Rowan’s text lands in the middle of my kitchen like a flare.
I’ll unlock Pivot Board if Leo is safe.
I read it twice, then a third time with my tongue pressed to my molar like I can anchor the sentence in bone. The bay coughs outside, the familiar wet rasp that blinds drones along the marina wind tunnel and sends news blimps on sulking detours. My phone vibrates again—no words this time, just the small bubble that means typing, then nothing, then gone.
“Hope?” Jonas says from the sofa, half under a tangle of HDMI, his laptop humming like a tired hive.
“A condition,” I say. “Rowan wants deniability. Leo off the board, then they’ll ghost the pivots.”
Jonas pushes himself upright, the couch springs creaking like old boats. “We can give them deniability,” he says. “We can’t conjure safety. What does off the board look like to intake?”
“Transfer,” I say, and I feel how the word warms my jaw. “A hospital with jurisdiction outside Curalis’s ‘peace program’ addendum.”
He’s already reaching for the printer I bought in a panic two years ago to file taxes before grief made numbers look like ants. “We make a transport request,” he says. “Scheduled, routine, boring. The kind clerks wave through because the halo icon sits in the corner like God.”
He opens his template folder and pulls up a form that sings in legalese. Inter-Facility Transfer Authorization appears across the screen, serifed and self-important. A faint watermark pulses behind it: two concentric rings. The printer warms, plastic smelling faintly like burnt sugar, the room layering scents—salt from the slightly open window, citrus from yesterday’s scrub, the thermal heat of new paper.
“What hospital?” he asks.
“Saint Brigid’s,” I say. “Their board refused Gray’s community leadership stunt.” I taste the memory of that meeting—stale coffee, a nurse’s cracked knuckles, the tinny cheer in the voice announcing the elevator has arrived on Level Two. “They still pretend paper has rights.”
Jonas types with the precision of someone who’s spent years pretending not to be angry. “We need a physician name.”
“Use the ER attending. I’ll make the call,” I say, already dialing. The line clicks; a human answers, then holds while a robot whispers the day’s safety mantra between floors: wash, breathe, repair. I swallow my reflex and ask for “a courtesy verification for a patient-in-transfer,” my voice rolling across syllables like I’ve always belonged in this tone. The charge nurse gives me a surname and an ID code without asking for Leo’s. She’s busy. That’s our opening.
Jonas fills the blanks. Receiving Physician: Dr. Alvarez. Transport Time: 23:40–23:55. Patient Status: Voluntary, non-violent, sensitive to sound. He waits for my nod and adds the line that makes clerks feel like they’re obeying: approved per plan of care.
“Insurance,” he says.
“Sera’s on it,” I say, and I text her the phrase we rehearsed when we were not yet old enough to hate forms: billing crisis.
My phone rings before my anxiety can pick a direction. “Tell me what to break,” Sera says, voice clipped, school-administrator steel wrapped in love’s cloth.
“Break nothing,” I say. “Confuse everything. Ask intake for an itemized ledger, the pre-authorization code, and a printout of all halo-dependent adjustments. Make the halo sound like a cash register.”
She exhales—a sound like opening a stiff drawer. “I’m wearing sneakers,” she says.
“No heel clicks,” I say, and the joke is something soft between us we can’t afford to drop. “You’ll walk in, and when they ask why at this hour, you’ll say the elevator screens told you ‘repair is available’ and you want to decline, in writing.”
“You sound steady,” she says, and I hear fingers zipping a hoodie, keys, the rustle of a tote where she keeps every receipt.
“I’m a singer with my hand on my own throat,” I say. “Rowan will unlock if Leo is safe. We make him safe for fifteen minutes—on paper.”
“Fifteen minutes,” she repeats, and now I hear the second layer, the one that knows fifteen minutes is an ocean when you’re drowning and a blink when you’re stealing time. “Text me the forms.”
I snap photos, label them boring, and watch them streak blue toward her. Jonas scrawls the ambulance number in Sharpie along the bottom margin. The ink smells like high school projects and lies that once felt harmless.
“We need a transport ID they can ping,” he says. “I can spoof one off the city’s legacy paging system for facilities that still fax.”
“You just said fax,” I say.
“The past is resilient where it’s inconvenient,” he says, and he taps keys like bones, and then a string of digits appears that looks older than the internet.
I carry the stack to the window to cool it; the paper’s still warm, edges slightly curly, the halo icon winking through like a promise and a threat. Outside, fog licks the streetlights into halos of their own. I can taste the salt without opening my mouth wider. The news blimp tries again to hug our block and gives up, the wind cutting a corridor that makes gossip stalls.
