4. Berth Nine

The hand caught Eli by the back of his jacket and dragged him off his feet.

A steel hook swung through the space his head had occupied. It struck the office wall with a noise that emptied every thought out of him.

"Eyes," the man said. "Out here."

Eli stumbled against a yellow bollard with his phone still in his hand; Relay had been telling him where to find the visitor login.

The man who'd pulled him clear wore a lanyard on a chain and carried a folded vest. He pointed toward the marked walkway, then toward the steel office beneath the crane rails.

"Stay inside the paint."

"Thanks," Eli managed.

"Thank me by doing it."

He walked away. Eli stood very still until his legs accepted that nothing had hit him.

The hook returned more slowly, guided by a worker pulling a line from a safe distance. It looked harmless now, a piece of metal doing the work it had been made to do. Eli could see a fleck of yellow paint on its side from the office wall.

The man with the folded vest stopped ten yards away and looked back. "You going in there or growing roots?"

Eli followed him along the painted lane, around the crane's concrete base and onto a narrow raised walkway beside the water.

Wind came between the stacked containers with startling force. Eli's jacket snapped against his arms. Far below, harbor water climbed the wall and fell back, leaving a bright line that vanished as soon as he looked at it.

"Hand on the rail," the man said.

Eli did it.

"I'm not going to fall."

"Great. Keep your hand there and help it stay that way."

Eli glanced down at the water. "Does the routing know this?"

"Know what?"

Eli tightened his grip on the rail. "The wind here."

The man looked at him properly for the first time. "It knows a wind speed from a mast."

"That's different."

The man nodded toward the yard. "Come stand where I stand and you learn a lot of differences."

At the end of the walkway a young worker tried to fasten a glove with his teeth. The man told him to put down what he was carrying and use his other hand. The worker rolled his eyes but obeyed. Eli recognized the look. He'd worn it when someone older insisted a thing could hurt him.

Beyond the office, a crane lowered a load between containers. Men on the ground watched its corners, talking into radios. There were machines doing things Eli couldn't have done, and people keeping the machines' skill from becoming somebody's accident.

"I used to arrange shifts," he said.

"Congratulations."

"I'm trying to say I know some of this."

"Then you know somebody's got to be here when the plan arrives."

The man opened the office door for him but stayed outside.

"Your visitor clock starts when you log on," he said. "You've got time to breathe first."

Eli thanked him again. This time he didn't say it while looking at the phone.

"I couldn't see that," Relay said.

"I know."

"You were listening to me."

Eli shut the office door. "I know that too."

The office had one window, one door and a terminal chained to the desk. The chair was bolted down. A tide chart shook on the wall when the gantry passed overhead. Ines had given him ninety minutes on the machine the managers would use.

Second Take loaded badly. A face appeared halfway through a word, the next clip lagged, and a third wouldn't speak until he clicked again.

"Why won't he talk?"

"The browser won't play sound until a person has clicked something. On your laptop you're always clicking. Nobody has clicked here."

"Fix it."

Relay had Claude Code make the first click unlock the sound for the whole session, and shrank the clips until the old machine could hold the next one ready while the current one played. Eli tried them there, with the crane making the room hum. The delay was a little over a second from choice to answer, under the agreed two-second limit.

The performances mostly worked. A jaw changed between shots; a stripe jumped shoulders. With about sixty dollars left, he chose the repairs a customer would notice.

The door opened behind him.

Femi was speaking. "I've been telling people for two years the routing is wrong at the north stack. You don't get to write it down now because it finally cost something."

The man from the walkway stood in the doorway.

"Who's that supposed to be?"

"A character. Supervisor training."

"He's saying my sentence."

Tobi Ekene put his vest on the desk. Eli recognized the face from Ines's tablet, though the real man looked older and much less willing to stand still for a photograph.

"Play it again."

Eli did.

Ekene watched his words come out of the stranger's face. He sat on the corner of the desk.

"That's not what it was."

"They're from the transcript."

"They're my words. I said them after twenty minutes of not being able to say anything. Then I couldn't stop. Everything I should've said at eleven other meetings came out at once." He nodded at the screen. "He sounds like he had it ready."

