The cavern kept its promises: shelter, shade, and the same stubborn smell of old bread and machine oil. Brendon slid into his corner like someone folding himself into an old coat. The satchel lay beside him, a small, heavy confession; the wooden tubes clicked faintly when he shifted. He stared at the vents as the light breathed across the crates and let the day unspool into memory.
Things had gone wrong in ways that made a man count his small losses. Drago's smile had taught him that everyone kept a price list — some people paid with cash, others with bones. Flim & Flam's brand seemed stitched through the city like a tendon. Ninja Fox had played the town like a board. Sofie had lost her fiancé, and the mayor had friends who moved crates like pieces in a private game. He had hoped for lines that would lead him to answers; instead he found a tangle that smelled faintly of old smoke and newer lies.
He watched the dust motes and tried to make the data points in his head straighten itself. What had been a map of absence had begun to feel like a map of intent. People moved in rhythms. Shipping was rhythm. Money was rhythm. Whoever was behind the tubes and the burned faces knew how to stop rhythm from becoming evidence. Whoever it was had patience.
He slept badly, the kind of sleep that comes on after you spend an evening learning what you cannot fight alone and want to forget. In the morning he washed in the sink under the vent and tied the same boots he'd worn the night before because they fit the way the city did — worn, practical, predictable. He set out to call Sofie with a plan that tasted like persistence.
She picked up on the second ring. Her voice was a thin thread of daylight. "Brendon."
"How're you holding up?" he asked.
"Breathe," she said. There was an edge to it — grief braided with professional distance. "I'm okay. What do you need?"
"I want you to talk to people who were close to Seth," he said, the sentence simple and deliberate. "Get some names, something suspicious, anything that points to his last days."
There was a pause, and once, the soft click of a pen. "That... that won't be easy. Victim's family has been turned inward. Friends are spooked. The Chief's hands are on everything that comes off the docks." Her voice steadied; the practiced technician reasserted itself. "But I'll try. I'll call the ones I can reach without leaving too many traces."
"Do it quietly, okay?" he said. "No paper trails."
"That's the efficient part," she answered. "I can ghost the calls. I can ask without asking."
He heard the fatigue like gravel in her tone. "Sofie—"
"I'll do it," she interrupted, and though it came out clipped, it was an agreement. There was no flourish, no false comfort. She had her grief to keep; she had her duty and the strange, dangerous pride of a woman who'd chosen to fight with data instead of guns.
Days ran into each other like trains on the same rusted track. He kept counting, and the city kept giving him little bills he couldn't pay. He in the meantime had conversations with Fylin. Brendon actually wanted to know what Fylin has learnt in past few days through his sources. They might het handy for him.
As he approaches, "Right then—what did your curiosity cost you?" Fylin asked, half-joke, as Brendon ducked into the cavern and shut the world out behind him.
"You got anything?" Brendon replied without preamble. He kept his voice low. The rope coil behind him creaked as he sat up straighter.
Fylin dropped onto the crate opposite, elbows on knees. "Not much. Little crumbs." He folded his hands and looked at Brendon like a man lining up coins. "Name is Seth Harrow. Quiet type. Do-gooder, that's what folk say. Volunteer at the community centre — food runs, odd jobs for the elderly, helps run a lads' workshop on Saturdays. Keeps his hands busy so his head don't wander, or so his Ma told a few people."
"Volunteer?" Brendon echoed. The word sat in the air like a soft confession.
"Aye. Likes to be useful," Fylin continued. "Gave time to the soup-kitchen at the East Wharf. That's where your ID turned up, isn't it? He handled pickups, sorted crates, helped stack. Folks liked him. No enemies on paper. Naïve more likely. He was getting married soon, yeah? That added panic on the street — nerves, wedding plans."
"And the docks? Why would he be there at night?" Brendon asked.
"Late shifts sometimes. Some drives run odd hours, donations arrive when the tide suits the lorry. Seth would meet delivery folk, sign sheets. He'd be on the quay clearing boxes, making sure food got to the shelter. Good bloke doing the wrong hours, easy to stumble into wrong company though." Fylin's voice thinned a bit.
"Anything about enemies? Arguments? Someone he scared off?" Brendon asked, penning the question with his tone.
"None that I heard proper. But whispers," Fylin said. "Seth'd been asking about shipments. Odd question for a volunteer, but he's practical — wanted to know where food came from. He bumped into the wrong chest twice: a driver who moved late, and a kid who was trembling like a leaf and then ran. Seth looked after people, even the frightened ones. Maybe that's why someone took advantage."
"Plus, I got a woman who said Seth argued with 'a man in a suit' the week prior — short, nothing polite. Could be nothing. Could be the man who gets paid to keep his hands clean."
Brendon let that settle. "You sure about the suit?"
"Suit, yeah. Not local. Smell of aftershave and money," Fylin said. "That's what my ear heard." He tapped the table. "That's your crumb, for now. Enough to send you chasing a road, maybe. I'll keep my ear. I've eyes near the quay and at the Old Lantern. If anything weird happens — I'll let you know."
Brendon nodded. "Good. Quietly."
"Aye," Fylin said, rising. "Quiet like the grave. But I'll have a look. Don't go dying for charity, wolf. You got things to count yet."
"Don't worry about me," Brendon said, but his voice was thinner than his words. Fylin gave him a look that suggested he knew better.
