A few minutes passed in silence, giving Iris enough time to stretch her legs. Long enough to feel the tremor in her hands finally fade and get slightly annoyed. She paced a short line between two pillars, rolled her shoulders, shook out her wrists. The garage smelled like damp concrete and cooling metal. Somewhere a fan kicked on and off, indecisive.
The elevator chimed.
Iris looked up as the doors slid open.
Wulong scuttled out first, claws ticking against the floor. He spotted her immediately and trotted over, tail up, confidence unshaken. He bumped his head into her shin like this had all gone exactly according to plan.
She crouched and scratched behind his ears. “Yeah,” she murmured. “Miss me too.”
The man stepped out after Wulong, lighting up a smoke on his way. Same goon she saw when she entered through the front door.
He took a drag, exhaled sideways, and looked at her like this wasn’t the first time he’d watched someone walk away from trouble and straight into more of it.
“Busy night,” he said. “You and Wei.”
Iris shrugged, straightening. “Happens.”
“Mm.” He flicked ash onto the concrete, watching it scatter. “Guy like him doesn’t ask for favors unless the clock’s chewing on him. Means you’re either very good at what you do, or very bad at saying no.”
“Depends who’s asking.”
He smiled at that. Not unkind. Not impressed either. “Fair.”
He stood there a moment. Iris’s comm buzzed with a quick message, without a name or pleasantries, an address somewhere in Hoi Sham that concluded agreement set. She read it once, then locked the screen. Wulong sat and wrapped his tail neatly around his paws, watching the man like he was a puzzle with missing pieces.
The man nodded toward the bike. “Anyway. If you ever get tired of burning on the streets,” he said, casual as rain, “give me a call. There’s more to this business than running goods.”
Iris stood up, and picked up her helmet from the bike. Annoyingly, he sounded practical. He wasn’t right, but his words made sense.
Iris ooked at him properly for the first time.
“Nate,” she said, casually thinking how to get out of this situation. . “Your name’s Nate, right? Look, appreciate the offer, let me think about it.”
Without a ceremony she grabbed Wulong by the scruff and settled him on the tank of her bike, swung on the bike and with a smooth motion put the helmet on. Nate didn’t comment, just took another drag. She didn’t look back. Just lifted two fingers from the handlebar and rolled out into the thinning dark, the morning already lining up its questions.
The city thinned the way it always did near the water. Towers gave way to warehouses, glass to corrugated steel, offices to loading bays, forever open.
The air picked up a salt edge, diesel layered underneath, sharp enough to cut through the lingering smell of rain.
If Hong Kong ever pretended to sleep, docks didn’t try to fool anyone.Trucks lumbered in patient lines, forklifts darted between them, horns barking in short, irritated bursts. Everything moved on schedules older than most of the people following them.
Iris didn’t feel the need to announce herself. Not here. The address Wei sent pulled her off the main drag and along the edge of the docks, past crates stacked three, four high, logos burned and reburned until they were more suggestion than brand. Nets hung to dry from improvised lines, someone had taped a paper charm to a floodlight, its corners curled, ink run thin by salt air.
Hoi Sham smelled like fish, oil, and money that didn’t show up on ledgers. The wet market announced itself before it came into view, voices overlapping, prices shouted and countered, water sloshing across concrete that had never been meant to stay clean.
This early an auction for fish was already in full swing, voices rising and colliding in practiced rhythms, numbers barked and torn apart before they finished echoing. Crates slammed shut. Ice was shoveled and re-shoveled, melting faster than anyone bothered to care about. Unlike Wulong, Iris didn’t care about fish.
She rolled in and cut the engine, eyes scanning for a very specific element of the environment, not that obvious to anyone not knowing where to look.
Unsatisfied, she pulled off her helmet and glanced down at her comm, then back at the market.
“Alright,” she muttered. “Let’s see what passes for normal today.”
She walked.
One man knelt at the foot of his stall, scrubbing the concrete threshold with seawater and muttering under his breath, the words too fast to catch, more rhythm than prayer. His neighbor tore a talisman in half and yelped like he’d snapped a tendon, shaking his hand before laughing it off, embarrassed. A priest moved down the row with a bucket and a brush, daubing cinnabar onto fresh slips, sealing each with a flat slap of his palm before pinning it to wet brick. A delivery drone skimmed overhead, slowed, then corrected its course with a sharp whine, brushing straight through the hanging charms without reacting at all.
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Tarps sagged with leftover rain. Alleys stayed slick no matter how many times they were swept. Cleavers slammed into wood, wet and rhythmic, while smoke and brine turned the air thick enough to chew.
At one stall a woman with a prosthetic arm stacked garlic into careful pyramids, each bulb bound with red thread. People grabbed them faster as charms than food, shoving bills across the counter without looking at prices.
