The first warning was the carrier handler dropping his end of the cage.
The iron corner hit the quay stones hard enough to jump. The cards inside stayed wrapped and strapped, but the impact rang down the narrow service lane between two warehouses.
Jessa spun before Tarin did.
"Leave it," she said.
The handler stared at the cage as if she had told him to leave his hand behind. "That's cleared stock."
"Leave it. Move."
Something clicked beyond the drainage cut ahead.
Not metal. Too quick, too dry.
Tarin caught one side of the smaller outlier case under his arm and followed Jessa's point toward the waterline. The group had been moving the surviving lot in pieces since Orsa split the stable work from his exception. Most of the accepted trays were already behind them on the safer quay route. What remained here was a small movement problem: the outlier case, two carrier cages, three workers, Jessa, Tarin, and a handler who kept looking back at the cage he had dropped.
The second click came with a scrape against brick.
A shape slid out from the mouth of the service alley.
It stood low through the shoulders and too long through the legs, a feral body plated along the back with translucent gray growths that caught the quay lamps in dull planes. Its muzzle stayed close to the stone. River damp darkened the fur beneath the plates. It did not charge.
It crossed the lane behind them instead.
Jessa swore once. "It's cutting the rear route. Water. Now."
Tarin's first impulse was to turn the group into a defensive shape around the cargo. There were walls, cage frames, enough hard corners to make a line. If he could get one controlled angle—
Jessa shoved the handler toward the next drainage ramp. "You want to fight for the invoice, do it after we're across."
That settled the route.
They moved.
The hound paced them from the alley mouth, visible for three strides, gone for six. Tarin heard its claws on the stones when he could not see it. The sound kept shifting from behind to their left as the lane narrowed around stacked carrier cages. It was not following the shortest line. It was looking for the open side.
One worker dragged the second carrier cage by its front bar. The rear wheel struck a broken seam in the paving and jammed.
"Lift, don't pull," Jessa said.
Two of them took the corners. The cage came free with a grunt and a squeal of iron.
The hound appeared at the far end of the stack.
It came so fast Tarin caught it in pieces: forelegs stretching, head low, glass plates rising over the shoulders. He shifted the outlier case into his left arm and reached for the heavy strap hanging from the stuck cage.
The shoulder plates clicked flat.
Jessa caught his sleeve and yanked him sideways.
"Front is armor. Move."
The hound hit the cage instead of Tarin. Glass struck iron with a hard clatter. The cage rocked toward the workers.
Tarin grabbed its upper rail and put his weight into the return swing. Pain tugged across his bruised side where Book 1 damage still had not entirely become history. The hound landed, twisted, and vanished between two stacks before the cage settled.
No clean attack followed. It had tested the moving edge and left before anyone could answer.
"Waterline's thirty yards," Jessa said. "One cage."
The carrier handler shook his head. "Both are claim stock."
"One cage."
"I can't abandon—"
"Then pick which worker stays with the other one."
He stopped arguing.
The rear cage had the worse wheel and the heavier soot marks. Its seal tags still meant ownership. They also meant nothing to the hound.
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He studied the lane ahead. The drainage ramp descended toward a broad cut where river water ran through the quay works before rejoining the channel. The crossing itself was wet stone and iron footing, loud with moving water below. Beyond it, the route opened toward active freight machinery and more people.
Behind them, the hound's claws ticked once against brick.
"Rear cage," Tarin said.
The handler's face tightened.
"Leave it," Jessa agreed. "Front cage and people. Go."
They unhooked the drag line rather than waste time freeing the wheel. Tarin pulled the abandoned cage sideways until it blocked half the service lane. The movement exposed a torn wrapping inside where one stable packet had been blackened beyond acceptance in the cardfire. Its residue smell rose under the wet-rope stink of the quay.
The hound stopped moving.
Tarin could not see it, but the silence changed.
He took the loose drag line and ran it once around a waist-high bollard at the ramp mouth. The line was ordinary carrier rope, wet and rough in his hands. He did not need it to hold the animal. He needed the abandoned cage to stay where they left it long enough to make the narrowest approach even narrower.
"Tarin," Jessa said.
"Done."
He followed.
The front cage rolled badly down the ramp. One worker controlled the rear corner while the handler took the bar. Tarin carried the outlier case and kept his free hand on the wall when the stones turned slick. His legs had started to feel the work from the entire North Quay job: too many hours standing, lifting, bracing, moving under Strain that had never politely gone away because the job changed modes.
