It was Lazar, dressed in the same Victorian style costume he'd worn at Mansions—beige shirt and pointed brown shoes, though he'd changed his blood-red cravat for a deep purple one. The outfit raised Dec's hackles and made him even more suspicious of the man.

"What are you doing here?" he snarled. Lazar must've been in the shipping container with Tommy the whole time. But what was he doing at Smackdown in the first place? Dec didn't take him for a fan of the fight.

Lazar considered him down the slope of his upturned nose before sliding his gaze to Mel. He held out his hand. "Lazar," he said. "You must be Mel."

Mel took his hand which was, absurdly, gloved. "Hi."

Lazar stepped to one side. "You needn't worry about your friend. He's fine. A few smelling salts and he came to. His eye will be swollen, but we've given him some pills for that. He said he'd like to see you."

Mel paused on the threshold of the shipping container, her front teeth gnawing at her bottom lip as though worrying over what she might find inside. Then, tossing her hair she went inside. "Thanks," she muttered over her shoulder at Lazar.

Dec made to follow.

"Not you," Lazar said, blocking Dec's path with an outstretched hand. "He didn't say anything about you. Besides, I think it would be best if he saw one visitor at a time. Head trauma. Wouldn't want to overwhelm him."

Dec looked down at Lazar's gloved hand and wondered what would happen if he used a few Smackdown moves on him. He wasn't in the mood for niceties and the pounding in his head was making him want to pound something else in turn. Though Dec wasn't a fighter, he could bet he was stronger than Lazar, who was built like a sun dried plant, shrivelled and weedy, in need of a good watering. A hefty tug of the cravat should be sufficient to cast him aside.

As tempting as it was, he reminded himself that he needed Lazar. He'd come to Smackdown to gain direct contact with him. And now, Lazar was standing right there, taunting him with the chance to get what he wanted. He glanced over Lazar's shoulder to where he knew Tommy would be and tried to settle his nerves over his friend's well-being. He'll be fine, he told himself. He always was. Mel would take care of him. And besides, he would only be crowding the room.

"Since you're going to be a dick about it," Dec said, squeezing his words out between gritted teeth. "We may as well talk." He glanced at the stragglers hanging around the port, having one last smoke before they caught the train. "In private."

Lazar raised his eyebrows. "Have you decided to take me up on my offer of recruitment?" he said. "Didn't take you long to change your mind."

Dec trained his gaze on the wrinkles of Lazar's cravat, well away from the triumphant look on his face. He had to fight to keep a snide comment from sliding from his lips. "I have a business proposition I think you might be interested in."

Lazar narrowed his eyes. "Business is going fine, thank you."

"But it can always be better, right?"

Lazar took a moment before he answered. "Well done, Declan. You have my interest."

"So, we'll talk. Alone."

Lazar spun on his heel, grinding gravel. "I have a few matters to attend to first. I'll meet you on the old jetty in ten."

Dec held his breath while Lazar sauntered away. There was a strange steadiness in the way the NYR leader walked, a kind of stillness in his strides like a crocodile keeping eyes above water, or as though he was carrying something fragile on his head. It was like watching a man tightrope walk between two buildings, as though he didn't trust the ground not to crack under his feet.

He waited until Lazar had passed behind a cluster of shipping containers before he let his hand travel to his back pocket. As he threaded the plastic packet of luminite between his fingers, he did the maths. If Tommy had bought his quart of luminite for—what had he said? Two hundred Sols? Then one brick of luminite had to be worth at least two thousand sols. If he sold his brick for half that, that left him with a thousand sols to get him through the rest of the Summer and into the fruit drying season when Quarry Cove would need reliable quality control workers on the convention lines. He still had contacts back in the cove. Surely someone would give him a job.

It wasn't great, but it was a plan.

His sister's laugh pierced his thoughts, high and tinkering, a feather tickling the inside of his ear. He hadn't heard her laugh like that since they were children and the sound had him frozen in memory. He stepped towards the rusted door and leaned his ear against the metal. He didn't know why he didn't go inside, now that Lazar wasn't there to guard the entrance. Maybe it was because the moment seemed so fragile, he didn't want to break it.

