2 / DOLLY

Dolly scanned the harbor through a hacked security camera, searching for the woman she planned to kill. The lens captured the starboard side of Sero, a two-hundred-eighty-foot yacht anchored near Rowes Wharf in Boston Harbor. The white boat floated like a ghost in the lifting fog and sea smoke. The eerie view made the morning appear like a continuation of the night’s dark endings. 

The view shifted to another camera mounted on a building across the harbor. The stream was secured, but Dolly penetrated its network. The lens captured the yacht’s port side and the object of Dolly’s hunt–a lean woman staring across at the city. Jacqueline Payne stood on the stern, taller than she appeared in contrast to the massive boat. 

Payne studied a brick building hidden amongst the dozens of nameless masonry boxes within the city’s industrial waterfront. Dolly knew which building held her gaze. Almost two centuries before, a brewer built it as a grain storage warehouse, but time wasted its potential. It stood derelict for decades until the recent gentrification of the area, when a shell corporation purchased it, gutted it, and rebuilt its interior into a modern facility. The outside remained inconspicuous and insignificant at just a few stories, it’s taller glass descendants dwarfing it, as if mocking its ancient brick bones. 

Dolly lingered on Payne for a few seconds more before breaking into the video of another security camera. This one was secured to the boat and focused on the deck, but also captured the warehouse along the horizon in the background. The structure barricaded visitors as it stood almost windowless with huge iron shutters sealing itself from the outside world. No sounds emitted from the building, but no one passing on the street was curious enough to hear its secrets. Everyone had too many screens to scroll.

She flicked through other camera feeds, seeking a different angle on Sero, but paused on one facing the streets of Boston’s Seaport district across the water from the vessel. 

Strangers shuffled to work while avoiding eye contact. Everyone’s attention vacillated between the road before them and their digital lives in their hands, their focus lost somewhere in between. They shuffled, tied to their phones like extensions of their bodies, entrusting their lives to an algorithm that tailored itself to whatever emotion it determined would keep them tethered. Outrage or sympathy. Swipe, tap, like, repeat. 

Not that she blamed them. On a gray day, it was impossible to avoid the atmosphere thickening with impending doom, or at least eventual and inevitable demise. It threaded through the harbor’s icy, black waters and up through the streets. It reached into the foundations of the buildings and scaled their walls. Fear and doubt served as the mortar that held the crumbling brick buildings up against the old city’s tall, glass future. 

Dolly’s perspective shifted again to the port side of the boat. A man emerged on the deck above the woman. The camera couldn’t pick up the sound, but Dolly was used to reading lips. 

“Ms. Payne, we’re ready for you,” he said.

The woman’s chin offered a curt bob before she turned and walked up the stairs and into the waiting helicopter parked on the stern’s upper deck. They lifted off toward other business on shore. Payne continued to study the former grain warehouse hovering below until it faded out of sight. 

Dolly considered attempting to interfere with the helicopter’s automated navigation system, causing the aircraft to crash into the water. Still, Payne’s death alone wouldn’t stop what the woman set in motion. She needed Payne to ensure the continuation and funding of everything they worked toward. Then she would die. 

The camera lens shifted again, this time inside the building that captured Payne’s undivided attention. First, Dolly panned across a lifeless, cavernous lobby. 

Next, she cut to an underground hallway lined with gleaming white tiles covering where rats once burrowed. 

Then, to a room offering a bird’s eye view of a hospital bed occupied by a still body hooked to several machines. Lights pulsed in organic rhythms. A disheveled man wearing a lab coat studied a screen of data as he stood next to the body. 

Undeterred, Dolly moved on. Her view arrived at an identical room with another body lying in a hospital bed while strapped with technology. On this one, though, she focused the camera and zoomed in on its subject. She stared, incredulous at what it showed.

This body, motionless for months, suddenly stirred.