The sky above the port is gray, the color of mycelium, the clouds like mushrooms hanging in the air. Max is in one of the kayaks motoring over towards Al's boat, the Driftwood. The electric outboard on the rear of the kayak is whining its typical induction whine combined with the faintest hint of cavitation bubbles popping in the propeller's wake. Tinkerbell is sitting inert in the space between Max's knees, the only part of the kayak that's protected from the waves that crest over the kayak's bow from time to time.

"Tinkerbell," says Max. No answer. Max figures it probably can't hear them through the thick plastic hull. Max looks over their shoulder, back towards the shore, and tries to see the top of Pyramid Peak. They can barely make out a sort of gray tunnel on the side of the ridge, a mound stuck to the mossy earth between a couple of outcrops. It reminds them of Cahokia, where they had been on a cross-country road trip years ago, the ancient mounds on the Mississippi river that it was originally thought were for burial, but turned out to be the foundations of giant pyramids long destroyed, built for sacrifices to gods no one remembers. They wonder what Skye is doing in there right now. Building some kind of contraption, probably. They want to ask her about but but they wouldn't understand the answer if they did.

The Driftwood is now a wall of gray steel in the center of Max's vision, with an old plastic ladder over the side. They tie off the kayak to one of the rungs of the ladder. At the top appears a huge bear of a man, six and a half feet tall, beer gut, short brown hair, dressed in blue-gray rubber overalls over a gray tee shirt. He's smoking a pipe whittled out of the sort of desiccated branch you find on beaches all over Alaska, dried out like salt cod.

"You Max?", says the man.

"Yeah. You Al?"

"Yeah. Come on up."

Max grabs the ladder with one arm, hoists themselves up onto the bottom rung, fishes Tinkerbell out of the kayak with the other arm, and scans the ladder for somewhere to grab without dropping it. Al must have noticed this because he extends his right hand. Thinking that he's offering to take Tinkerbell, Max lifts their arm up to meet his, at which point he grabs their wrist and tries to pull them all the way up onto the deck. Of course this doesn't work. Max isn't particularly big (five foot five if we're being generous) or particularly heavy (130 pounds) but they're still a fully grown human being and that's a lot to try to one-arm, even for someone as large as Al. They both would have fallen overboard if Max hadn't managed to catch the ladder with their other hand and vertically crab walk up with Al still holding on to their wrist.

Al straightens up and says, as if nothing had happened, "Welcome aboard. I see you've brought something. A gift?"

"Not quite. This is what I've been using to talk to Skye."

"A recon drone?", he says incredulously.

"Yeah, that's kind of why I'm here."

"Uh, okay. You want to come inside?" He starts walking to the door of an office in the middle of the boat behind the bridge, and Max follows.

Al has a deep resonant voice, not just because of his general scale but also the voice of a heavy pipe smoker. Max thinks his accent is from the midwest somewhere.

Inside the office is a dragon's horde of old navy equipment. The desk in the center of the room is a bridge console. The chairs look like they came from the Red October. The walls are covered with maps and charts, broken up by the occasional set of machine shop cabinets. Al sits down in the captain's chair behind his desk and Max sits across in one of the old metal swivel chairs. Al sinks into the chair and looks forward, expecting Max to state their business.

Max obliges: "Right, so, you know that cannery on the east side of the bay?"

"Yeah."

"You know what they're doing in there?"

"Not really. I think Skye mentioned some kind of biological research project."

"Right, so, according to Skye, that biological research project is industrial-scale organ harvesting."

"You mean like offal? The stuff that gets turned into fish meal?"

"No, human organs."

"Uh, what?"

"They're harvesting human organs and putting them in a kind of, like, suspended animation, to sell to rich people so they can live forever. Or something."

"Okay..."

"Look you really should just talk to Skye. Tinkerbell."

"Tinkerbell?"

"Uh, that's what the drone is called. Skye has it rigged up to alert her whenever someone says its name."

Silence balloons for about five seconds until Al pops it: "Maybe you can tell me what you and Skye have been up to for the past few days?"

"Well I've been over there talking to the guy that runs it. Or, bankrolls it anyway. This was before Syke told me anything. Mega rich guy, owns a huge defense contractor, Halcyon,"

"No shit?"

"Yeah, no shit. He's one of those rich guys that wants to be cool, too, which is probably why he was putting up with me being there. They like hanging around artists, it makes them feel important."

"You're an artist?"

"Well, sort of. I make tabletop figurines out of driftwood and whale bone. You know, warhammer, dungeons and dragons, that sort of thing. Anyway while I was over there getting talked at about money Skye was apparently, and she didn't tell me anything about this at the time, sneaking around and picking all their locks. And then, and she didn't tell me this until later either, she snuck off and broke into the drone command bunker next to Pyramid Peak."

"So that was what she asked me to cover for."

"Yeah. I forgive you."

Al doesn't respond.

"Anyway, tha--"

A tinny, nasal voice says: "Hey, sorry I didn't answer earlier, I got distracted by having to pull someone out of the bay."

"You mind telling me what's going on?", says Al.

"Right so you know the cannery?"

"Yeah, Max covered that. What's this about organs?"

"They have an MRI machine that can put organs into suspended animation so they keep forever and they're using that to murder people and stockpile their organs, presumably to sell them to old rich people."

Al thinks about this for a few seconds, his face cycling through about a dozen reactions before settling on "bemused".

"You still haven't gotten to the part where this is my problem."

"They're murdering people, that's everyone's problem. Especially out here where it's not like we can call the cops. I mean that doesn't do any good most places but it's literally impossible here."

"Look, I'm trying to run a business. I catch fish, I sell the fish, I go home. I do not go around playing masked avenger and making people I don't know and have no business with want to kill me."

"Oh, so you're scared."

"What? No, I--"

"You don't want it to be your problem because you're afraid of a couple of nerds with an MRI machine."

"Why would I be sca--"

Tinkerbell is up in the air now, slowly hovering right up to Al's face. Max is carefully studying the grain of the fake wood on the arms of the chair they're sitting in.

"OooOoo, big man's afraid of two dweebs and some computers...", she teases, "vewwy scawwy."

Al's face is beet red, his shoulders halfway down his big captain's chair. At this rate he'll be a puddle on the floor in a minute.

Skye continues: "Really all I need from you is for you to introduce Max here to Alice so I can ask her for drone piloting help. I'm not good with offensive drones and I know she was at Creech during the war."

Al grunts and reaches over to the 1980s telephone on his desk.