The lane pinched where runoff had eaten a shallow notch from the stone. The cage could pass, but only if the handler stopped trying to keep it perfectly square. Jessa put one worker ahead to clear the footing and another behind with both hands low on the frame. She kept Tarin off the rear corner.
"You carry the sealed case," she said. "If the cage goes, you let it go."
He disliked that order because he could already see three ways another pair of hands might save the cage. Two of those ways also put him between a rolling iron frame and a wet wall. The third would make everyone stop long enough to build a safer drag.
The hound clicked somewhere above them.
Tarin shifted the outlier case higher against his ribs and stayed out of the pinch. The handler let the cage yaw a few degrees. Its bad wheel scraped through the notch, then caught the flatter stone beyond it. They had spent seconds instead of a minute and nobody had needed to become the brace.
At the bottom of the ramp the water noise swallowed speech.
Jessa pointed to the crossing, then held up two fingers: workers first, cargo second.
The nearest worker went across carrying only a manifest tube. The second followed with the front of the cage while the handler pushed from behind.
The abandoned cage crashed somewhere above them.
The hound had hit it.
Tarin looked back.
The cage skidded against the bollard and stopped. The rope snapped taut. The hound stood on the far side, head low, glass shoulders raised. It bit at the torn wrapping, jerked once, then lifted its muzzle toward the moving group.
Residue distraction. Seconds, not safety.
Jessa was already on the other side of the water cut. She slapped the iron rail with her palm.
"Across!"
The front cage was halfway over when one wheel slid toward the edge.
The handler tried to haul it straight. That only turned the cage farther.
Tarin put the outlier case down on the dry inner lip and stepped back onto the crossing.
"Let the rear swing," he said.
The handler looked at him.
"Let it swing or we jam it."
Jessa, from the far side, pointed down-current. "Give it the angle."
The worker released pressure. The back corner slewed toward the water, terrifyingly close to the edge, then the front wheels lined with the iron footing. Tarin drove his shoulder into the side rail while the handler pulled. The cage lurched forward.
Behind them, glass clicked flat.
Tarin did not turn until the cage cleared him.
The hound was coming down the ramp.
There was no alley now, no stack to break its approach. Its paws spread on the wet stone. The armored shoulders made its front look wider as it gathered itself.
A frontal answer was exactly what the body invited and the plates were built to punish.
Tarin snatched the loose end of the crossing's cargo guide rope from the ground and flung it low across the approach, not at the hound's neck but under the line of its next stride. The rope was already tied to a freight ring on his side. Jessa understood before he spoke. She seized the slack beside him.
"Now," she said.
They hauled together.
The rope rose just enough to spoil the hound's foreleg placement. It did not bind. It clipped one leg, forcing the animal to shorten its pounce and twist. The glass shoulder struck the side rail with a crack that sent the hound sideways rather than through them.
It recovered almost instantly.
So did Jessa.
"Leave the rope."
Tarin let go.
The instinct to improve the trap arrived a heartbeat too late to matter, which was useful. They had not come here to teach a territorial predator a better answer to their controls.
He grabbed the outlier case. Jessa shoved the handler ahead. Together they backed onto the far stones while the hound tested the first wet step of the crossing.
River water surged through the cut beneath the iron footing. The hound's forepaw touched the slick edge, withdrew, and came down again. Its nose worked furiously. Behind it, the abandoned cage sat crooked in the ramp mouth with claim tags still attached.
The animal barked once, a glassy sound with no resemblance to a domestic dog, and paced along the near bank.
It did not cross.
Jessa kept everyone moving until another twenty yards and a strip of active freight machinery stood between the group and the waterline. Only there did she stop.
The handler bent over with both hands on his knees. One worker had scraped a palm on the crossing rail. Tarin's own breath rasped hotter than he liked, and his shoulder throbbed from shoving the cage, but nothing had broken badly enough to become a new condition.
Across the cut, the hound had already turned back toward the abandoned stock.
The carrier handler stared at it.
"That's a full cage."
"It was," Jessa said.
He looked at Tarin, perhaps expecting a technical argument that would convert the loss into something recoverable.
Tarin had none.
The people were across. The viable cage was across. The outlier case sat at his boots, still sealed inside its job envelope. The route remained usable from this side of the waterline.
The rear cage remained on the other side with a territorial predator between it and any sane retrieval attempt.
A pale System edge opened at the corner of his vision only after that fact had become irreversible.
No second panel followed.
Jessa checked the scraped palm, reassigned who would push the remaining cage, and pointed them toward the next freight lane.
"We still have a job," she said.
Tarin picked up the outlier case.
Behind them, beyond the running water, the lost cage struck stone once more.