The bay coughs fog into the street like breath through cotton, and drones blink and give up, forced to reroute around the wind tunnel by the marina. I park under the clinic overhang and taste salt on my lips. As the doors inhale us, the smell flips—citrus disinfectant, bright and cold, like someone scrubbed grief with a lemon.
Sera walks half a step ahead, coat buttoned to the throat. She keeps her shoulders square the way she does with combative parents at school meetings, like posture is a shield the world must recognize. Elevator screens in the lobby whisper headlines between floors—Healing Packages Expanded—and my reputation app pings my pocket with a nudge I refuse to answer.
At reception, the counter glows a slow halo blue. The clerk smiles with wholesome precision. “Welcome to Curalis. Family names and wristband IDs?”
“Vale,” I say. “Mira and Sera. We’re here to withdraw Leo Vale from the program.” I slide the photocopied statutes across the counter, the ones our lawyer annotated with a fluency that felt like sorcery. The clerk refuses to touch them, like paper can stain.
“Withdrawal is patient-initiated,” she recites. “We require self-discharge to honor autonomy.”
“He signed intake during a panic episode,” I say. “Autonomy has prerequisites, like sleep and food.”
Sera’s hand trembles as she pulls a printed policy from her folder. She plants her feet and reads aloud, each clause a stepping stone. “Section 6.2: Participants may withdraw or be withdrawn by a legal proxy in cases of diminished capacity or undue influence.” Her voice cracks on undue. She clears her throat and tries again, slower. “The clinic shall not impede a family’s reasonable attempt to discharge.”
The clerk’s smile doesn’t move. “We take undue influence very seriously.”
“He’s in your custody,” I say. “That’s the influence.”
A security guard unpeels from the white wall, the kind built like a gentle refrigerator. He has the same citrus sheen on his cuffs that I smelled on Gray’s associate at dinner. “We can bring Leo to the lobby,” he says, voice polite to the point of bruise. “He can discuss options with you.”
“He doesn’t need options,” Sera says. “He needs a door that opens when I ask.”
The clerk prints a form that arrives with a receipt. The paper carries the faint watermark of the halo—two concentric rings—like a promise pressed into skin. “If you believe he lacks capacity, you may sign a request for evaluation,” she says. “Our team will review.”
“Which team,” I ask, “the one that sells forgetting as cure?”
Sera puts a hand on my sleeve. “Give me the pen.” She speaks to the clerk without looking at me. “What does it do?”
“It initiates the clinical review.”
“The withdrawal?” Sera asks.
“Review,” the clerk repeats, and taps the halo icon as if it were a seal against chaos.
I pull a pen from my pocket—the safe one, not the recorder—and place it in Sera’s palm. Her fingers close around the barrel like it’s the only solid object left. She signs SERA VALE with her neat school-secretary handwriting. The pen whispers over paper. I can hear every loop.
Micro-hook: The receipt printer purrs and coughs out two inches of paper with the halo faint and smug, and the sound lands in my chest where thunder used to live.
We wait on a bench that feels engineered to discourage naps. The air hums at 980 Hz—my new enemy—and slides between 1000 and 1040 like a tide engineered to lean. Families gather at the edges, liveblogging from polite distances because the food-hall etiquette leaked everywhere; you don’t film at a communal table, but you post the edges anyway. A woman whispers to her mother, “He scored seventy-nine,” and the numbers float like weather.
The guard returns with Leo.
He wears a clinic hoodie whose seams form a cross at the sternum, a soft bullseye. His hair is clean in a way that isn’t his, and his wristband winks halo-white under the lights. When he sees us, his mouth moves first, a ghost of a grin, then resets into serenity like someone smoothed it with a thumb.
“Hey,” I say, standing so fast my knee hits the bench. “We’re going home.”
His eyes land near mine and then slide one degree to the left. “Alignment brings ease,” he says softly, the phrase timed to the room’s breath.
“Not today,” I say. “Today, sisters bring keys.”
Sera steps in, voice calibrated for small rooms and stubborn boys. “Leo, I filed a withdrawal. We can take you out now. You can sleep in your bed. You can eat real eggs.”
He blinks, slow and deliberate, like following a metronome no one else can hear. “When we align with care,” he says, “ease follows.”