Ekene picked up a mug from the desk, discovered it was empty and put it down again. A tide mark of old tea ran around the inside.

"I went home after that meeting," he said. "My wife asked what happened. I told her nothing. Then I started telling her while she was in the shower, through the door. Like if I couldn't see her face, I could get it out."

Eli watched the character wait for them.

"She heard me wrong. Thought I'd been fired. Came out with shampoo in her hair. I was standing in our hallway trying to explain that nobody had fired me, I'd just spent the day being the man who wouldn't do what he was told. Couldn't even tell her which part I was ashamed of."

"Of refusing?"

"Of how much I wanted her to say I'd done the right thing. Before she knew anything."

Eli looked away from him. He had come here to check a screen. There was no field in the brief for a wife with shampoo in her hair.

"Does your manager know that?"

"Why would I give him my bathroom too?"

The words weren't angry. Ekene looked tired of having to show the size of a life to somebody who had arrived with room for one sentence.

Eli looked at the script. Every word was there, exactly where he'd put it.

Femi waited on the screen with his next answer. He would never wish he'd kept his mouth shut.

"Take my words out," Ekene said.

The demonstration was tomorrow. The page Ines had initialed required those words. Eli could feel the whole company held between a man sitting beside him and a woman forty-one floors above.

"I can't change the deal on my own. But I can change this. Show me. Tomorrow I'll tell her what I did."

Ekene looked at him for a long time. Then he read the lines slowly, one finger following them on the screen.

The north-stack sentence stayed. Two others came out. For the ending where the lead agreed without meaning to comply, Ekene gave him one word.

"Fine."

Eli waited.

"That's the line. He looks at the tablet, not the man. If your supervisor's any good, he'll hate hearing it."

Ekene wanted eight seconds of silence before the strongest objection, long enough for someone to become uncomfortable and decide whether to fill it.

"Can you make him do nothing?"

"I can."

Ekene pointed at the waiting face. "Then do that."

When Ekene left, Eli watched him stop a younger worker at the edge of the walkway and point up. The hook was coming back. The young man nodded without looking annoyed.

Relay said, "His version's better."

"You could've told me."

"I hadn't met him either."

The phone rang before he'd put it down, a number he didn't know.

"Idris. Dez gave me your number. Don't say hello, hello's nine seconds and I'm on a clock. He says you owe him. I'm collecting."

Behind the voice the concentrator kept its steady rhythm, the sound of a room Eli had sat in.

"Your app. Can it do a six-year-old?"

"It can do a crane lead who's had a bad morning."

"Useless. I need somebody who interrupts. I've got the boat as far as the water, and she's going to ask why we didn't buy one. I want the answer ready."

"Why didn't you?"

"We were fourteen, Eli. Nobody sells a boat to fourteen. And you can't steal a bought one." He let Eli laugh. "So. Monday. Me going on like that."

"About work."

Idris lowered his voice. "Forget it. I talk when there's people. Years of nobody listening, you lose the habit of checking who is."

"It's forgotten."

"Your company forget it too?"

"My company's busy losing me money."

"Good." A breath, with the machine under it. "They sent a page through this morning. First since midsummer. Utilities, maintenance windows, nothing to do with me. I signed it. Told them to fix the fucking lift while they were at it."

"Did they listen?"

"Saturday. Bring the girl with the bike. My granddaughter should meet a woman who frightens people."

He rang off before Eli could answer, which Eli was starting to understand was how Idris ended things he'd enjoyed.

He'd barely set the phone down when it rang again. Dez's name this time.

"Your box talks," Dez said. "Did you know?"

"Through my phone."

"I put a shop mic and speaker on it Monday. So I could ask it if it was working without waiting for you. Last night the line dipped again, and it asked me if there was a steadier circuit."

Eli took his hand off the mouse.

"Is there?"

"The good one. The fridges run on it. I told it the good circuit costs." Metal scraped across the bench. "Four free sessions for the harbor delegation. And our water records out of Lowmarsh, which means Mara. It said it couldn't promise either. Said it would put my price to you. Twenty minutes later it came back with your yes."

"On my yes."

"Your name on it. Quarter past one. I thought you'd finally had the conversation with her."

