Read Chapter 10: The Missing Scientist

The old docks were a graveyard of rust and rot. Cranes stood like fossilized rib cages against a bruised sky, their cables snapping in the wind. Finn tied the skiff to a corroded bollard and helped Tess onto the slick concrete. The tide was low, which meant the dock level sat far above the waterline, exposing a landscape of cracked paving and drowned warehouses.

“Dr. Chen works out of the hydro-engineering annex,” Tess said, pulling her jacket tight. “Third building on the left. She keeps a workshop there.”

They moved between skeletal storage tanks, their footsteps echoing off wet metal. Finn's eyes kept scanning the rooflines, the shadowed doorways. Every instinct screamed that this was too quiet, too exposed. But Tess walked with purpose, and he followed.

The annex was a two-story structure of poured concrete, its windows dark. The door hung open.

Tess stopped at the threshold. “She never leaves this unlocked.”

Finn pressed a hand to the door and pushed. The interior smelled of damp and something chemical, sharp and acrid. Light filtered through grimy skylights, illuminating a chaos of overturned chairs and scattered papers. A workbench had been swept clean, its instruments knocked to the floor.

“This wasn't a departure,” Finn said. “This was a search.”

Tess moved through the room like a ghost, touching surfaces, reading the aftermath. She stopped at a wall where a shelf had been pulled down, tools and binders spilling across the concrete. “They were looking for something.”

A sound from the back room made them both freeze. Finn pulled Tess behind a steel cabinet, his hand on the knife at his belt. Footsteps, slow and shuffling, approached.

An old woman emerged, small and hunched, wrapped in a grease-stained cardigan. She saw them and let out a sharp gasp, pressing a hand to her chest.

“Tess? Tess Marlowe?” The woman squinted through thick glasses. “I thought you were dead.”

“Rose.” Tess stepped out from behind the cabinet. “Where's Dr. Chen?”

The old woman's face crumpled. She looked away, toward the far wall where a calendar hung, frozen on a month that had already passed. “They came for her. A month ago, maybe more. Men in dark suits, the kind that don't ask questions. They took her files, her notes, everything.”

“Who were they?” Finn asked.

“Didn't give names. Don't need names when you carry those badges.” Rose's voice trembled. “Core Security. They came in the night. I heard her shouting, and then nothing.”

Finn glanced at Tess. The same thought pressed between them, unspoken but heavy. If Dr. Chen had been taken a month ago, then the plan had been in motion longer than anyone knew. And if she was still alive, she was likely the one designing the very system meant to flood their homes.

“Did she leave anything behind?” Finn asked. “Anything they didn't find?”

Rose hesitated, then nodded toward a trapdoor in the floor beneath a rolled-up rug. “She told me once, if anything ever happened, don't let them find the basement. I kept my mouth shut. Even when they put a gun in my face, I kept my mouth shut.”

Tess moved to the trapdoor and lifted it. A ladder descended into darkness. The chemical smell grew stronger, tinged with something else—ozone, like after a storm.

Finn went down first, boots landing on damp concrete. Tess followed, and Rose stayed above, watching the door.

The basement was a single room, crammed with equipment. Oscilloscopes and signal generators lined one wall, their screens dark. A drafting table dominated the center, covered in blueprints so dense with annotation they looked like spiderwebs. Finn's eyes caught on the familiar shapes of tide walls, gate mechanisms, pressure valves. He'd spent a lifetime working on those systems. Seeing them rendered in such precise detail, with red ink marking stress points and failure thresholds, made his stomach turn.

Tess moved to a far corner where a small projector sat, its lens aimed at a blank wall. She pressed a button, and the device whirred to life.

A woman appeared on the wall—sharp features, grey-streaked hair pulled back in a practical knot. Dr. Chen. Her lab coat was rumpled, and her eyes carried the weight of someone who hadn't slept in days.

“If you're watching this,” the recording began, “then I'm already gone—or dead. I'm betting on gone, mostly because the alternative is too inconvenient.”