Micro-hook: My phone thrums with a new message before the word “ready” can land. Rowan again: Deniability only works if he’s not in chair zone at 23:45. A second bubble: Your counterstream buys me cover, not immunity. Then: I can sabotage live. I cannot survive being named.
“I hear you,” I text back. “We move him.”
Jonas snaps a binder clip on the forms and slides them into a plastic sleeve until the packet looks official enough to own me. “You shouldn’t carry,” he says. “I forged; I’ll deliver.”
“I have the name,” I say. “They’ll call Dr. Alvarez. They’ll ask why a sister is here and not a transport rep. I can meet their eyes like Mom taught me when rent was late.”
“We go together,” he says, and when I look up, I see it: the line where his mouth wants to be brave and lands on honest. “I’ll peel off to the records desk and confuse their scanner with this.” He holds up a small black square that looks like a coaster. “It loops the feed—only a few seconds, just enough to make their console think it pinged the transport hub.”
“Looping cameras is a love language now,” I say.
We move. The row house stairwell smells like old varnish and laundry; the foyer smells like neighbor dinners and disinfectant. On the sidewalk, the fog holds everything close. Families pass us swapping reputation scores like weather reports—green today, amber in appeals, red until the halo says otherwise—and I keep my head down because my name rides the edges of those sentences like a skateboard, ready to jump a curb and crash in my lap.
We split a rideshare because nothing says normal like an algorithm that thinks it knows your route. The driver’s dash displays elevator-screen headlines in miniature; the same whisper: repair is available. I lick my tooth and taste old blood from an earlier bite. Jonas squeezes my knee once—a tap that says count, cradle, low—then drops his hand like a lit match.
The clinic lobby is white-on-white, citrus in the vents, art that looks like storms pretending to be brains. A halo icon sits on the check-in kiosk and lights up when my shadow crosses it, like purity is motion-activated. Sera is already there, front of the line by force of stance, papers braced against the counter like a sailor bracing for a wave.
“I need an itemized ledger,” she says to intake, voice calm as a lake that drowns people. “I need the pre-auth code for any procedure touching my brother’s pattern. I need the list of halo-dependent adjustments on his account, and I need a written acknowledgment that we decline ‘rituals of repair.’”
The clerk blinks, then glances at the halo icon as if it can answer. “That’s not standard,” she says.
“Neither is a TV show inside a clinic,” Sera says. She lifts her phone so the camera stares at the desk, not the clerk’s face. Etiquette forbids filming at the communal table of reception; everyone liveblogs from the edges instead. We give them nothing to post but the top right corner of a screen.
I slide to the side, packet under my arm, pulse in my elbow measuring time. Jonas peels off as promised and leans over a records scanner like he’s bored by its blinking. He sets the black square on the counter, palm covering it in a gesture that looks like he’s steadying himself. The scanner hiccups; its light bar repeats the same three inches of glowing blue twice. He drops a casual, “That hub is glitched tonight,” to no one in particular. No one hears him until they need an explanation later.
“Authorization?” the clerk says to me, finally, suspicious of my stillness.
“Transfer to Saint Brigid’s,” I say, and I let my voice unfold the way Mom taught us to lay linens—smooth, no snag. I place the forms down so the halo icon in the corner shines up at her like a saint’s disc. “Per plan of care.”
She touches the paper and frowns. “This wasn’t scheduled.”
“It was,” I say. “Your system is late.” I smile with my gums because a real smile deters confrontation better than a perfect one. I tip the page so the transport ID number catches her eye. “We have a window.”
Her fingers tap the number into a terminal; the scanner blinks; the looped feed pretends to ping and returns its own reflected approval. The elevator screens behind her whisper a headline about my lawsuit; my name crawls along a ribbon like a bug. I taste hot sugar and acid. Sera slides a receipt toward the clerk as if to trade truths. “Here,” she says. “Your ledger has my wrong address again.”
The clerk groans—a small human sound I want to thank. “I’ll need to pull a supervisor,” she says.
“Perfect,” Sera says with a smile that belongs on campaign literature. “Bring two.”
Micro-hook: My phone buzzes, and I can tell by the vibration pattern that it’s not a troll. It’s Rowan. I open the message under the counter, the tile cool against my hip. A photo fills the screen: the pivot board, a wall of toggles and color blocks I recognize from the Edit Bible. A padlock icon that used to be shut is unlatched, hovering in a tiny green that wants to be innocent. Beneath the dashboard a Post-it reads, “air-gapped test—do not touch” in someone’s hurried hand. Rowan has scrawled over the photo: Unlocked / training mode / deniability.