Iris paused at a spice stall and pinched a bit of star anise between her fingers. Sharp enough to sting her teeth when she sniffed it. Cut with cheap ash to make it “special.”
The vendor grinned, gold teeth catching the light. “Protection,” he said. “Good deal.”
She rolled her eyes and walked off before he could finish the pitch.
Victoria Harbour lay just beyond the break in the stalls, greasy and flat under the white glare of floodlights. Debris bobbed in lazy circles. Roof tiles. Prayer slips. The rear half of a scooter, paint scraped clean. Across the water, Hong Kong Island gleamed immaculate. Glass towers pristine. Holo-ads crisp and obedient. Corporate wards had held there, clean as doctrine.
Iris turned back into the noise.
She stopped at a stall selling dried fish heads and pointed at nothing in particular.
“Jack Ma,” she said. “You seen him?”
The vendor didn’t even look up. “Depends which one.”
“Funny,” Iris said. “This one’s breathing.”
A shrug. “People do that.”
She moved on.
“Jack Ma,” she tried again, a few stalls down.
A man laughed outright. Another shook his head without slowing his hands. One woman smiled too wide and said nothing at all.
Finally, a vendor with arms like rope and a face carved from weather looked up from gutting a grouper. He snorted.
“Jack Ma?” he said. “What do you want with that bastard?”
Iris leaned an elbow on the counter, close enough to smell fish oil ground into the wood. “Just to chat, you know.”
That earned her a proper look. The man’s knife paused mid-cut. His eyes moved over her jacket, the helmet under her arm, the way she stood like she wasn’t in a hurry but wasn’t planning to stay either.
“Hm.” He scraped the blade once along the table, slow, deliberate. “You picked a bad morning for a chat.”
“I’ve had worse.”
A corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. A concession. He hooked the gutted fish onto a nail and jerked his chin toward the back lanes of the market. “Come. Jack doesn’t like weather like this.”
He didn’t wait for her to follow, as they moved off the auction floor into the service lanes where the noise dulled and the air cooled. Crates crowded in close, stacked until their labels contradicted each other. Power cables snaked across the ground, some live, some dead, all pretending to be temporary. Water ran in shallow channels toward drains that clogged faster than anyone bothered to clear them.
He stopped at a shipping crate that looked exactly like the rest of the shipping crates in the whole yard. Dented corners, scraped paing, sun-bleached shipping codes and inspection stickers layered over each other until none of them meant anything.He pried open the locking bar, and door gave with an ear-piercing squeak that was instantly drowned in low hum of the crane passing overhead and reverse signal of an automated dolly.
The crate was mostly empty, the floor scuffed and ringed with salt, a few plastic chairs stacked against one wall in an afterthought. Someone had dragged a tarp inside during the storm and never bothered to take it back out. It felt less like storage and more like ain improvised typhoon shelter.
The vendor reached down and hooked two fingers into the edge of a frayed rug that shouldn’t have been there, and peeled it back.
A square had been cut clean through the steel floor, opening to concrete floor with a round sewer grate, iron swollen with rust, its surface scored by pry marks, both old and new.
Iris crouched, peering down. The air coming up was cooler, damp, threaded with old machine oil, incense residue and something faintly metallic. Didn’t smell like rot or sewage. She looked at Wulong, who was sniffing the air, and when looked at her, made a little stink face, teeth showing without a sound, like the air itself had offended him. Iris smirked - last time he did this when she gave him an orange to smell.
The man reached behind a stack of chairs and produced a crowbar. He wedged it into the grate seam and leaned his weight onto it, letting it complain with long, slow squeal of metal on metal, then reluctantly gave. With grate gone, dim light showed a ladder beneath, old steel rungs bolted into concrete cylinder of a well, rusted so badly Iris became unease about the perspective of going down. It went down farther than the light could follow.They were not fresh, but not ancient either, in some places they looked even deliberately painted to resemble heavy, iron-eating rust. That bothered her more than neglect would have. Neglect happened. This took effort.Wulong followed her gaze, and his ear twitched, irritated.
The vendor stepped back, crowbar resting on his shoulder. “You still want to talk,” he said, and Iris looked back at him. She nodded.
”Looks like it.”
She planted a boot on the first rung, testing the weight, listening to the metal. Rung held.
She shifted her weight a little more, slow and deliberate. The rung creaked, flakes of rust drifting down into the dark, but it didn’t give. That was enough.
“Watch him,” she said, not looking back.
The vendor grunted once, neither agreement nor refusal. He stayed where he was, a silhouette framed by crate light, crowbar still loose on his shoulder. As she went down, she heard sewer grate being returned, and as rug fell over, she was left alone in the dark.
