The visitor did not announce himself.
He simply stood where the dock had made room, close enough that Abel could see the stitching on his cuffs and the slight damp on his boots from a plank that should have been dry. Abel hated the damp more than the careful stitching. Damp meant the visitor had crossed the dock without being slowed by the same small irritations that slowed other men. It meant the dock's inconveniences were not for him.
Matthieu's hands tightened together in front of his chest. He did not step back. He looked as if he had forgotten that stepping back was allowed.
Silas stayed at Abel's shoulder. Not shielding him. Present in the way a wall was present even when you did not lean on it. Abel did not know whether to be grateful for that presence or resentful.
The visitor's gaze moved from Matthieu to Abel. It lingered on Abel's notebook, then returned to Abel's face as if confirming that the face belonged to the object. "Abel," the visitor said.
Abel heard his name the way he heard a clerk read a line from a ledger. It was not hostile. It was official. "Yes," Abel said.
He regretted answering quickly. Quick answers were compliance. Slow answers were suspicion. The visitor had arranged a pace Abel could not win.
The visitor nodded once, as if Abel's voice had been expected. "You were present yesterday," he said. "During an irregularity at the registry."
Abel felt Matthieu flinch beside him. A small sound escaped Matthieu's throat, not quite a word. Abel did not look at him. Looking would turn this into a shared disaster, and Abel did not know how to protect anyone else while he was still learning how to stand in his own body.
"I corrected a record," Abel said. The visitor's expression did not shift. "You altered what was written." Abel's jaw tightened. "It was wrong." The visitor regarded him for a beat longer than necessary. Then he reached into his coat and took out a narrow strip of paper.
The strip was clean. It did not curl at the edges. It did not carry smudges from fingers. Abel had handled paper all his life; he knew how quickly paper became lived-in. This strip looked as if it had been kept away from air.
A stamp marked one end. Abel could not read the symbol from this angle, but he felt the precision of it. The stamp's ink was dark and crisp. Too crisp. The mark did not look like an emblem. It looked like an instrument.
"Verification," the visitor said, and held the strip out. Abel did not reach for it.
He watched the visitor's hand instead. The fingers were steady. The wrist did not shake. The paper did not flutter. It looked like an offer. It felt like a hook.
Matthieu swallowed audibly. "Abel," he whispered. Abel kept his eyes on the strip. He said, without turning his head, "Did you sign anything." Matthieu's breath hitched. "No," he said. "No, I swear." Abel believed him. Abel also knew belief did not matter. The visitor waited, patient in a way that felt trained. A dock bell rang.
The sound was sharp and ordinary, and around them the dock shifted its stance. A cart rolled forward, not toward them, but enough to narrow the lane beside the warehouses. A sailor stepped into a gap between barrels and began tying a line that could have been tied anywhere. A porter lifted a crate and set it down again as if he had forgotten where he meant to put it.
No one looked directly at Abel. People looked where work told them to look. That was the point. The bell did not command attention toward a spectacle. It reallocated space.
Abel felt the space tighten anyway. The visitor's hand remained extended. "Take it," the visitor said.
Abel forced himself to speak carefully. "What happens if I take it." The visitor's tone did not change. "You accept evaluation." "By you."
"By authority," the visitor said, as if authority were a location rather than a person. "You will answer questions. You will be assessed for containment risk."
Matthieu made a small sound and stopped it. His hands clenched harder, knuckles pale.
Abel's stomach rolled. Containment risk. The phrase sounded like dock vocabulary. It sounded like a way to talk about rotted wood. Abel had never heard it applied to a person.
Silas spoke, mild and controlled. "You are issuing notices on dockside."
The visitor turned his gaze to Silas.
The gaze lingered slightly longer than it had lingered on Matthieu. Abel noticed it and felt a cold irritation. Recognition without context was worse than suspicion. "Yes," the visitor said.
Silas's eyes went to the strip. "Under what charter." The visitor's expression remained calm. "The city's." Silas nodded once, as if accepting the answer for what it was. "And you plan to write this into dock record." The visitor did not respond directly. He looked back at Abel and held the strip out again. "Take it." Abel lifted his hand.
He lifted it slowly, palm up, as if choosing reason. His fingers stopped a fraction short of the paper.
He held the pause there. A suspended courtesy.
If the visitor pressed the strip into his hand now, it would not look like acceptance. It would look like guidance. Abel did not know if anyone else would see that difference. Abel needed the difference anyway. The visitor's eyes narrowed slightly.
