeine, knives, and the injustice of bad lighting in criminal enterprises.

“You look tired,” Aidan said, voice low enough to be soft and private.

“Tired is the new normal,” I said. My fingers went numb for a second and then warmed when he squeezed my hand. “You rested at least?”

“An hour in the chair.” He said it like it was a confession and a boast at the same time. “I can do more.”

“You don’t have to prove anything,” I told him. He didn’t argue. He never argued when it was about me. That was both comforting and scary — comforting because he stood with me, scary because his quiet could become a place I felt responsible to protect.

We pulled up a few blocks from the river, where warehouses leaned like old men against the dark. A single streetlight buzzed. There was a smell of wet concrete and fish and rust. The river cut slower than I remembered, like it had time to think about every object it took. We met up with Elena and Ethan by the stairwell that led down to the docks. Ethan had his drone helmet on like a child with a toy that mattered far more than it should.

“Thermals are clean,” he murmured, flicking through the tablet screen. “No Creed vehicles in the neighborhood. No drones overhead. That’s… unusual.”

“Unusual is good,” Elena said. She kept a crossbow loose in her grip, bolts silently nested like birds. “Unusual that doesn’t mean someone nasty is five seconds away.”

Echo hunkered down and listened to the river. “Anchors are about memory,” she said quietly. “About the things people tie meaning to. Riverfronts are easy to anchor. People remember where they lost things, where they loved, where they first learned to swallow fear. Selene knows this.”

Rhea opened the journal and thumbed the thin, brittle pages. “The River Anchor is a layered thing,” she read. “It is a place of leaving, and also of being found. The Harbinger who bound it named the acts that fed it: promises not kept, lovers who left, hands that let go. You can’t just bomb it and expect the hurt to die; you have to replace the binding with something gentler.”

“Great,” Elena muttered. “So it’s basically a cosmic heartbreak. We’re going to a wedding for angry ghosts.”

Echo didn’t smile. I didn’t either. Ritual was not my favorite thing. Ever since the lab, ceremony felt like an invitation to the past — and the past liked to bite. But ritual might be what stopped Selene more surely than bullets. The Harbinger journal made threats like that: old hands that knew the rules you broke at your own peril.

We split into two teams: Ethan and Elena would keep eyes on the road and the rooftops, make sure no vans rolled in unnoticed. Aidan, Rhea, Echo and I went down to the lower docks. Callum stayed covering the exit route in case we needed to haul a dozen bodies out in the dark and no one wanted to be slowed.

The docks were a maze of rotted planks and moored boats. The river hissed like a sleeping beast. Somewhere a gull complained. The anchor was supposed to be embedded in an old mooring stone beneath the east pier — a place where fishermen used to tie their boats and youth used to jump into the cold in July. People left things there. People made choices there. It was private in a public way, which made it a perfect place for memory to ferment.

We reached the pier and dropped into the shadows. Ethan’s drone hummed silently above, sending a blue image to his screen: the stone, the dark water, a faint circle of algae.

“See that?” he whispered. “A ring of sediment around the mooring. That’s not natural. Some kind of tested bed.”

Rhea checked the journal, lips moving with the words even in the low light. “The Harbinger called it an eye. A gaze into the river. She wrote that you must offer the river something true to blind it.”

“Offer what?” I asked.

“Truth,” Rhea said, as if the word were simple. “Not like standing in speeches and promises. Like — give the river the honest thing you tried to hide. The first thing that bled you. The first failure. It binds better if you won’t lie about it.”

Aidan’s hand brushed my shoulder. “We can do that,” he said. His voice did not tremble. “We will do that.” His jaw tightened. He always said it like permission: we will do what is needed, together.

There were three lanterns arranged in a triangle where the mooring stones poked out of the water. Someone had been here very recently. The glass was fresh; wax still softened. That meant Selene’s people — scouts or recruits — had come to check on it. Or someone had just prepared it as a trap.

Echo moved forward, quiet and precise. She knelt by the largest stone and touched it like it was a live thing. Her fingers came away with green growth clinging to them. “It’s active,” she said simply. “It’s feeling for presence.”

“Then we do the thing.” Rhea’s hands didn’t shake as she read. “We speak the words. We make the offering. The Harbinger wrote a binding that inverts the anchor’s call; it’s safer to seal than to break.”

“What does sealing mean?” I asked.

Rhea held the journal to the lantern light. “It means we ask the river to take what has been used as a hook and instead hold it as a cairn. We give back what was stolen — but not in chains.” She looked at me, and for the first time her eyes were full of something fierce. “You will have to speak. You will have to name what you lost.”

My mouth went dry. Naming felt like coughing up a part of yourself. What had I lost that could give the river pause? My family? The knife? My childhood? The night in the closet? Everything felt too heavy and too personal and at the same time too public to hold.

“I’ll do it,” Aidan said before I could choose. He sounded so sure I flinched. “I will say the name. I can be the offering.”

“No,” I said. The word came out too sharp. “This is mine. This is the place I belong to or not belong to. I have to do it.” I hadn’t told him about that change, not the deep thing about being made, about the lab, the blood DNA, the experiment. But this was not the time to hide. If the river wanted truth, it wanted mine.

Aidan’s jaw worked. There was a fight inside him. Finally he nodded. He stepped back and took a breath. “If you’re sure,” he said softly. “I’ll be beside you every second.”