It began on the eighth night, during the heavy midnight rains that usually emptied the streets of District 4.
At 2:30 AM, water poured off the corrugated steel roof of the flour mill, creating a dense curtain of white noise. Hunza stood beneath the awning of the secondary storage shed, holding his wooden flashlight, his senses sharp despite the fatigue of the long shift.
Through the roar of the downpour, a faint sound caught his ear—not the wet slap of water against timber, but the rhythmic scrape-scrape of metal against metal near the rear perimeter fence.
Hunza immediately turned off his flashlight. He moved silently through the dark yard, using the high stacks of timber pallets for cover, until he reached the overgrown hedge along the back brick wall.
Peering through a gap in the wooden fence, he saw two men in plastic rain ponchos standing under the overhang of an adjacent abandoned warehouse. One of them held a tin can of industrial solvent; the other was holding a grease-stained map of the flour mill’s intake vents.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
"The main grain silo feeds directly into the grinding floor," one whispered over the sound of the storm. "If we dump the kerosene and the spoiled grain into the external intake chute before four in the morning, the whole batch gets contaminated when Farooq turns on the main motor. The city health inspector is already tipped off to arrive at seven sharp."
"What about the undocumented guard?" the second man asked.
"He won't see it coming. He stays near the front gates. Once the inspectors find spoiled, chemically tainted flour in Farooq's main hopper, the city revokes his operating license on the spot. Farooq gets shut down, the boy loses his job, and Barlas takes over the property lease by next week."
They chuckled quietly, tucked the tin into a waterproof bag, and melted back into the dark alley toward the harbor road.
Hunza stood in the pouring rain, his jaw tight, his heart thumping heavily against his ribs.
The scheme was insidious. Barlas wasn't going to attack him with fists or knives—he was going to use the city's own health regulations to destroy Mr. Farooq's life and strip Hunza of his honest living in one single stroke.