I time our entry to the algae wall’s hum. Outside the boardroom door, the lobby glows a calm green that tries to talk pulses down; inside, the wood panels drink sound and give nothing back. The room has no windows. It doesn’t need them. Power breathes fine in sealed air.
Elias smooths his tie the way he does when he’s pretending he cares about ties. “Stay?” he murmurs.
“Shadow line,” I say, and I take the seat two back from his right—close enough to intercept, far enough to look decorative. The black-glass table reflects everything: water pitchers, knuckles, nerves. I measure the gloss like a second camera.
He stands, not tall so much as true. “We can’t be a subcontracted conscience,” he says, voice steady, the cadence of a man who wrote this argument in his head while tying his shoes. “The defense contract buys speed by amputating oversight. We know what happens when we train models to triage human risk for convenience.”
A throat clears. Not my cough, not Lila’s cough man, but a cousin: legal’s polite punctuation. I clock the sound, file the voice. The algae hum outside holds its pitch—lobby doors mostly shut—so I have to look to see stress instead of hearing it. I study wrists for vein flare, collars for twitch. The board’s mood lands in tiny kicks: a finger drumming, a pen cap smoothed smooth.
“Idealism doesn’t balance a ledger,” the chair says. His smile does nothing for his eyes. “We remain committed to ethics within a pragmatic framework. The contract’s oversight features are robust.”
Elias’s jaw works once. He lets the silence settle. “Then we should welcome sunlight,” he says. “Third-party audits before deployment. Worker councils in the loop. Publish error rates, not only ‘success’ stories.”
I watch the man at mid-table on the left. He kept his phone facedown when he came in. Now the screen wakes without him touching it—haptic buzz nudging glass. Reflex moves his thumb. He tilts the device just enough to pretend he’s checking his calendar.
The black table loves lights. His phone paints a faint rectangle across the gloss. I slide my own phone next to my water glass and angle its camera down, catching reflection instead of face. The image flips to a perverse lakescape: bright text floating in an obsidian pond. I breathe shallow to keep my hands rock.
The chair lifts a hand. “Let’s respect our guest observers,” he says, eyes flicking to me like he’s smelling my badge from across the room. “We’ll proceed to a silent vote.”
I don’t twitch. Guests are accountable; girlfriends decorate. I keep my mouth still and count the bodies. Nine voting members today. One loss means a contract that opens the door Sable wants. The algae wall outside throbs, a bass I feel under the floor like tide touching pilings.
The chair taps the tablet in front of him. Heads dip. The room swallows breathing. Paperless paddles blink blue, then white, then settle. I tilt my lens another degree, chasing letters in reverse—Lty Pal—and then a complete line falls into frame like a fish turning in clear water: “We have the numbers. Confirm.”
My throat tastes like penny and iodine. I don’t look at Elias. I photograph the pond.
The chair inhales. “Motion carries,” he says. “Eight to—”
“Seven,” someone corrects softly.
“—eight to one.” The chair doesn’t look at the man who corrected him. He looks at Elias like a father disappointed his son chose art school. “Dissent duly recorded.”
Elias exhales through his nose, small and sharp. Hope breaks down without noise; I only see it in the way his hand folds into itself on the tabletop. He nods once. “Then I record, for the minutes, that I believe this vote increases harm risk for the city we say we’re here to serve,” he says. “And that this decision accelerates the cultural drift that will hollow out whatever good we still do.”
“Duly noted,” the chair says again, like he’s already bored of being human. He moves to new business. He doesn’t notice the phone two seats down flash bright, then dim with relief.
I widen the frame and pop three more pictures of the black lake, each a tiny theft. The texting board member’s cuff links gleam Palmetto gold where the suits pretend they invented restraint. He types one more line; the word “concierge” blooms and vanishes, and the glass puddle keeps the secret for me.
The agenda crawls through approved budgets and scheduled storms. I learn nothing I want to keep. My job here is twofold: prove Elias still has a handhold on the cliff, and keep my cover steady enough that no one taps the rock out from under us.
Elias waits for the closing, then stands again. “One more item,” he says, ignoring the chair’s mistake of thinking the gavel ended meaning. “I’m instituting a lab walk for board members. Any hour. No prior notice. I’ll accompany you.”
“That’s theater,” legal says. He smiles at the word like it tastes like budget dust.
“It’s accountability,” Elias answers. “We claim excellence. Come see it when it isn’t on a catered tour.”
The chair says something about scheduling constraints. Elias smiles without teeth. The algae wall’s green leaks low under the door when someone walks past in the lobby; for half a second the pane at my back goes a shade darker, then eases. I count that as a yes in another language.
The meeting dissolves by choreography. Chairs push back in polite sync; whispers fold into handshakes. I keep my eyes on my water glass until my angle on the lake loses the phone. Then I flick my screen black and slide it away.
Elias moves to me through little eddies of attention. He always draws the kind of gaze that wants to be benevolent and ends up proprietary. He bends, hands braced on my chair. “How bad?” he says, voice for me alone.
“One,” I say. “Margin razor-thin enough to cut fingers if anyone tries to hold it.”
“Anything useful?” His lashes are longer when he’s tired. I catalog that and call it intel.
“Yes,” I say. I keep the rest behind my molars. I don’t feed him hot coals when I need his balance for the walk ahead.
We exit as a pair. The door hisses soft; the algae wall greets us with a green that plays doctor. The lobby’s air tastes like lemon and expensive filters. “Smile,” I tell him. “We’re the healthy couple in a healthy company.”