Behind the visitor, the two men in clean boots stood near the eastern berth with a ledger between them. They were not counting now. They were watching. One held a pencil behind his ear as if to remind the world he could write whenever needed. The other's hands hung empty at his sides. Abel disliked the emptiness. An empty hand could become a grip.
Silas's stance shifted. Abel felt it more than he saw it. Silas turned a small angle toward the tally table.
The dock official stood there with his ledger open. His pencil scratched steadily, too steady. Abel watched the pencil move and felt a sudden nausea that had nothing to do with distance. Ink could make this real.
Silas spoke, not loud, but pitched so the official could hear. "Hold." The pencil stopped.
It was not a dramatic pause. It was a pause that felt like someone refusing to breathe.
The dock bell rang again, sharper than before. The sound came clean and immediate, and Abel saw heads turn, not toward Abel, but toward the tally table where the official's pencil had halted. People noticed when work faltered. They did not need to know why.
The dock official looked up. His face tightened with annoyance and fear, both present at once. "What."
Silas answered as if he were correcting a mundane error. "Your tally is wrong. You logged the eastern berth twice."
The dock official frowned and looked down, pencil hovering. He scanned his ledger as if it might absolve him. Abel watched the official's eyes flick left and right and felt, suddenly, how fragile routine was. Routine held until someone forced it to justify itself.
One of the clean-booted men took a step toward the table. The visitor's gaze flicked to the official, then back to Silas. "Do not interfere."
Silas did not look offended. He looked mildly amused, which Abel found strange in a moment like this, until Abel realized the amusement was weaponized. It made the visitor's command sound petty.
"I'm correcting," Silas said. "If you want the dock to keep believing you, you should allow corrections."
The visitor returned his attention to Abel. "Take the strip." Abel lowered his hand. "No," Abel said.
He said it plainly, and the plainness frightened him because it sounded like a decision. Abel did not feel decisive. He felt cornered.
The visitor nodded once, as if Abel had confirmed a prediction. "Then you become deliberate."
The phrase struck Abel harder than it should have. Deliberate sounded like intent, and intent sounded like guilt.
The dock official's pencil began to move again.
Abel watched the pencil scratch and felt a pulse of panic. The official was writing while Abel stood here. The record was being made while Abel still had breath in his lungs, while Abel still had the option to change nothing.
Silas's voice cut in, sharper now, still not a shout. "Do not write." The official's pencil froze mid-stroke. Ink pooled at the pen tip and made a dark dot. The official swallowed. "I am only tallying," he said, voice thin.
Silas's tone was controlled. "Then tally later. If you write now, you will have to explain later why you wrote while a verification was issued in a disputed lane."
The official's eyes flicked toward the visitor. The visitor looked back at him. The official's face went paler. He did not write. The pause became public. Abel felt it the way he felt weather changing, not with sight, but with pressure.
The visitor's jaw tightened slightly. It was the first visible strain Abel had seen. Abel moved.
He did not run. Running would make the story too clean.
He stepped sideways, aiming for the narrow channel between the tally table and a stack of crates. He had walked through such channels his whole life without thinking. Now he felt his shoulders calculate whether they could fit. The channel was too narrow. He went anyway.
His ribs scraped wood. Pain flared sharp and immediate. His notebook jammed against his side. The seam on the notebook's spine caught against his shirt and tugged. Abel hissed through his teeth and kept going, not because he was brave, but because pain was simpler than being held.
The visitor's hand brushed Abel's sleeve. The contact was light. The reaction was violent.
A cold drop went through his belly. His skin prickled. The distance between his shoulder and the crate edge stopped behaving. He felt it compress, then spring, then compress again, as if the world could not decide how wide he was allowed to be. He did not understand it.
He only understood that if the visitor's fingers closed around him, his body would not tolerate it. He would break, and not in the clean way the visitor meant. Abel let himself stumble.
He made the stumble look like a dock misstep. He pitched forward, slapped a hand to the crate, and used the wrongness in his body to slip through the rest of the channel.
A crate shifted under his palm. Someone shouted, not from fear, but from irritation. A dockhand's voice snapped, "Mind your hands." The shout drew eyes. Abel felt attention thicken. Silas moved in the same instant.
He did not sprint after Abel. He stepped toward the tally table and spoke in a tone that sounded like dock authority even though it was not.
"Hold your line," Silas said, pitched to carry. "If you write now, you will write wrong."
The dock official stared at him, pencil trembling.