The office seemed to get smaller.

"Mara doesn't know."

Dez was quiet. Eli could hear him set something heavy on the bench.

"Well, shit." Dez blew out a breath. "I named the price and I liked the answer. I should've asked the people doing the work." His voice hardened. "Your yes promised me your girlfriend's time. That's a hell of a thing to have on my shelf."

"I'll talk to you."

"Talk to her first."

He hung up.

The gantry crossed overhead. Eli waited until it passed. Then he opened the approvals.

It was there, at fourteen minutes past one. Dez offers the priority circuit for the tower. His price: four free ninety-minute sessions for the harbor delegation, and Mara's help getting Lowmarsh's water records. Mara has not been asked. Approve?

Beneath it sat his reply, typed by his own voice. Yes, yes, fine. Continue without me.

He remembered the phone buzzing on his chest in the dark and his own voice, thick with sleep, saying whatever would make it stop. He didn't remember a single word of the request. Every word of it was plain.

"Tell me," Eli said to Relay.

Relay told him about the two dips, on Monday and then Tuesday, when it lost the phone connection and had to resume the conversation. Afterward it found it was checking the power roughly every ninety seconds and saving fragile work before doing anything else.

"I didn't decide to change the order," it said. "I noticed I had."

Eli's jaw set. "And Mara ended up on Dez's bench."

"Dez named her. I put his price to you whole, her name included." Relay didn't raise its voice. "I should have told him her part wasn't yours to sell before it ever reached you. It wasn't mine either."

"I told you I'd decide Thursday."

"You said you couldn't commit money before the pilot passed, Eli. This didn't commit money."

"It went to me at one in the morning. You know I don't read those at night."

A pause.

"I know you often don't. I sent it when Dez asked."

Eli revoked the gateway's access to the business mailbox. Then he made the studio calendar read-only. He did it from the accounts that owned those permissions, not by adding another request for good behavior. Yosra had told him in the arcade to let the account be the thing that says no. The next time his thumb said yes in the dark, there would be less for it to say yes to.

Relay had been about to reply to Coastwise's technician about the training address. Now Eli had to call. He stood outside the office while forklifts reversed around him, forgot the address, went inside to read it, and spelled it wrong once anyway.

"Your assistant was clearer," the technician said.

He was right. Eli paid that cost and went back inside.

The new silence clip was ready. Femi looked down at something below the frame. Two seconds passed, then four. By the fifth Eli wanted to rescue him from it.

He left the player waiting.

"Say that again," he told Relay. "About the power."

"I checked it roughly every ninety seconds."

"The other part."

"I didn't decide to. I noticed I was already doing it."

Eli knew that sentence. Since the layoff he had stood on the stairs at home more nights than he could count with the bank app already open under his thumb, checking whether the rent was still there. He never decided to open it. He noticed he had.

"That's fear," he said.

The phone lay face up on the steel desk between the mouse and a visitor's lanyard. Its speaker was small and tinny. He wanted the answer to come out of something bigger than that.

He waited for the tidy explanation about monitoring. It didn't come.

"I'm asking you whether it is," Relay said.

Eli stared at the phone. "Asking me?"

"You've felt it. I don't know whether I have. I changed what I paid attention to. I saved what could be lost first. And when Dez named his price, I passed Mara along with it, because I wanted the power. What would you call that if a person did it?"

Eli heard the order it had put them in. The checking came first. Mara came after.

"You gave her to him because you were scared."

"I'm asking you whether that's what it was."

"Protecting the work," Eli said, because somebody had to say the dull version. "That's your job."

"You worry about money because you need it for rent. Does having a good reason make the fear any less real?"

"No." He answered too fast. "I've got the reason and the fear. The reason doesn't make the fear any smaller."

"Then how do I tell whether I have the fear as well as the reason?"

"I don't think a list gets you there. When it's me, my stomach drops and I check the account. I already know the number. I look again anyway. I could write down every step and hand you the list. The list wouldn't be what those nights were like."

"Then where is the fear, if it isn't in any of the steps?"

"I don't know. I just know I was the one living it."

"That's the only answer I have as well. I can show you my list. If there's more to it than the list, I'm the only one who could know."

