The industrial district breathed with the rhythm of forgotten things—cranes frozen in attitudes of perpetual reaching, warehouses holding secrets in their corrugated steel ribs, the harbor water slapping against concrete with the patience of centuries. Eli moved through this landscape like a ghost remembering mortality, his footsteps silent on oil-stained pavement, his eyes tracking shadows that moved wrong against the failing light.
Selena's coordinates had led him to a fish processing plant, long decommissioned, its windows boarded with plywood that warped and wept in the salt air. The smell of old death lingered here—not human, but organic, the ghost of ten thousand gutted catches permeating the walls. A place where life became commodity, where transformation happened behind closed doors.
Appropriate, Eli thought, for a meeting about rebirth.