I zoom in until I can see the edge of their sleeve, the precise engineer grime near the cuff where citrus never quite reaches. Another text: I can stall compassionate overlays. I can’t kill the show alone. Move him.
“We’re a go,” I whisper to Jonas, who doesn’t look over; he slows his breath and counts aloud for no one—“one, two, three”—the way he does when he needs the world to match his metronome. Sera taps the desk with a pen, a rhythm of insistence.
“This says 23:40,” the clerk says when she returns with a supervisor whose tie knot is a small sculpture. “That’s in—” She blinks at the clock.
“Nineteen,” I say, as if reminding her of a sale.
“We can’t discharge on transfer without patient consent,” Tie Knot says.
“You can walk him to a neutral bay while you verify,” I say. “Lights hurt him. You call Dr. Alvarez while we wait. I’ll sign that I asked you to delay any scan or ‘comfort’ procedure until the transport team arrives.”
He hates that I quoted his own brochure. He also loves when forms promise to keep him clean. He nods toward a tech. “Neutral bay,” he says. “No procedure,” he adds, imitating my cadence so it lives in the room if someone replays audio later.
They lead us down a corridor that smells like the memory of lemons. My throat tightens at the bend where security glass mirrors everything; my face looks like a stranger who knows my passwords. A mop bucket waits by a door, like the building has a sense of humor about disguises.
Leo sits up when we enter, eyes glassy with the residue of their ritual comfort. “Hey,” he says, and the word drifts like a paper boat across a spill.
“Transfer,” I say, light in my voice. “Field trip.”
He smiles and then glances at the wall speaker, which is silent but authoritative. “Do I have a say?” he asks, and his mouth tilts the way it did when we used to steal dough from the bowl. I want to say you always did. I say, “Yes.”
“Okay,” he says, and the okay is not a triumph. It’s oxygen.
Sera handles the forms like choreography, never breaking eye contact with a different clerk who has materialized to witness us not breaking rules. Jonas positions himself by the bay curtains, a casual bouncer for light. I stand the way you stand when you’re the only thing your brother will look at and not flinch.
My phone pulses again: Eleven minutes. Rowan’s message shortens the world. Another: If anyone asks tonight, I ran diagnostics.
“Deniability,” I whisper, and Sera’s mouth pulls so gently I could miss it—agreement and fear sharing a seat.
Tie Knot returns with a nod too big to be real. “Transport hub confirmed,” he says, language performing cleanliness. “You will go to Saint Brigid’s.”
“We will,” I say, even though the ambulance we’ve conjured is a van with a magnet stuck on the side and a driver who owes Jonas from a story they once killed for ethics.
“No filming,” a nurse says, glancing at my phone like it’s a loaded word. Her voice is professional sugar.
“Etiquette noted,” I say, and I let my hand relax at my side where the camera lens looks at tile.
We roll. Wheels squeak under Leo’s chair; the sound makes my molars buzz. The neutral bay door sighs like a person relieved. The corridor gets narrower or I get wider; it’s hard to tell when breath becomes a unit of architecture. At the exit, the wind slaps us with salt, and the fog has thickened into something that keeps secrets.
The van nose appears at the curb like a fish surfacing; the driver lifts two gloved fingers, chin down, no heroics. I hear a siren far off—the real ambulance for someone real, or a security car pouting.
“Go,” Jonas says, his voice now a tight wire. He touches Leo’s shoulder as if to ground a circuit. “I’ll follow with gear.”
Sera checks the forms tucked into the transfer sleeve one last time, then clips the plastic to the chair’s handle like it can protect us. “Leo,” she says, bending to his ear, “count, cradle, low.”
He whispers the last word the way we were taught—below the throat, where it steadies. The van doors open with a rubber kiss.
Micro-hook: My phone blinks one more photo from Rowan—the pivot dashboard now with a gray bar sliding over Compassion Overlay and a small text box open that reads training in progress. They add a line: You have until the overlay tests fail. Then the board will fight me.
The driver calls, “We’ve got eleven, then the cops get curious,” and the number rhymes with Rowan’s timer in a way that makes me believe in something colder than fate and warmer than math.
“Question,” I say to my brother, to the fog, to the two concentric rings stamped in the corner of every page I’ve ever signed here: “If we clear this curb and buy Rowan the cover to pull the plug, will the unlocked board hold long enough for live—or will the window close with Leo halfway between a chair and a van, and all of us trapped in the story Gray paid to write?”