Chapter 8
Chapter 8
Elara and Kael scout the rail yard dead drop site at noon, confirming sightlines and cover positions. At ten that night, they find Tobias's signal—a chalk mark on a junction box—but the meet goes wrong when Collectors arrive. They extract Tobias under fire and escape through the rail yard, learning he was tortured for information about Elara and Kael's plans but gave them nothing. Tobias reveals the Collectors have moved up the Meridian dinner to tomorrow night, drastically compressing their timeline to reach Desmond Crane.
The rail yard sat south of the industrial corridor, a rusted vein of track and gravel cutting between two defunct manufacturing plants. We arrived at noon exactly, Kael driving the borrowed sedan with the window cracked despite the cold—his tell for hyperawareness, I'd learned. Needing the air like needing a second pair of eyes.
He parked on a service road half a block east. We walked in separately, me first, him trailing by three minutes. Standard counter-surveillance. Even alone the habit calmed something in me—the ritual of operational thinking smoothing over everything else that lived unexamined beneath it.
The yard opened into a grid of track beds, some raised on rotting ties, others flush with ground level where weeds had colonized the gaps. A chain-link fence bordered the north side, torn open at one point where someone had cut the links and bent them back. The gap was wide enough for a person. Narrow enough to control.
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