At the dock entrance, a woman in a dark parka stood with a clipboard and a headset, directing traffic with her free hand. She was shouting something at a forklift driver. She turned, saw two more men coming through the snow, and without breaking stride said, “Gloves are on the table. Scanners are on the left. Ask for Marcus. Thank you for coming.”

Then she looked up and saw his face.

Leah Santos stopped. A snowflake landed on her eyelash. For a long moment she simply looked at him, and he looked at her, and neither of them said anything at all.

“You,” she said.

“Ms. Santos.”

“You were on the sidewalk.”

“Yes.”

“You look different.”

“I hope so,” Ryan said.

A strange, quick expression crossed her face, and she nodded once, as if confirming something to herself. She pointed to the table of gloves.

“Marcus is the tall one by the blue containers,” she said. “He’s short a hand. Go.”

He went.

The Longest Night

Marcus Delacroix was six feet five and had been working the Joliet dock for nineteen years. He had a voice like a cement mixer and a way of looking at newcomers that suggested he had already forgiven them for everything they were about to do wrong. He took one look at Ryan’s soft hands, his borrowed gloves, and his wet city shoes, and he did not say a word about any of it.

“Blue containers,” he said. “Forty-one. Medical. Every one has to be on a trailer by midnight, strapped, sealed, and logged. We’re at nineteen.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is it’s nine-fifty and we’re at nineteen.” Marcus handed him a scanner. “Grab a pallet jack. You see a tag with a red stripe, it goes first. You see one with a green stripe, it can wait. You see one with no stripe, you ask me.”

“Understood.”

“Can you drive a jack?”

“Yes.”

“Can you drive it fast without killing anyone?”

Ryan hesitated. “I can drive it without killing anyone.”

Marcus almost smiled. “That’ll do.”

The warehouse was an enormous steel cavern, lit in hard white bars from above, filled with the smell of cold concrete, cardboard, and diesel. Hundreds of people were moving through it with the intensity of an ant colony: dock workers in orange vests, office staff in borrowed coats, a man in a priest’s collar, a group of college students who had apparently seen the call on social media, a woman in a wheelchair scanning labels at a folding table. Everyone was shouting. Everyone was laughing. Ryan had never seen anything like it.

He worked for two hours without stopping. His hands blistered through the gloves. His lower back, unused to this kind of labor, started to burn like a hot wire. He lost feeling in two of his toes. Sweat ran down his spine in the freezing air and turned to ice. Somewhere in the second hour, he stopped noticing the pain and began noticing the people.

A young man named Devon, who talked constantly and well, about his sister’s graduation and a new pair of sneakers and a girl named Imani. A grandmother named Mrs. Okonkwo, who had come in her husband’s coat and could stack boxes faster than anyone in the building. A teenage boy in a hoodie who stood at the end of the line and handed boxes to anyone who held out a hand, saying “You good?” each time, as though it were a sacrament.

At 11:05, the line stopped.

“What happened?” Ryan called.

“Trailer eleven’s jammed!” someone shouted. “The door won’t close. Ice in the track.”

Marcus swore, a long, inventive stream of syllables. “We’ve got eight containers waiting on that trailer. If we can’t load it, we have to move them to another one, and the other ones are full.”

“How many trailers are open?” Ryan asked.

Marcus turned. “Why?”

“Just a question.”

“Two, maybe. Fourteen and nineteen. But they’re on the far side, and there’s a drift across the lane.”

Ryan stood for a moment, staring at the floor plan taped to a nearby pillar. Something was moving in his head, the old, quick, hungry machinery, the part of him that had always been able to see a system as a whole. He felt, strangely, no pride in it. Only a quiet clarity, like the clearing of a window.

“The drift is only in the east lane,” he said. “The west lane is clear. If we run two jacks down the west side, and cross at the loading bay, we can reach fourteen in about ninety seconds. Then we split the eight containers across fourteen and nineteen, four each. Nineteen has the heated cab, so we put the insulin there.”

Marcus stared at him. “That’s a decent plan.”

“It’s not mine,” Ryan said.

“What?”

“I mean it’s a guess. You’ve worked here nineteen years. You’d know whether it works better than I would.”