Drift
The city had forgotten what it was supposed to look like.
Richard stood at the Southeast Salient with his back to the ironstone wall and watched Halifax try to remember. Downtown was patchwork – a block lit, the next one not, the harbourfront a long dark seam except where the hotels still had generator power burning yellow in the upper floors. Across the water, Dartmouth was doing better. Or had been hit differently. It wasn’t clear which yet.
No phone signal. He’d stopped checking it an hour ago.
The wind came off the water in long flat sheets. Cold for May. Everything smelled like low tide and something burnt, electrical, the city’s infrastructure giving off the stink of systems that had been running wrong and then stopped.
He’d come up the hill for the sightline. His city, reduced to its bones, was easier to read from here.
He took the watch out. Woman’s watch. Brown leather strap.
It was ticking. That alone made it remarkable. He’d passed three clock faces on the way up – the one on the corner of Barrington, the digital display outside the parking garage on Spring Garden, the analog above the closed pharmacy – and none of them had agreed on a time, or agreed with each other, or agreed with anything verifiable. The Scotiabank clock was still cycling through numbers with the desperation of a rat drunk on a rotten apple, certain something was wrong and unable to stop running.
This watch was ticking.
He held it on his palm and counted against his own pulse, which was not a precise instrument but was the only one available. Sixty beats. Give or take. He counted again.
Off. Half a step, maybe less. Not the battery. Not the movement. Something else, something he had no word for, a drift so small it would take specialized equipment to confirm and enough stubbornness to care.
He closed his fingers around it.
Below the rampart, something scraped across cobblestone.
He went still. Reflex. His body made the decision before the mind caught up. He looked down into the courtyard. A figure crouched near the far wall, rifling through a canvas duffel with the focused energy of someone on the clock. Male, probably. Heavy jacket. A second bag already closed beside him.
The looter hadn’t looked up.
Richard watched him work. The man’s hands moved fast and sloppy. He was sorting, discarding, shoving things into the open bag with no discernable system. A grab-and-go. The kind of punk who saw the lights go out and thought: finally, my turn. There was a tablet, a laptop, smaller things Richard couldn’t identify from here. Electronics. Whatever he’d found unlocked or unlatched in the dark.
There was no weapon visible.
Richard came off the wall.
He took the parapet stairs in eight steps, no noise that mattered, and crossed the courtyard at the same pace he’d cross a parking lot. The looter heard him at about ten feet and came up fast, spinning, bag clutched to his chest like it was his.
“Back the fuck up,” the man said. “I’ll drop you.”
He wouldn’t. His weight was wrong, feet too close together, the bag still in both hands. The man hadn’t decided yet what he was willing to do.
Richard had already decided.
He closed the distance in two steps, took the man’s right wrist before the bag hit the ground, and used the momentum of the drop to plant him face-first into the ironstone wall. The sound was flat and final. The man folded. Richard stepped back and let him go down.
The man hit the cobblestones on his side and stayed there, one knee drawn up, breathing through his mouth, soupy with blood from a broken nose. Not unconscious. Not trying to get up.
Richard picked up the dropped bag by its strap. Laptop. Tablet. A phone that wasn’t his. Three or four smaller items he didn’t look at closely. He set it down against the wall, away from the man, without any specific feeling about it.
Then he took the watch out again.
The man on the ground made a gurgled sound, not words. Richard didn’t look at him.
His own phone screen lit up in his jacket pocket. He could feel it before he pulled it: the faint vibration of a network finding itself, the grid stitching back together one node at a time. He looked at the screen.
Three messages. Two from his service. One from a number he recognized.
The subject line of the last one read: RE: Halifax Airport Incident - official summary attached.
He opened it. Read it in the time it took the looter to stop making noise.
Systems cascade failure. Contributing factor: unauthorized hardware installation, access point C-7. Fatality: one contractor, Marco–
He stopped reading.
The report was four hours old – he had no way to verify that either. He hadn’t even been home yet. The investigation was already filed, the conclusion already written, the name already absorbed into a sentence that explained what happened without explaining anything.
He looked at the watch again.
The city was coming back below him in the wrong order: residential before commercial, east before west, the grid returning in a sequence that made no sense if you knew how the infrastructure was laid. He knew how it was laid. He’d spent enough years working its failures to know how it healed.
This wasn’t healing. This was something else being turned back on. The Tufts Cove generating station remained quiet.
The watch ticked.
He put it in his inside pocket, against his chest, and felt it there. Its small heartbeat rhythm was wrong, a half-step off.
He walked back to the parapet stairs. The looter was sitting up against the wall now, one hand to his face, not looking at Richard. The duffel bag sat where Richard had left it.
His phone had a signal now. He didn’t use it.
He went down off the ramparts.
Behind him, the city continued to reassemble itself.
He didn’t look back to see what it was becoming.