He huffs. “I’m bad at pretending health.”
“You hired me,” I say. “Let me be good at it.”
We angle toward the elevators; I steer him through the camera cone that gives me the shallowest lens distortion, where my face reads pleasant instead of calculating. The tide clock over the marina in the distance lies three minutes ahead, a rumor in metal. Everyone plans; no one is truly ready.
“Dinner?” he asks, keeping the boardroom anger folded away like a letter he can’t mail yet.
“Later,” I say. “Walk under the arches first. Air helps truth not choke.”
He nods. “You didn’t blink in there.”
“I blinked,” I say. “I just wrote it off as dust.”
The elevator doors part. We step in. From the corner of my eye I catch the security head watching me over the lobby’s fern arrangement, jaw built to grind bones and contracts. He lifts a hand, crooking a finger. I pretend not to see it and let the doors close.
We ride down one floor to let the board scatter, then I send Elias to the lab level with a kiss to the corner of his mouth that places him on a safe camera. “Text me when you’re in,” I say. “I’ll sweep the lobby path and meet you by the algae.”
He touches my waist like permission, like a key. “You were right about the walk,” he says. “Come back fast.”
“Always,” I lie. The doors close on his face softening into something he doesn’t let the board see.
I step out into the lobby again. The security head is waiting where the fern stops pretending it’s wild. He’s the kind of man who calls women by their first names when they paid to be called by their work. “Mara,” he says, voice dry, a rail against my shin.
“Garrett,” I say, giving him the name he earned on a patch and a clipboard.
He smiles without his mouth. “Friendly reminder,” he says. “Board protocols exist for a reason. We appreciate your cooperation. Stay in your lane.”
“Which lane is that?” I ask. I keep my posture bored. “The one where I stop men from getting shot in their own lobby, or the one where I make sure their suits don’t wrinkle when they sit?”
“The one where you don’t take pictures in meetings,” he says, flat.
Heat pricks the back of my neck. I let my face do a tiny flinch so he thinks he’s scored. “I took notes,” I say. “On paper. Old school.”
He tilts his head, bird of prey playing curious. “Just be careful,” he says. “We have a lot of eyes here. Some of them don’t blink.”
I let the line hang next to Lila’s fragment and its whispered command. Don’t write that down. I smile the way lobby women smile when they know knives don’t show on scanners. “Eyes get tired,” I say. “I sleep fine.”
He doesn’t move. He wants me to explain myself until I confess to a crime that isn’t one yet. I give him my best shrug—unbothered, uninterested—and walk past the algae wall where the green dips a fraction when a janitor’s cart rattles by. The wall gives away more truth than Garrett ever will.
In the elevator again, alone, I pull my phone and open the pond photographs with a thumbprint. The text is clear enough for my crawler to chew. I tap Resolve, and the number—clean, pretty, concierge-grade—slides through the street maps until it clicks into a profile: Palmetto House, Concierge Desk, “Finch.” The same title the steward used when he pulled my borrowed key out of his pocket and smiled with his eyes and not his mouth.
My heart kicks low, deliberate. Hope coughs up a new organ—anger with a plan. The message thread says “We have the numbers. Confirm.” A second line pings into the frame in the last shot, one I didn’t read in the room: “Next step: dinner. Same table.”
I copy the number to a file nutmeg-colored with caution. I tag it with the board member’s cuff-link glint and the way his thumb rubbed the screen like a favorite coin. I move the shard next to Lila’s laugh and the hiss of the lab door. The pattern begins to breathe.
The elevator opens to the lab floor. Elias waits by the algae pane that runs like a living column here, smaller but still humming. I slide the phone into my pocket before he can read my face.
“How bad now?” he asks.
“Different bad,” I say. I step beside him so the glass will catch us like a portrait of moderation. “You lost by one.”
He nods. “I counted it too.”
“And I caught a number,” I say, lowering my voice until it’s more breath than word. “It routes to Palmetto House. Concierge.”
His jaw shifts. “You’re sure?”
“Sure enough I’m not calling it from here.” I touch the glass; it’s cool, slightly damp with micro-condensation. “We take our walk,” I say. “Under the arches. Blind zones for cameras. You tell me what you can live with, and I tell you what I plan to burn.”
His hand finds my wrist, fingers warm, pulse steady in denial of what just happened upstairs. “They told you to behave,” he says, not a question.
“They told me to remember my lane,” I say, and I smile into the algae’s green like it’s a mirror. “I remember it. I just draw it myself.”
The lab door hisses behind us; someone coughs down the corridor, a sound that rhymes with a man I haven’t cornered yet. I hold the number under my tongue like iodine, like a printed key in a room where locks think they’re smarter than hands.
“Walk?” I say.
He nods, and I take him toward the elevators, toward the hurricane barrier that pretends to be a park, toward the arches where the city tells cameras to nap and lovers to breathe. The proof in my pocket warms against my leg, a small live thing that could bite or sing.
On the way down, my phone buzzes once. I don’t look. I already know who wants dinner, and I already know which table he means.
I lean into Elias so the camera will read us as steady. “When we sit,” I whisper, “do you want truth on the plate or a story for dessert?”
The doors open on a lobby that glows the wrong kind of healthy. I don’t wait for his answer. I decide where we’ll walk, and I decide what we’ll risk, and the tide clock out there lies three minutes ahead like a dare I plan to take.