Mel's laughter broke into an exclamation. "Arg. Sorry!"

A dozy kind of chuckle followed, one which Dec recognised as Tommy under the influence of a lot of pain medication. "Melodyyyy, now my modelling career's def'nately over," he slurred. "Chook better watch out. Mel'sssss coming—the next street fighting champ..." His voice trailed away to more chuckles.

"I can't believe I did that!" Mel said.

"S'okay. S'not like I needed to ssssee with my eyes." Tommy said. "If it wasn't for those lights, I would've had him... was rigged I tell you."

Mel said, "Doesn't matter. You'll beat him next time."

"It does matter... it did matter."

"... What do you mean?"

"Dun matter now...S'too late," his voice slurred off to an inaudible whisper.

Dec pushed his ear even harder to the metal corrugations, thinking bitterly that if he is going to have supersonic hearing, it might as well be for something useful. It should've been him in there, analysing the fight, ripping Chook to shreds, conspiring over who'd rigged the headlights. It had always been him and Tommy, with Mel tugging on his arm, wanting to be included. Now, for the first time, he was the awkward tack on in their trio.

He had a sudden vision of himself, pressed up agains the door like a creep, or some desperate loser and suddenly felt disgusted. He was acting crazy. He had more important things to worry about. Such as his impending meeting with Lazar.

Stepping away from the door, he checked the time. Barely a minute had passed and yet he had nothing to do while he waited. Deciding to make his way to the jetty early, he wound through the old port, footsteps loud on the hard, compact clay earth and echoing along the maze of abandoned shipping containers. Past broken cranes and sheets of rusted metal, the path opened out before him onto a wide flat plain that used to be the river, but which was now filled with the carcasses of old tinnies, tugboats, sailboats, ships and stolen, submerged cars.

The hot, northern wind whistled through the carcasses which had been shelled out by parts scavengers, bleached by the sun and mummified by mineral salt and silt. Dec's nostrils flared. The site had a strange smell about it. It was nothing like the fishy sea brine of the new port, kept at bay by the hot northern desert breeze. Here, the claggy marshland wood rot had disappeared years ago and given way to a desolate mineral tang. Nothing grew here anymore. People avoided the place.

Lazar was early like him, standing at the end of the old jetty, silhouetted by the moon. As he drew closer, he noticed Lazar's head was pitched towards the sky, eyes closed, one arm held to the side of his face, palm flat. He seemed to be muttering under his breath and the blue light of his palm pod suggested he was talking to someone.

Dec paused to watch from afar when suddenly, his dung beetle senses buzzed and crackled in overdrive and he thought he could hear a voice on the other end of the palm pod call, as clearly as he'd heard the exchange between Tim and Grubber. He almost turned around, right there and then, to go back in the direction he'd come, when his name stopped him hard in his tracks.

"Yes. Declan Hancock. That's the one. He's the perfect candidate for your assignment. He's good at going unnoticed, 'slipping under the radar' if you will. I believe he is the one for the job."

Forgetting his plan to walk away, Dec stepped onto the salt-cracked earth, then onto the wobbly wood-rotted planks of the jetty, feet drawn by strings of dread and curiosity. Was he really hearing the voice on the other end of Lazar's palm pod call? But Lazar was more than fifty meters away.

As he approached the end of the jetty, within normal hearing reach, he said, "Who are you talking to?"

The cravatted man lowered his hand, and the light of his palm pod went out. He turned on Dec, with a conscious slowness. "I should've known the background decoration would be as silent as a shadow."

Dec didn't answer, just drew up alongside Lazar and stared out at the wide, flat plain of riverbed. "So, who were you talking to?"

Lazar followed Dec's gaze. "They call this the fisherman's graveyard," he said. "They say this place is haunted by spirits of all those who lost their livelihoods when the river dried up."

Dec scowled. While it was obvious avoidance of the question, he couldn't push Lazar for an answer without revealing what he'd overheard. Which would lead to the question of how he'd heard. Which would lead to him having to explain how he'd done the seemingly impossible.