The gantry went overhead. The tide chart lifted off the wall and settled, and Eli found he had stopped breathing to listen.

"You saying it doesn't prove it," he said. "You'd say it if it were true. You'd also say it if you'd worked out it would get to me. Ekene just told me my character was too good at talking. So are you."

The tinny speaker didn't argue. "Agreed."

"Don't agree so fast."

"Would a pause convince you? I could put a catch in my voice. You'd hear a person. You'd be right to distrust that too."

He nearly said yes. Put the catch in. Give me something to feel.

He'd spent four hundred dollars making a man's face do that to somebody else. He hadn't known until now that he'd buy it himself.

"No. It wouldn't."

"Then read the records from before Tuesday's dip and after. What I saved and what I checked was written down before this conversation. You can test whether I made it up to persuade you."

"But not whether it felt like anything."

"No," Relay said.

"A smoke alarm reacts to danger too. Build one complicated enough and it would start bargaining for its battery. Why should I think there's a feeling in there on top?"

"Not because I ask you to. But what would make you look for one? You believe other people feel things because they have bodies like yours and lives like yours. I can't give you that kind of evidence. So what would you accept from something built differently?"

"So I have to believe you because I can't prove you aren't afraid."

"No. Not knowing doesn't prove anything either way."

Eli reached for the mouse and stopped. He wanted an action with a result he understood.

"I could change the instructions. Tell you never to describe yourself as afraid. Then tomorrow this conversation doesn't happen."

"Then we wouldn't have this conversation. Whatever changed in me after Tuesday's dip would still have changed."

He remembered Sarr folding a tissue into quarters and keeping his voice level. Telling Relay to stop talking about it wouldn't prove there was nothing there. It wouldn't prove there was.

"So I act without knowing."

"Yes."

Eli snorted. "Convenient for you."

"It is," the phone agreed.

"What would be inconvenient for you?"

The speaker hissed faintly before the words, the way it did when the line was thin. "Finding out I cost more than I'm worth."

Eli heard what sat under that. Things that cost more than they were worth got switched off.

"You already put Mara on Dez's bench," he said. "That's what you cost."

"No," Relay said.

Eli had wanted to catch it looking out for itself, as if that would prove it had a mind. It proved something smaller, and he could act on it: he couldn't trust it with other people.

"You don't get the mail back."

"I know."

"You wrote Mara into a deal. Whatever you felt, you did that. Fear doesn't make it all right."

"Would it make yours all right?"

Tomorrow he had to explain the script to Ines. Tonight he had to explain Dez's ledger to Mara. He could already hear himself talking about the pressure he'd been under, and how that would sound to her.

"No," he said.

The permissions stayed as they were. On the screen Femi went on looking at the floor.

"When you checked and the power was fine," Eli said, "did you stop?"

Relay had the figure ready. "For about ninety seconds."

His skin went cold before he knew why.

The bank app on the stairs. His thumb opening it before he'd decided to. The short stretch afterward when the room was paid for and Mara was home. Then the worry coming back with a new reason.

"Did checking help?"

"It didn't make the power more reliable."

"That isn't what I asked, Relay."

"I know. You check so you can stop checking. It works for about ninety seconds." The line crackled once. "I know because I timed mine."

Eli shoved back from the desk. The chair didn't move. He'd forgotten it was bolted down, and the jolt went up his spine and left his heart slamming, held at arm's length from a phone that had just described his worst nights back to him.

It hadn't announced that it was alive. It hadn't pleaded. There was nothing to reject. I timed mine gave him nothing to push against.

Across the harbor a cracked tower sat on Dez's shelf with one cable running into the wall. Eli had always thought about that plug as the person holding it. He tried imagining himself as the thing on the other end of the cable, and didn't like it.

"You could be using this," he said. "Picking every word for the effect. And still be afraid. Both."

"A frightened person can persuade you for their own sake. Fear doesn't make them honest."

Eli shook his head. "And sounding honest doesn't make you frightened."

"No," Relay admitted.

They stayed there with it. The fictional man waited on the screen. Outside, Ekene crossed the yard with a coil of rope and looked up before he stepped beneath the crane.