---
Then, two days later, Brendon and Sofie met at the north dock where he had last seen the tech head of RTPD. Sofie waited in the shadow of a container. She had a thermos, and she hugged it like it might be a telephone, or perhaps it was a talisman for warmth.
She walked to him with two worn envelopes folded into her hand. There was a look on her face that had nothing to do with the badge and everything to do with loss. She tried to smile but failed. Brendon sat on the coil of rope he had used before and watched her come close enough that the sound of the water was a third presence.
"You look like a person who is somewhat... directionless." she said once.
"Coffee," he said, and she handed him a cup that smelled faintly of hospital rooms and cigarettes. He wrapped his hands around it like a man holding a very precious thing.
"You did it," he said after a beat.
She nodded. "I talked to his parents. Mostly grief. A mother who doesn't know how to set her son back right. His father kept muttering about town and changes. They didn't tell much until his mother said something you wouldn't expect: Seth had been nervous the last few week before the wedding. She thought he was anxious about commitment. She thought it would pass. She didn't think it was anything like this."
Sofie's voice wavered and for a second the dam broke. Her eyes glossed; she swiped at them with the heel of her hand. Brendon wanted to step in, to wrap an arm around her shoulders and make the world make sense by proximity, but he was careful — comfort here had to be given in rationed measures.
He kept his tone steady. "Tell me everything, Sofie. Please, go on."
She inhaled and squared herself. "I spoke with his cousins, with a friend from his university days, with a bartender off the quay. Most of it was noise — kids that grow up together, debts, the usual. One name kept surfacing in the shadows: Alex. Alex Pryce. He was — apparently — down on his luck. Gambling debts. He'd been seen the night before Seth disappeared. Last person to leave with him, according to the bartender who stayed sober enough to remember. After that Alex… just vanished."
Brendon let the name sit. Alex Pryce: a ring in the pattern. "Did anyone see where he went?"
"No," Sofie said. "He had no phone contact after leaving Seth. No one has been able to trace him. The bank transactions has been stopped too. His flat was emptied by someone else. Cleaned out. Quick. Like someone had planned a disappear."
"So he is our prime suspect, for now. Someone from whom we can extract the truth." Brendon said, eyes scanning the dark edge of the dock, thinking transport and trade. "He could be in serious debt, he could be frightened, or he could be cooperating."
Sofie's jaw tightened. "Or he was a scapegoat dragged in and then chucked away. But I have a place for a head-start. He was supposed to meet someone in South Wales. There's a pub — the Old Canary, twenty kilometers out. They listed him on a tab. He had drinks there on the night he was last seen."
Brendon's hands found the satchel and he flexed his fingers against the leather as if counting out decisions. "You got an address?"
"Coordinates... to be specific. " she said. "And a rough time: he was seen there late that night. I pulled CCTV from nearby roads, but most of it's a blur; few cameras are useful that far out. But I can't go. Chief's watching me. He'd scalp me if I left the city in my... current condition." Her voice was flat with the edge of betrayal. "You have to go instead."
He looked at her then, and for a moment the world reduced to the soft curl of her grief. "You sure this isn't a dead end?"
"It's the only lead that I have so far." she said. "Alex Pryce is the only name that keeps cropping up when people try to remember the last faces Seth smiled at. So go, check it out. Quietly. And Brendon — don't trust anyone who laughs the wrong way. As far as I figured out, Pryce has friends who are too quick with tongues."
He worked his brain on it: distance, time, routes that avoided tolls and cameras, a train that might track him more than a car. South Wales was a long reach, but reach was precisely the thing he had become good at when he'd been a thief.
"You don't have to do this alone, okay." Sofie said. "If it goes sideways, I can try to open other channels here. I don't want you to be a body they can file away."
"No promises," he said. "But I'll be careful." He could not offer her anything better. He had been running alone long enough that other people's lives weighed heavier than his. He knew how to move where a man could vanish and still be useful. He'd gone from stealing to law to fugitive — now this: private hunter for a grieving woman with a badge.
Sofie hesitated, then lowered her voice to something that felt like a prayer. "Brendon — be careful. Don't let this become the thing that finishes you for good."
He looked at her, at the hard edges of her face softened by the waterlight. "I know how to survive, so don't worry about me." he said. "But maybe this time I'll do it with a purpose."
She gave him a distracted, small smile. It was enough. He rose and shouldered the satchel, emptying it of the wooden tubes and tucking the photos into a waterproof sleeve she'd given him earlier. He left the rest behind: a wolf with fewer burdens looks less tempting.
They parted with no ceremony. Sofie went back to the city she'd pledged to the badge — though for the first time since he'd known her, he thought she might betray it for a higher kind of truth. Brendon started walking toward the tram that would take him toward the outer road, toward South Wales and a pub called the Old Canary. The city slid away behind him with its smoke and its teeth.
On the tram he looked out at the suburbs scrolling past like a filmstrip. He tried to arrange his thoughts into a sequence of steps — what to bring, what to leave, who to ask first when he arrived. He had a name now — Alex Pryce — and a place, and the kind of permission that can make him move.
Night came before he was ready for it, and it was full of the kind of silence that suggested plans. He had a hunt in front of him, and the ledger he kept no longer wanted to stay tidy.