He changed the subject. "What were you doing in the shipping container with Tommy? I didn't take you for a Smackdown fan."

Lazar sighed, lifting his shoulders as one does when addressing a small, impertinent child. "Is this a barb exchange or do you have a business proposal for me?"

Dec didn't answer.

Lazar narrowed his eyes. "If you really want to know, tonight was Tommy's initiation. I was watching his performance to see how serious he was about joining the NYR. Let's just say, he passed with flying colours."

"So, you were testing him."

"In a way, yes. I wanted to see how he reacted under pressure. I wanted to see him lose."

"Lose?" Dec spluttered. "So it was you who flickered those lights."

Lazar turned back to the 'graveyard.' "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Let me get this straight," Dec said. "Tommy almost got himself killed because he thought if he lost, he wouldn't be initiated into your stupid group."

"Yes. Though whether they realised it or not, both Chook and Tommy were going to be initiated. The fight was a test to see their compatibility for certain assignments I've got lined up. You can learn a lot about someone from the way they fight."

Assignment. There was that word again. So, Lazar had been talking to someone on the phone. Another NYR member? Discussing Dec's eligibility for an NYR assignment they had lined up? No doubt a dangerous assignment, one they couldn't get any of their other members to do.

Cannon fodder recruitment, he reminded himself and took a deep breath. One brick. One thousand sols. Was it really enough to make up for the 'wrongness' of funding a madman who'd duped his best friend and got his people to tattoo their allegiance to his party on their bodies?

He decided it wasn't.

"Never mind the business proposal," Dec said, turning back towards the old port. He shouldn't have come. He should've listened to his gut.

"Don't you want me to make an offer for your luminite?"

Dec froze. "How did you?"

"I can see it sticking out your back pocket," Lazar said. "You didn't strike me as a user, but you're proving to be a consistent surprise."

Dec tried and found he couldn't move.

"How much have you got?" Lazar said.

"One brick."

"I'll move your brick if you agree to work for me," Lazar said. "You'll be paid like an NYR insider. I'll triple your rates to include a weekly profit share for the sale of your goods. I'll even write up an official 'contract' if that'll make you feel better."

Dec could tell from the triumphant smirk on Lazar's face that he thought he'd won. "I'm not going to work for you," he said. "One thousand sols for the entire brick. Take it or leave it."

"You're stupid to turn down my offer, Declan," Lazar said. "Our support numbers double each week. We have one hundred thousand members scattered throughout the Southern Isles, young and old. We do not discriminate. By the end of the month, I'll have three hundred thousand people bearing my tattoos. That's almost half the Atundan population before the Northern invasion. By the end of the year, who knows, we might have enough for a revolution."

"The last time we had those kinds of numbers," Dec said. "Well, I'm sure you remember what happened."

Lazar tipped his head back to the sky, as though bathing in the dark opal moonlight. "Ah. The infamous March Massacres. The result of poor planning and hopeless execution. I ask you, what good are a thousand lone rabbits against an army of foxes? The NYR aren't scared little rabbits, Declan. We're a pack of wolves howling to the one moon, thinking, hearing, seeing with the same eyes. We have some of the best in intelligence on our side. Alphas in the navy. Betas in government. You make it sound like we're merely going to swarm the streets, throw some stones and see what happens."

"You make it sound like you're preparing for war."

Lazar raised his eyebrows and said nothing. But the look he gave Dec was enough to make Dec want to leave very quickly. Turn and walk fast enough to leave his words behind and forget he'd ever come in the first place.

One last question nagged. "If you've got so much support for your cause, what does it matter if I join or not?"

Lazar smiled. "Your ability to go unnoticed has been noticed. I'm not the only one who thinks you'd be the perfect candidate for my next assignment. Much better suited than Tommy. If you want it, it's yours."

And there it was—confirmation that Dec had heard of the other end of Lazar's palm pod conversation. That his supersonic hearing was, somehow, a thing.

Lazar was still talking, "So, I could make you work for me in exchange for not turning you in for holding large quantities of a prescription substance. But I won't. I believe in the protection of my fellow Nocturnals. The NYR is committed to making our world a better—"