Chapter 11 - The True North
Six months later, the pile drivers began their work at Port Fourchon.
The sound carried across the marsh grass for three miles—a heavy, rhythmic *thump-thump-thump* that shook the herons from the reeds and sent ripples through the brackish water of the bayou.
Wren stood on the newly poured inspection apron of Pier Seven. She wore a white hard hat, high-visibility vest over a heavy canvas work jacket, and steel-toed boots that bore the gray dust of eight-thousand-pound Portland mix. In her hand was a digital clipboard showing the real-time core telemetry from forty feet beneath the mud line.
The readings were green. Every single one. The compressive strength was running eight percent above specification.
A shadow fell across her tablet.
Cormac stood beside her, his long coat whipping in the stiff gulf breeze. He looked out over the open water where three heavy Vale Logistics barges sat at anchor, their holds full of certified Appalachian granite aggregate.
“How does it feel?” he asked.
Wren leaned her weight against him, her shoulder resting against his arm. The scar on her thigh no longer pulled when the weather turned damp; it was just a line of pale silver skin, a reminder of the night she had crawled out of the dark into his warehouse.
“It feels solid,” she said, looking down at the concrete beneath their feet. “It’s going to hold.”
Cormac reached into his pocket and pulled out the brass compass. He didn't look at it; he placed it into Wren’s palm, his fingers closing over hers just as they had done on Magazine Street.
“Keep it,” he said.
Wren looked down at the scratched brass, at the true needle that pointed steadily north toward the city, toward the warehouse, toward the life they were building out of the river silt.
May you like
“Why?” she asked, looking up at him through the wind-blown strands of her hair.
“Because,” Cormac said, his arm sliding around her waist, pulling her flush against his side as the tide began to turn beneath the pier, “you’re the only thing on this river that doesn't drift.”