My throat goes salt. I want to shake the sentence out of his mouth like water from a shell. I make myself smile instead. “Ease can follow us home.”
The guard positions himself at a diagonal that keeps the automatic doors in his field of vision. “Leo can leave any time,” he says. “He just needs to tell me.”
“I just did,” Leo says, but the cadence wraps the words in cotton. The guard tilts his head, as if tone outranks content.
“We can complete self-discharge upstairs,” the clerk offers, voice gentle. “Or you can talk here.”
“Here,” I say. I don’t trust their rooms. The bench digs into my thighs like a witness.
Sera unfolds another paper and reads again, voice steady until it isn’t. “Time-limited review shall not exceed four hours.” She swallows and the next words scrape up. “Leo, I need you to say you’re withdrawing.”
He looks at her hands, not her eyes. “I’m asking you to trust the alignment,” he says. “It brings ease.” The words carry a weird, warmed honey sweetness, the clinic’s aftertaste of agreement.
I reach for the hug we’re owed and the guard gives the barest nod. I step into Leo’s space and wrap both arms around him, cheek to his shoulder. His hoodie smells like citrus and dryer sheets and something under that—saline and fear cleaned away. My fingers find his wrist and the halo imprint. “I’m here,” I whisper into the seam of his hood. “Storm words when you can.”
I slide my other hand down, slow and practiced, and nestle the recorder into his palm. It looks like a clinic pen—the same matte finish, the same clip, the same ridges for grip—but it weighs truth. I press the barrel until his fingers curl around it. “For your notes,” I say, voice too bright by half. “It writes smooth.”
He doesn’t look down. “Ease,” he breathes, the mic probably catching throat sound, chime bleed, guard radio static. If he caps the pen, it records. If he writes, it records. If he pockets it, it records.
Micro-hook: Somewhere above us, a door chirps and a hallway exhale carries the canned scent of orange blossom—comfort injection for people who read their mail.
The guard clears his throat. “Leo, do you intend to self-discharge?”
Leo’s mouth opens, pauses on a half syllable, then lands on the therapy tracks. “I intend to complete alignment. It brings—”
“Ease,” I finish, too sharp. Sera squeezes my wrist, a private brake.
She turns back to Leo. “Honey, remember the storm words?” Her eyes shine but she refuses to let them overflow; Sera treats tears like adversaries to be scored against. “Tell me one.”
He blinks again, almost a flinch. His gaze flicks to the elevator screen above the clerk’s head. Ten Days whispers from a floor counter that believes in neutral voice and fails.
The clerk sets down another form with a careful thwap. “Evaluation initiated,” she says steadily. “A clinician will meet you within the hour to discuss capacity. You can wait in Family Seating.”
“We’re family seating,” I say to the bench, to the guard, to the lemony air that tries to sand my words smooth. “We are the family and we are seating.”
“We’ll wait,” Sera says. She sits. She wants to win in their ring, on their terms, because the rules look like safety when you grew up teaching kids to love rules.
I can’t sit still. I walk to the vending wall, scan a QR, and a bottle of water drops with a clack. The receipt pops from a slit and shows the halo icon near the subtotal. The rings are everywhere like a quiet religion—the same mark on hospital wristbands, contracts, donation jars, and it all means you’re safe because we’ve captured you.
Back on the bench, I hold the cold bottle to my neck and watch Leo’s hands. The pen rests in his fingers with the intimacy of a rosary. He rubs the ridges and glances at the guard, then at me. He doesn’t cap it. Good.
“Leo,” I say soft enough that the air has to lean close, “what do the chimes mean when they change pitch?”
He answers like he’s reading a card. “The chimes mark good work. They let my body know ease is near.”
Sera’s mouth compresses. “Do the chimes stop you from thinking?”
He shakes his head in a movement so slow it barely counts. “They organize.”
The guard’s radio cracks. He touches his ear politely, never taking eyes off us. The clerk pretends to sort staplers. The elevator pings floor by floor, whispering things no one asked to hear.
A clinician arrives in a coat the color of soft milk. Her shoes don’t squeak. She sits at a respectful angle and introduces herself with syllables arranged to soothe. “We want to support Leo’s choice,” she says. “Let’s check that choice is free.”
