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Maya left her car a half mile from the waterfront and took a cab the rest of the way. The river district was usually safe, but even if no one stole it, there was no guarantee she’d be able to navigate the cluttered streets that radiated out from Port Blackwater like fat-clogged arteries. The lights of the harbour settlement gleamed in dull Technicolor projection on the fat, heavy night clouds, orange and yellow flecked with just about every other tint imaginable, a shadow play of a disco somewhere in Hell. Thin trails of smoke drifted up into the few lazy flakes of snow still falling. A couple of times she caught glimpses of the Murdoch River running sluggish, black and cold. No ice on its surface. Not yet.

“First time in the Port?” the cab driver said. “You picked a good time; rest of the city might be shutting up, but the Port’s open all day, every day, right?”

“No,” Maya said. She could smell, or imagined she could smell, grilled fish, gritty acrid black coffee. Algae, river mud, photochemical pollution. See the slowly decaying drifts of packing waste and plastic netting and the shrieking clans of gulls that lived on them. “No, it’s not my first time there. I grew up in Port Blackwater.”

“For real?”

“Haven’t been back in years.”

“How come? How come you’re going back now? Going to see the old place, huh?”

She hadn’t gone back because there was nothing there to go back for. Her dad dead and gone, and she’d taken so long and worked so hard to escape the place’s gravity well that even going near it now made her wary, afraid of falling back in. The scent of her dad grilling whatever he’d managed to pick up cheap from the market that morning, busy in the tiny galley. The regular Sunday treat of lunch at old Thierry D’ Croix’s place and what he always swore, in his broken mix of English, Spanish and some obscure Haitian dialect, was stew made from river rats, and maybe it had been. Sitting on mismatched plastic stools on the deck of Thierry’s ancient tug, its surface protected from his customers’ feet by tightly compressed strata of newsprint, a Burroughs cut-up catalogue of five years of history in half a dozen languages. Something she could feel, but was too young to understand, between her dad and Thierry. She knew then that her father had worked for the Argentinean government, knew now that he’d been in intelligence, but what that meant to Thierry or why he’d ended up living in a floating refugee ghetto in America was, and remained, a mystery to her.

(Raw, un-copyedited, blah blah blah.)