Three men had already started memorising Desmond’s face by the time he crossed the first plank of the black-market docks, diesel and fish-rot thick enough to taste at his back.
The bazaar sprawled underneath an old pier on the west side, a floating warren of lashed-together barges and rotting pontoons that traded in everything the city’s corpse had left behind.
Chitauri scrap changed hands here alongside copper wire, sodium lights, and medical supplies with the serial numbers filed off.
Everyone here was somebody’s informant.
Everyone here knew someone who’d disappeared after selling the wrong thing to the wrong buyer.
And everyone here, Del had said flatly, would smell Desmond’s desperation if he walked in alone.
So she walked ahead of him, and he carried the bag.
“Let me do the talking,” she’d said on the ride over, and he’d agreed before she’d finished the sentence.
She read markets and people as fluently as he read steel.
This was her terrain, not his.
Del moved through the narrow lanes between stalls like she’d been born to them, shoulders loose, eyes reading every chalk-scrawled sign and every vendor restacking inventory.
She didn’t hurry.
Desmond followed her, half a step back, the canvas bag slung over his shoulder heavy with the Chitauri components they’d stripped and cleaned and packed in foam: actuator rods, power-cell fragments, the bits of alien engineering that moved fast here and didn’t advertise what they’d come from.
“Halloran first,” Del said without looking back.
“He pays fair and he doesn’t ask stupid questions.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” she agreed.
Halloran’s stall sat at the junction of three pontoons, a sagging canvas awning over tables stacked with sorted scrap.
The man himself was broad, grey-haired, mouth smiling, eyes not.
He looked up as Del approached and his smile widened.
“Ms.
Mercer,” he said warmly.
“Twice in one month.
I’m flattered.”
“You paid last time,” Del said.
“So I came back.
Funny how that works.”
Halloran laughed and waved them to the table.
“What’ve you got?”
Del unzipped the bag and spread three actuator rods on the table without a word.
The man picked one up, turned it over, checked the coupling for cracks.
His smile never wavered.
“Clean work,” he said.
“No torch-marks, no stress fractures.
You’ve got a good crew.”
“I know.”
“Where’s the source?”
“Not your business.”
He set the rod down gently and looked at her.
“It is if I’m paying top dollar for steady supply.
Every fence on this dock wants to know who’s sitting on a reliable alien stash.
You walk in here twice with clean components, people notice.”
“People can notice all they like,” Del said.
“I’m selling product, not a map.”
Desmond watched the exchange from half a step behind her, hands loose, face neutral.
Halloran’s eyes flicked to him once — a quick once-over, pricing him like the rods on the table — and then back to Del. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Good.
Stay on her.
“Fair enough,” Halloran said after a beat.
“Five hundred per rod.”
“Eight hundred.”
“Six-fifty, and I take everything you bring me next time, no questions.”
Del paused.
Desmond saw her weigh it: the deal against the hook.
Every handshake down here is a leak — someone learns the shape of us.
“Seven hundred,” she said.
“And you get first look next time, not exclusivity.
I don’t marry my buyers.”
Halloran’s smile returned, and this time it almost reached his eyes.
“Deal.”
They shook on it.
He stacked bills onto the table — American cash, worn soft, bundled in hundreds — and Del tallied it back to him out loud before she pocketed the roll.
Twenty-one hundred dollars.
Enough for a week’s food and fuel with margin left over.
Desmond caught the buyer watching him again as Del packed the empty bag.
“Your friend doesn’t talk much,” Halloran said lightly.
“He talks when there’s something worth saying,” Del said without looking up.
“I like that.
Man who knows when to shut up.” Halloran nodded at Desmond like they were sharing a joke.
“You ever want to deal direct, you know where to find me.”
Desmond met his eyes and said nothing.
The man laughed, waved them off, and turned back to sorting scrap.
They moved through the market after that, turning the fresh bills into the things the Roost couldn’t grow or scavenge: canned goods, propane canisters, a crate of mismatched blankets, antibiotics in battered foil packs.
Del haggled every vendor down and never hit the same stall twice in a row.
She was building a supply pipeline, not a dependency.
Desmond watched her work and updated his model.
He won by terrain and structure.
But the market was her terrain, and she moved through it the way he walked seams — reading the stress, testing the joins, sensing which surfaces lied and which ones held.
He needed her the way a city needed a treasury.
The Roost could grow bone, but bone didn’t feed anyone or fuel a generator, and without Del turning salvage into a repeatable trade line they’d starve on top of a fortune.
Self-contained wasn’t enough anymore.
They were networked now — and that meant noticed.
Loading supplies onto the barge they’d borrowed, he told her so.
“You’re good at this,” he said.
Del paused mid-lift, a propane canister in her hands, and gave him a skeptical look.
“You sound surprised.”
“Not surprised.
Grateful.”
A snort.
She set the canister down.
“Save it.
I’m not doing this for you.
I’m doing it because if the place falls apart I’m back to sleeping in a condemned building, and I’m too old to freeze twice.”
“But,” she said, and he heard the smile before he saw it, “you’re welcome.”
They worked in silence after that, stacking crates and lashing them down.
The sun sat low over the Hudson, orange light slanting through the gaps in the pier above them, and the market thinned as buyers and sellers packed their tables and drifted toward the bridge.
Desmond was securing the last tie-down when he felt it: eyes that had settled on him and stayed too long.
He didn’t turn.
Hands steady on the rope, he let the prickle sharpen into a position.
Thirty feet back.
A man in a canvas jacket, leaning against a piling, pretending to smoke while he studied the supplies they’d loaded and the pattern of the crates.
Not the buyer.
Someone else.
He’d been shadowing them through the market — logging every stop, noting what went onto the barge and how much of it looked alien.
Desmond finished the knot, straightened, and turned just enough to put the man in his peripheral vision.
The man didn’t look away.
He met Desmond’s glance with a flat, considering stare, then dropped his cigarette into the water and walked off toward the pier.
Del noticed.
“Friend of yours?”
“No.”
“Good.
I didn’t like his face.”
Desmond untied the barge and pushed them off.
Del took the tiller, steered them out into the current.
The docks shrank behind them — stalls folding, lanterns guttering — until the market was a distant smear of light and the man in the canvas jacket had vanished into the pier’s dark skeleton.
But he’d been there.
And he’d seen enough.
The warmth at his sternum pulsed, steady and annoyed.
Coin for bone.
Flow up.
Good, the voice said, low and dry like stones grinding.
But every hand you shake down there learns the shape of us.
I can’t hide what I am if you keep selling pieces of me.
Desmond pressed his palm flat against the barge’s rail and said nothing.
The Roost was right, and the Roost was wrong.
They needed supplies.
Supplies meant trade, and every deal was a leak of information about what he had and where it came from — networked-and-noticed, exactly the thing he’d tried to avoid.
He’d gained a supply line tonight.
And he’d been marked by the underworld that fed someone bigger — someone with enough reach to put fixers on the docks just to track who was moving steady exotic scrap.
Toomes’ economy, or something shaped like it.
The barge cut through the black water toward the platform, and Desmond stood at the rail and tallied the new eyes on him: a smiling fence who wanted his source, and a rival’s man already carrying his name uptown.
One more day, he thought.
It’ll hold.
But the margin was getting thinner, and the eyes were getting closer, and sooner or later someone was going to ask a question he couldn’t answer without lying or losing everything he’d built.
[The Roost] — TRADE ESTABLISHED — COIN FOR BONE.
FLOW +1 (supplies secured).
But mouths remember the shape of what you sold them.
Coin is a door and doors open both ways.