The shack sat at the far end of the dock road, wedged between a salt-eaten storage house and the waterline itself. Three walls held without complaint. The fourth, the eastern one facing the harbor, had been losing an argument with the sea air for as long as I could remember. My father had patched it twice with timber salvaged from broken crates down the wharf. The salt always found its way back in. On still mornings you could hear the harbor through the boards without trying—the knock of moored boats against their posts, water working at the pilings underneath, the dock crews already loud at the far end of the waterfront.
I'd stopped hearing it years ago. It was just the sound the world made before anything else happened.
This morning I heard all of it.
My father sat in his chair by the window the way he always did, the fishing net spread across his lap, hands moving through the familiar repair he'd been making for three days. The light coming through the warped shutters was the same pale morning grey. The room smelled of salt, old timber, and the cold ash of last night's fire that never quite left the walls.
But his hands had stopped moving.
He was looking at me. Not with disapproval. Not with that quiet pride he never quite knew how to show. This was something heavier, a weight that had sat deep behind his eyes for a long time and was only now rising to the surface. The kind of look that comes from knowing something terrible is already in motion, and deciding not to name it out loud because naming it wouldn't stop it.
I'd never seen that look on him before.
"Oren." His voice came out quiet. Careful. "Promise me something. No matter what happens, you'll stay strong."
I studied his face. The lines around his mouth were deeper than I remembered. His knuckles were white where they gripped the netting.
"Dad." I kept my voice light, easy. "I don't know what you're so worked up about. I'll be fine." I crossed the room, lifted the net from his hands, and hung it on its hook by the door. "You're going to tangle the whole thing sitting there squeezing it like that."
He didn't respond.
When I turned back, he was still watching me, and something shifted in my chest—something I wasn't ready to sit with.
I did know why.
The Society had been moving through the western quarter of Riverdale for weeks now. Lean figures in dark coats turning up at market stalls, dockside taverns, and the corners where fishing crews gathered between hauls. They never announced themselves. They didn't need to. Everyone in Riverdale knew what a dark coat meant, and what it meant when those men stood somewhere and watched with the patience of people who answered to nobody.
My father had spent my entire life making sure the worst parts of the world looked past our door. We were poor, the shack drafty, and some mornings breakfast was whatever hadn't been finished the night before—but I'd grown up without fear because he'd quietly arranged it that way. He knew the right people and the right things to leave alone.
The Society didn't leave things alone.
He opened his mouth. Whatever he meant to say never made it out.
A sharp knock rattled the front door hard enough to shake the eastern wall all over again.
"Oren! You in there?"
I let out a breath. "That's Valor." I grabbed my jacket off the hook. "I'm off, Dad." I squeezed his shoulder as I passed. His hand came up and covered mine for just a moment—barely long enough to register—then I was at the door.
I barely had the latch undone before Valor pushed past me, bringing the smell of the harbor and that restless energy he carried everywhere, the kind that made every space feel smaller and more awake.
"Lucas." He dropped into the chair across from my father and put his boots up on the table the way he'd done since we were eight. "Looking well. How's the net situation?"
My father managed a thin smile—the real one. Valor had always been able to pull that out of him. "Oh, just living. How about you—still chasing that Eratiell guard position?"
"As if there was ever any doubt." Valor grinned and glanced sideways at me. "Oren. You coming or not?"
"Yeah. Sure."
I hesitated at the threshold. The morning was already happening outside—dock sounds bleeding through the open door, salt air moving through the room. A normal morning, the same one I'd known my whole life at the end of this road.
But today felt heavier. Like the sky before a storm when nothing visible has broken yet, but your body already knows.
I looked back at my father sitting there with empty hands in his lap. He was still watching me.
"Alright," Valor called from outside, already moving. "Let's go."
I stepped out and pulled the door shut behind me.
The dock road ran the length of the waterfront from the harbor mouth to where the city proper began. We walked it the way we always did—Valor two steps ahead, talking, me half a step behind, half listening. The morning was loud: fishing crews hauling crates, merchants moving stock, the smell of frying fish drifting from a woman's brazier up the road. She did it every morning. I'd been smelling it since I was small.
Riverdale was not a gentle city. It sat at the base of the trade routes and took everything the roads brought—goods, money, trouble—and processed it with flat practicality. Everyone on the docks knew the difference between the Society's dark coats and the dock watch's brown ones. Everyone knew which ones you crossed the street for.
The Society had been here for weeks. More of them than usual. Standing at corners and sitting in doorways, watching with the stillness of people waiting for something specific.
We turned onto Main Street and the city changed—more noise, more color, more bodies moving in every direction. The Job Festival had taken over everything.
It stretched the full length of Western Road, stalls lining both sides three deep in places, the street so packed that moving through it meant committing to a direction and pushing. Blacksmiths, farming consortiums, stonecutters, architects, textile merchants, shipping companies—all competing for every fifteen- and sixteen-year-old who had come to decide what the rest of their life would look like. Colored banners snapped overhead in the harbor wind. The noise was constant and layered.
It should have felt like possibility.
It felt like a performance.
Because the Society was here too.
You felt their stall before you saw it: a pocket of quiet that had no business existing in the middle of all that noise. A stillness that spread outward, making people move a little faster and look anywhere except directly at it. The merchants on either side had left more space than they needed to.
The dark coats stood behind a plain table with no banner, no pitch, no decoration. Strange angular lettering marked the front in a script that shouldn't have been readable at this distance.
Somehow I read it anyway. As clearly as my own name.
**Society of Assassins.**
No one was selling anything. A man sat behind the table running a blood test—pricking fingers, collecting results in small glass vials—with the efficiency of someone who had done this many times. The line in front was longer than it should have been.
Knights in Eratiell armor stood at intervals down the road, ostensibly keeping order. One stood twenty feet from the Society stall, looking very carefully in the opposite direction.
Everyone in Riverdale knew the rules. The Society did what it wanted. The knights looked away. The only real question was whether the Society was looking at you—and what you would do if they were.
Most people chose to do nothing.
Valor was already cutting through the crowd toward the Eratiell stall with that easy confidence of his, people shifting out of his way without realizing it. He took his place at the end of the line and looked back at me.
"Come on."
I fell in beside him. The line moved. He talked about the evaluation process and physical requirements, but my eyes kept drifting to the Society stall.
That line moved differently. Quieter. The people in it stood with their weight forward, eyes ahead—the focus of those who had already decided.
One by one they stepped up. Arm offered. Vial reacted—or it didn't. Most were sent away.
"I'll be right back," I said.
Valor turned. "What?"
My feet were already moving.
"Oren." He reached for my arm and missed. "You'll lose your spot."
I was already gone.
I crossed the road and joined the back of the Society line, stepping into that pocket of quiet where the festival noise pressed in from the outside but didn't quite reach.