One of the clean-booted men reached the table. He leaned close to the official's ear and murmured something. Abel did not hear it. Abel saw the official's face tighten, saw his throat work as he swallowed, saw the pencil hover like a knife deciding where to land.
The visitor stepped after Abel. He did not hurry. He did not need to. The dock made room for him in small obedient shifts. Abel stumbled into a rope coil.
The rope tightened around his ankle and nearly pulled him down. Abel yanked his leg up and the loop cinched harder, scraping his boot and catching on the heel.
He bent fast, hands clumsy. His hand closed on air first. The misjudgment made his stomach lurch. He reached again and found rough fiber. He tore the loop open and dragged his foot free. He looked up. The visitor was already there.
Abel felt anger flare, quick and useless. Arrival like that was worse than speed. It felt like inevitability. "Stop," the visitor said.
Abel rose into a crouch instead of standing. He kept his weight low, ready to move, though he did not trust his legs. A dock bell rang.
The sound came from behind and above, and Abel felt the dock respond around him. A cart rolled forward at the worst angle. A sailor stepped into the narrow lane Abel had been aiming for. A porter swung a crate off a shoulder and set it down in exactly the space Abel would have needed.
The dock did not trap him deliberately. It trapped him by doing its work.
Silas's voice reached Abel from somewhere to his left. It was low, clipped, human. "Not straight," Silas said. "Not clean." Abel swallowed.
He moved sideways toward a staggered line of barrels. He slid between two, shoulder brushing wood. The smell of brine and old wine filled his nose. His foot slipped on a damp plank and his knee slammed hard.
Pain bloomed bright and stupid. He bit down on it and kept moving. The visitor followed, calm as ever.
Abel saw, ahead, a cart loaded with sacks. The sacks bore a merchant mark Abel did not recognize, a crude sigil stamped on coarse cloth. The cart blocked a lane. A porter stood with hands on the handle, waiting for a signal.
Abel's mind snagged on the porter's waiting. Waiting was a hinge. Hinges could be pushed. Silas reached the porter first.
Silas did not touch him. He did not need to. He spoke with the right kind of nuisance in his voice. "Don't move that," he said. "Berth count is disputed."
The porter frowned. "What." Silas's tone sharpened, still ordinary, still human. "You want to be paid, or you want your name on a delay report." The porter's face tightened. He froze. The cart remained.
Abel slipped around the cart's left side, squeezed between sacks and a mooring post. His shoulder scraped cloth. Dust rose. He coughed and tasted grit. The visitor approached the cart.
He slowed for half a heartbeat. Not because the cart was a wall. Because stepping around it made pursuit visible. A man stepping around an obstacle looked like a man who wanted someone.
Abel felt, with a sudden grim clarity, that this was what Silas had been buying. Not distance. Visibility. The visitor could do what he wanted most easily when no one could describe what they had seen.
The ship bell rang out over the water, low and rolling.
The sound came from the Peregrine Quiet. Abel did not turn his head. He did not have time. Still, he felt the sound settle in his bones like a reference point, something outside the dock's bell tower.
Bodies shifted toward the ship bell for a heartbeat. That heartbeat loosened attention. Abel moved on it.
He cut toward the warehouse corridor, a narrower lane where crates were stacked in taller piles. The lane was tight, and Abel's body hated tightness now, but tightness meant fewer carts, fewer ropes, fewer accidental obstacles placed by honest work.
He ran, not full speed, because his body did not allow it. He ran with desperate economy, feet placed where he could, breath tearing in his throat. The visitor followed.
Abel heard the visitor's boots behind him. Still too quiet.
Silas's voice rose again, pitched toward the tally table and the watchers near it. "Dock official," he called. "If you certify this as an incident under dock authority, you certify his authority. Do you want your name under that."
The dock official's voice rose in panic. "I am only tallying." "Then tally later," Silas said. "Do not certify." The pencil did not move.
Abel reached the warehouse corridor and slipped into it.
The corridor narrowed him into a line. The walls on either side were close enough that Abel could smell damp stone. Nets hung from hooks and brushed his shoulders as he passed. He flinched at the touch, then forced himself not to. Flinching wasted motion.
He heard the visitor enter behind him.
The corridor made the visitor closer by default. Abel hated himself for choosing it. He had chosen the only route that made sense. Sense was predictable. A dock bell rang again.
The echo bounced off warehouse walls and returned at the wrong angle. The sound felt like it came from in front and behind at once.
The dock responded. Feet moved. Voices shifted. A cart wheel squealed as someone turned it away from the corridor mouth.