“Free from what?” I ask.
“From undue influence,” she says, and smiles at the policy in Sera’s lap like it’s a friend we have in common.
Sera nods toward the form she signed. “We started review.”
“And we’ll complete it,” the clinician says. She turns to Leo like we briefly stopped existing. “Do you feel pressured right now?”
“Pressure left when alignment began,” he replies. The words land like pillows.
“Would you like to go with me and talk in private?” she asks.
The pen shifts in his hand; the mic will love the rustle. He looks at me again and I tilt my head a fraction, the way I used to signal trust your own mouth when we were kids and school assemblies tried to grade us on posture. He inhales, finds the clinic breath, and says, “Yes.”
They stand. The guard shadows them with the practiced chill of a man who escorts storms and never gets wet.
When they disappear down the white throat of the hallway, the room exhales and the pitch drops two semitones. I sit next to Sera. Her hands grip the policy packet hard enough to warp the corners.
“You did right,” I say.
“I don’t know what right means in here,” she says, voice low and frayed. “I signed a thing and it felt like asking permission to be his sister.”
“That’s the trick,” I say. “Make us pay tolls for roles we already carry.”
She laughs once, small and bitter. “He’s speaking in posters.”
“Active conditioning,” I say, and I tell her about the manifest without giving details she can’t carry. “They have scripts keyed to his wristband. Words that push other words out.”
She swallows. “We have to break the wristband.”
“Not yet,” I say. “Right now that band is a map. The pen is the knife.”
Micro-hook: A child across the lobby drags a wheeled toy past a “No Wheels” sign, and the toy’s tiny rumble sounds like a protest no one will teach him is possible.
The hour becomes ninety minutes. The citrus sharpens until it’s metallic. I buy vending-machine pretzels and tear a piece off to taste if salt still does what salt does. It does. The city outside is a smear of lights in fog and hot sugar from the late cart crawls under the door to remind me people still fry things while other people decide outcomes.
The clinician returns without Leo.
“He wants to complete today’s session,” she says gently. “He may reconsider after. You’re welcome to visit again tomorrow.”
Sera stands so fast the papers flutter. “He may reconsider?” Her voice tips and then cracks, a splintering violin string. She closes her eyes for one beat, opens them anew, and starts again with the language of forms. “I request to see the evaluation notes and the legal basis for refusal.”
“Those will be available in the patient portal,” the clinician says. “We’ll send an access link.”
“Portal,” Sera repeats, and folds the word like a receipt she never asked to keep.
I push my chair back and the legs complain against polished floor. “Did he say anything about storm words?” I ask.
The clinician tilts her head. “He named gratitude practices.”
The guard escorts us to the doors. The fog presses its face to the glass like a curious animal. A news blimp hovers, then slides away in embarrassed silence. I take one last look at the lobby and count the halos—nine I can see: wristbands, screens, receipts, signs. Purity while hiding capture.
Outside, the air tastes clean only because it’s honest about salt. Sera’s breath comes in tidy bursts. “I should have broken the pen against their counter,” she says.
“I need the pen inside,” I say. “It’s recording. I set it to cap-record.”
“They’ll find it.”
“Maybe not today,” I say. “Maybe after it hears exactly what we need.”
She turns her face toward the marina. The wind tunnel sends a thin whistle along the metal rails, a thread to sew the night together. “What if he says the words on air before we get him out?”
“Then we cut the seam,” I say. “We build a louder memory, and we build it in public.”
I open the car. The seats hold our shapes from the drive over, a small mercy. Across the street, a bakery throws out a pan of end-pieces and the smell of hot sugar leans into the disinfectant we just survived. Elevator screens in the clinic tower flirt their headlines again—Capacity Confirmed—like the building wants to feel helpful.
Sera buckles in and stares at her hands. “I signed a withdrawal,” she says, and the line trembles. “They told me to be proud of advocating.”
“You should be,” I say. “And I’m still going to break their show.”
I rest my forehead on the steering wheel and close my eyes for three breaths. Linen, thunder, storm words. I open them to the fog and the twin rings embossed on the receipt in my lap.
“Question,” I say to the night we carry like a second skin. “How long before they notice the pen, and can I get Leo out before the recording becomes the only proof we have?”