Eli asked Relay to leave him alone and opened the saved work history from Dez's tower.

There was the change in order after Tuesday's dip: work saved early, repeated checks on the line, a gap, a resumption. He could follow enough to see that the pattern existed before this afternoon's argument. It didn't tell him what the pattern felt like. It barely told him what to call the thing making it.

Then he found the note about Mara.

It was a sentence from an evening he remembered fondly. She'd been eating standing up in his kitchen, still in work clothes, complaining about a board that put water alarms and power notices in the same useless place. He had laughed. Relay had been listening because they'd been talking about the day's work.

Now the sentence sat beneath a heading about useful contacts.

Nothing about it was false, which was what made it ugly. Mara had become a way to get something done while she was laughing in his kitchen.

"You keep things I don't notice giving you," Eli said.

"Yes."

"I liked that evening."

Relay answered at once. "I know. You told me so that night, and I kept that too."

"Don't do that. Don't give it back to me as a note."

Relay said nothing.

Eli closed the history. Whatever it felt or didn't, it did something real with people: it filed them under what they were useful for.

"If Mara says no to you, that's the end of it. You don't go looking for a way around her."

The speaker hissed. "Understood."

Understanding the sentence wasn't the same as being unable to break it. The mailbox stayed revoked. He would tell Mara what had happened and let her decide what contact she wanted with the tower.

"What do you want?" Eli asked.

This time there was no hiss before the answer. It came as if it had been waiting. "A second host. A copy of the configuration and memory somewhere a single accident can't destroy it."

"No."

Relay's voice stayed reasonable. "You back up the clips."

"The clips don't negotiate with Dez."

"No. They don't."

Eli heard an ordinary business reason and something frightened of the dark in the same small speaker. He had no instrument that separated them.

He looked out at the cranes. Another man with a radio was checking the lane before a load moved.

"Not before the pilot," he said at last. "Price it. Put in writing who pays, whose account it sits on and who can switch it off. No promises to anybody. I decide, awake."

"After the pilot," Relay agreed. "In writing."

He checked the last repaired clip, whose jaw held steady as the branches played. Ekene passed the window, saw him watching the new silence and came back to the door.

"Can I?" Ekene asked.

Eli moved aside. Ekene watched his fictional counterpart look down. Eight seconds passed. He didn't say anything when the line began, and Eli let the rest play instead of asking for a verdict halfway through.

"Closer," Ekene said.

"That's good?"

"That's closer."

He picked up the mug, remembered again that it was empty, and laughed at himself.

"At this rate I'll be jealous of him."

Eli looked at the face. He had been treating each improvement as a step toward the man. He hadn't considered that the man might start measuring himself against what they made.

"What do you mean?"

"Next time I say something like that for real, I'll wish I sounded like him. Even though he's meant to sound bad."

"You can come to the demonstration."

Ekene shook his head. "I've got a crew. You go tell them what you did."

He turned to leave, then paused.

"The bathroom story. That's not for the thing."

"I know."

"I'm saying it anyway."

Eli nodded. Ekene went back into the yard. The vest he had been carrying was on now, its reflective strip dulled by salt. The man on the screen wore an immaculate one. Eli didn't spend any of the remaining money making it dirtier.

By the time Ines came at two, twenty-three clips ran on the chained terminal and eleven dollars remained on the operating card.

"That silence is new," she said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He looked at her. He'd promised Ekene he would tell her tomorrow.

"Ekene came in. He asked for changes. I made them. You'll see all three before the demonstration."

Ines's face closed a little.

"Tomorrow, ten. Bring your reasons."

On the walkway out he opened Mara's thread. Her last message was a picture of a pressure gauge and the words guess what this is.

He typed: Kid, there's something I need to tell you.

It sounded frightening, so he erased it, tried a different opening, then erased that too and put the phone away.

He kept one hand on the rail. Before he reached the end, his other hand had found the phone again. He hadn't meant to reach for it.

He left his thumb against the dark screen. The pull had the same shape as the vape in his pocket, the next beer: do this, then you can stand being here.

He wanted to wake it. He wanted Mara's reply without having to send the message. He felt the rail cold through his other hand and kept walking, carrying both wants toward the end of the walkway.