The Ash Ledger

The fluorescent tube cracked open at 4:47, and the white dust that fell onto Curt Havel's ledger was the last clean thing that day. She'd been cross-referencing the Ash Ledger for three weeks, corrugated cardboard, river fog, the slow sweet rot of pallets stacked against the far wall. Standard inventory work in a warehouse that belonged to no one who'd show their face. Then she found the column that didn't belong: a sequence of names and erasure codes that, if decoded, meant someone had been scrubbed from every record the city kept. Glenn Harrow. Harren Voss. Solomon Beck. People who'd been here yesterday, gone by morning, as if the fog had swallowed them. Now the warehouse is no longer just a warehouse. Lian Okafor is pulling shipping manifests from the river dock. Nadia Petrov has been watching the loading bay since Tuesday. Doris Fenn, who runs the ledgers above the waterline, won't meet Curt's eyes anymore. And Marcus Drewe, Marcus who used to lock the south gate and whistle while he did it, is missing, and his last entry in the Ash Ledger is a date that hasn't happened yet. Judge Amara Singh has scheduled the evidentiary hearing for Friday. The Ash Ledger is the only document that can tie the harbor's disappearances to the men who own the docks. But there are two copies, and the second one is with Elise Brandt, and Elise is not on Curt's side. Yuki Tanaka knows where that second ledger sleeps, and Yuki is the only person in this story who isn't lying, or isn't trying to be. Curt can hand the ledger to the judge and let the system grind whatever truth it contains into its gears. Or she can burn the pages in the same furnace that made the Ash Ledger what it is, and walk back into the fog with nothing but a name and a hunch. The river will keep her secret. The question is whether she can live with the ones it won't.