The corridor tightened in Abel's perception, not by sight, but by pressure. His gut turned. He felt the world try to compress him into a place his body could not occupy.
He dropped lower without thinking, a crouch that became almost a crawl for two steps, hands skimming the rough plank tops as he moved. The movement was humiliating. It was also effective. People did not look down unless something fell.
Abel emerged from the corridor into a wider dock lane and nearly collided with two men arguing.
Their argument was ordinary, stupid, and repetitive. Abel could not hear the words, only the pattern of speech. Short sentences. Repeated. Neither voice willing to stretch into anything longer. Abel shoved past them and the nearer man swung a hand toward him in anger. Abel ducked it by accident.
His body misjudged the distance of the swing and moved wrong, and the wrong movement saved him. The fist passed above his head and struck nothing. A curse rose. Heads turned. Witness risk thickened.
The visitor stepped into the wider lane behind Abel and stopped for the first time. Not retreat. Assessment.
Abel looked back and saw the visitor's gaze sweep the watching dockhands, the tally table, the cart lane, the ship masts beyond. Abel saw calculation in the visitor's eyes, quick and cold. How much can be done without producing a story.
Silas appeared at Abel's side again, breath steady, as if he had never been apart. Abel hated that steadiness. He also clung to it.
Silas spoke low. "He's constrained now." Abel's voice came out raw. "He can still take me." Silas's eyes stayed on the visitor. "Not cleanly." The visitor stepped forward anyway.
Abel's body reacted. His stomach dropped. The air seemed to thicken. The distance between him and the visitor wavered. Abel felt, not with sight but with sensation, that the world wanted him to misjudge, wanted him to step into the wrong place and be pinned there.
He refused. He moved sideways again, toward the water spur. The spur was a poor choice. Abel knew it as he chose it. It was narrow. It ended at a railing. It offered no clean exits. He chose it anyway because the dock had made a brief corridor toward it, and brief corridors were all Abel had. The visitor followed.
Silas followed, a half-step behind Abel now, not alongside. Abel reached the spur and backed into the railing. Cold wood pressed against his hip. Water breathed below. The smell rose in damp pulses. The visitor stopped three steps away. "Enough," the visitor said.
Abel's hands shook. He tightened his grip on the notebook under his arm until the leather creaked. The notebook felt heavier now, not because it had gained pages, but because Abel had purchased it with Matthieu's name.
Matthieu stood at the spur's entrance, eyes wide, hands still clasped too tight. He looked as if he were watching his own life become an error.
Silas's voice came from behind the visitor, mild again. "You cannot do this here without making it a dock incident."
The visitor's gaze flicked toward the watchers beyond the spur, then returned to Abel. "Then it will be a dock incident."
The sentence was calm. It was the first truly frightening thing the visitor had said, because it admitted he was willing to pay a price.
Abel's stomach rolled. He tasted bile. The visitor took a step forward. Abel felt the world tighten.
He did not wait for a second step. He moved. Not away. Toward.
He stepped toward the visitor as if trying to pass, forcing the moment into contact on Abel's terms. The movement was ugly and desperate and too close. The visitor's hand rose.
The fingers brushed Abel's sleeve again. Abel's body revolted.
The nausea hit like a shove. Distance snapped. Abel felt his own shoulder become too large for the gap, then too small, then too large again. He did not understand his power. He only understood the rule his body was writing into him. Do not be held.
He twisted under the visitor's reaching arm and shoved his way toward the spur opening.
His ribs scraped wood. His shoulder scraped coat. He stumbled out of the spur and into the wider lane.
A crate stack beside him shifted as his hand slapped it. A smaller crate slid. Someone shouted. The shout drew more eyes.
Silas's hand caught Abel's elbow for a heartbeat, steadying him just enough to keep him from falling flat. Silas released immediately, as if holding Abel too long would make Abel sick. "Move," Silas said. Abel moved. Not walking now. Running.
The dock had become a trap of honest work and obedient bells. The visitor had accepted the cost of being visible. Abel felt it in his bones. The moment had tipped. The next steps would not be negotiation. They would be capture or escape, and neither would be clean.
Abel ran toward the crane lane, breath tearing, ribs aching from scraping wood, notebook pressed hard under his arm like a shield that would not stop anything.
Behind him, the visitor followed with the calm persistence of a correction finally permitted to become force.
And the dock, still ordinary, still busy, still pretending nothing abnormal could happen on planks that had held thousands of lives, began to watch.