Neon City Table (1)

At Pier Nine, Blue saw three Harken Logistics enforcers pinning a bruised, split-lipped boy against a crane housing while longshoremen ignored them. Blue confronted the men with his iron cudgel, but the lean enforcer drew a sidearm, the broad enforcer with Harken tattooed along his jaw held the boy as leverage, and a third man armed with a chain closed off Blue’s escape. The chain struck Blue’s left calf, dropping him to one knee and leaving a deep injury, while the enforcers demanded he leave or be added to the boy’s supposed debt. Blue bluffed, claiming Koban’s daughter Shillah had sent him to oppose her father’s business on the dock. The names unsettled the enforcers; the lean man gave Blue and the boy thirty seconds to leave, and the jaw-tattooed enforcer released the boy.

Blue helped the boy away between the container stacks, limping but keeping his cudgel in hand as the enforcers stood down. Blue admitted he knew only Koban’s name. The boy revealed that Harken had seized him because he had seen where an unmanifested shipment from the night barge was moved. Blue noticed a boat without full running lights moving toward the far end of the pier before it disappeared. He gave the boy two silver coins and told him to go somewhere safe and stay away from Pier Nine; the boy left. Alone, with his injured leg aching, Blue recognized that his bluff involving Koban and Shillah would spread through Neon City, then pulled his cloak tight and walked away from the harbor into the city.