Tess exhaled a shaky breath. Finn stayed still.

“I confirmed the drain order two months ago. The core is planning to sacrifice the low zones to protect the financial district from the rising tides. They're calling it a 'managed retreat' in the official documents, but that's a lie. This isn't retreat. This is murder disguised as infrastructure.”

Chen paused, glancing off-camera as if hearing a sound. When she continued, her voice dropped.

“The first drain is scheduled for our district. The floodgates will open, and the water will come in. They've built the system to look like a structural failure, so the public never knows it was deliberate. I've been trying to prove it, but every avenue closes. My access codes were revoked. My colleagues stopped returning my calls.”

She reached toward the lens, and the image shifted slightly, refocusing.

“The beacon that Finn Delaney found—I don't know how he got it, but it's not what it appears. It's a calibration device. It tells the drain system when to open and how fast. If they get it to the receiving tower in the core, the whole operation goes active. The low zones will flood within hours, not days.”

Finn's blood went cold. He thought of the beacon in Anya's hands, the file she was still trying to crack. Every hour they spent trying to understand it was an hour closer to the dawn deadline.

“I've hidden the full schematics in a secondary file on the beacon itself,” Chen continued. “It's encrypted, but the key is with…” She hesitated, glancing at something off-camera. “No. If they're watching you, they'll have taken anyone I mention. Just know the proof is there. Find it. Expose this before they close the gates.”

The recording flickered, and Chen's face hardened.

“They're here. I can hear them in the hall. If I'm taken, don't come looking for me. I'll be useful to them alive, which means I'll be designing their failure. I promise you that. I will build them a drain that will never hold.”

The feed cut to static.

Tess stood motionless, her face pale in the projector's dying glow. Finn watched the static until it faded to black, the silence of the basement pressing against them.

“She knew about the beacon,” Tess said finally. “She knew about you.”

“She knew about a lot of things.” Finn ran a hand through his hair. “And if they have her, they know what she told us. They'll be watching every route through the wall.”

Tess turned from the projector. “The secondary file. She said the proof is there. Anya's still working on it, but if we can get her the key Chen mentioned, we might not need to break the encryption at all.”

“Chen didn't say where the key was.”

“No,” Tess agreed. “But she said the schematics were on the beacon. If Anya can find anything in that file—even a fragment—it might tell us what key we need.”

Finn looked around the cluttered room, at a life's work abandoned in a hurry. Chen had known they were coming for her. She'd had time to make the recording, to hide the schematics. That meant she'd had time to leave more.

He started pulling open drawers, rifling through stacks of paper. Tess did the same on the other side of the room. They worked in silence, the weight of the recording pressing on them.

Then Tess made a sound, low and sharp. Finn looked up. She was holding a small data chip, unmarked, its casing scuffed like it had been dropped and stepped on.

“Under the drafting table,” she said. “Taped to the underside.”

Finn crossed to her, and she handed him the chip. It was light in his palm, unassuming. But if Chen had hidden it, it meant something.

“We need to get this to Anya,” he said.

“And that means going back through the wall.” Tess met his eyes. “Which means we need a route Chen didn't have time to tell us about.”

Finn looked from the chip to the blueprints spread across the drafting table. His gaze caught on a section marked *SLUICE 7—RESTRICTED ACCESS*. Someone had circled it in red.

“We have a schematic of the core's underground passages,” he said slowly. “And now we know the sluice gates are part of the drain system. But if they've taken Chen, they know we have her recordings. They'll be waiting for us to move.”

Tess tucked the chip into her jacket. “Then we don't give them time to wait.”

Footsteps thudded above them. Rose's voice rang out, sharp with alarm. “Someone's coming! Dark suits, three of them, at the end of the pier!”

Finn grabbed Tess's arm and pulled her toward the ladder. His mind raced through routes, locks, timing. The church was across the water. Anya was there with the beacon, with a file she couldn't crack.

And now they had a key they didn't know how to use, going back into a wall that was closing around them.