Chapter 24 · Whoever Holds the Wheel

"Don't touch the pen." I said it before he even got near the counter.

Calder's hand stopped an inch off the protection order. Blue light slid across the porthole glass in slow bars, red right behind it, painting his bare shoulder in colors that didn't belong in a panic room. He wasn't looking at the paper. He was looking at the hatch.

"Not signing anything with the Coast Guard lighting up the dock," he said. "I'm bolting us in deeper."

"Deeper than a panic room?" I grabbed his shirt off the floor and held it to my chest, more for something to do with my hands than for cover. There was a mark under my collarbone, dark and finger-shaped, and I pressed the shirt over it before he could see me notice it. "There's no deeper, Calder. There's locked and unlocked. That's it."

"There's the wet locker behind the false wall." He was already moving, one hand braced on the pipe above the hatch, the other spinning the inner wheel — three clicks left, two right. A combination I hadn't seen him use in three days of living in this box. "Nobody's coming through two hulls tonight.