The clinic’s sound system played lullabies pitched for tired adults—soft, repetitive, tinny at the edges. Under the sugar music ran the steady metronome of IV pumps: beep, pause, sigh, beep. I sat in a plastic chair that stuck to the back of my thighs and watched a toddler rub a knit rabbit bald while her grandmother stared past a daytime drama to a window where the storm barrier’s arches pinched the horizon into manageable pieces. The air smelled like antiseptic cut with instant coffee and a hint of iodine when the outside door burped open.
June nudged my knee with her shoe. “Your face is doing the thing,” she murmured, eyes on her phone like a parishioner. “The one where you try to look harmless and you look like a blade in a velvet sleeve.”
“I brought the sleeve,” I said. “I left the blade at home.”
She snorted softly and slid a candy bar across the magazine table between us. Its wrapper crinkled loud enough to cover a name given at the check-in desk. We didn’t collect names; we collected stories that could live without them. I’d learned to translate fear: how shoulders climb around ears, how hands hang empty to prove they’re not holding anything that could be used as proof later.
The wall-mounted TV cycled public service ads between weather and a segment on Harbor Eleven’s resilience festival—another mockup of lanterns under the hurricane barrier, another promise that we celebrate survival without tallying what it cost. I watched a clip of dancers twirling near the arches and wondered which cameras slept on purpose tonight.
“Ms. Q,” the receptionist said, too bright. “He’ll be out in a—oh. She’ll be with you shortly.”
He, she—cover pronouns. The receptionist knew where to place air around a sentence so it could breathe without names. A good sign.
A young mother slid into the seat across from me, hands pressed flat between her knees. Her nails were chipped purple, moons of color flaking under fluorescent rattle. “You said you were a friend of a friend,” she said, not asking. “My friend said you listen.”
“I listen,” I said. “And I don’t record unless you ask.” I left my phone facedown and let her see my empty hands. June had already seeded the room with a trickle of white noise from a pocket speaker; the IV beeps took it in and exhaled it as privacy.
“He comes home from night shifts,” she said, barely moving her lips, “and he asks me if I remember making breakfast while he is…still eating it.” Her tongue found the word on a second try. “He can’t keep the hours straight. They said migraines. Night migraines. He wakes up bruised like he fought the pillow.”
“Did anyone mention dissociation?” I asked, gentle, like the word itself could pop the room.
She flinched and then stilled. “Only the NDA.”
I looked at the rabbit in the toddler’s arms, the place where the eyes had been rubbed ghost-smooth. “Do you have a copy?”
She shook her head. “They took it back. They said it was proprietary, and my signature counts even if I can’t read it.”
June’s hand drifted to the bowl of pens at the reception desk; she always collected cheap plastic when she was angry. “Side effects,” she said softly, almost to herself, “as a trade secret.”
I kept my voice steady. “We can get you a phone that only receives texts from numbers you choose. No apps. No trace. We can keep contact off the grid until you decide what you want to share.”
The mother’s eyes jumped to my face and then to June’s hands, which were already moving. When I’m gentle, June is mechanical calm; when I go tactical, she brings tea. Tonight she opened a small cloth pouch and laid out a stack of candy-bar phones like playing cards that folded the future in half until it fit a small pocket.
“No GPS,” June said. “No Bluetooth. No brand loyalty. Pick a color you hate so nobody steals it.”
“Pink,” the mother said immediately, and didn’t smile.
I took a breath and asked the next question, the one that could crack the shape of her night. “What did they promise for the migraines? For the hours gone?”
“They promised to pay off the laundry debts at the pier,” she said, voice dry like she was reciting a weather report. “And a scholarship for our niece when the resilience festival cycle came around. They used the word resilience like it was bread.”
My tongue caught on the word scholarship and refused to swallow. “For participants’ families?”
Her gaze slid. “For families of people who helped them learn. That’s what they said.” The NDA had taught her new grammar. Charity for silence.
Micro-hook 1
The door to the back hallway opened on a small squeak, and a nurse with tired hair and good shoes rolled a cart out. She paused at the water dispenser, tipped a paper cup into the trash, and let a folded square of paper fall lightly between the cup and the rim. It slid into a neat V against the plastic.
I counted to three, stood, stretched like a woman working the kink from an old injury, and drifted to the dispenser. I palmed the paper and took a performative sip; the water tasted of melted ice and copper pipes, city minerals filtered but not forgotten. When I sat, I unfolded the square under my thigh and read the neat columns. Dates. Times. A shorthand I recognized: transfer windows tied to tide cycles, matched against clinic intake spikes, annotated with initials that weren’t names so much as reminders of who hurt when.
At the bottom, a short line of letters: LQ—crew meal band 23:57. The date matched the last day on Lila’s ledger. My vision narrowed to a street-width of detail and then came back hot, like stepping from fog into air that has opinions.
“They feed night,” the mother said, watching me watch the paper. “They feed and then they test. He says the food smells of boat fuel sometimes, like the tray spent time outside before it spent time inside.”
I folded the paper again, careful, and slid it into my boot where it would be warm and unlosable. “Thank you,” I said to the mother, and to the nurse at the same time.
June handed over the pink phone with two numbers loaded: one for a clinic advocate I trusted and one for the pattern-hunting inbox we kept in code. “Keep your old phone for anything they expect,” she said. “Use this when your head hurts and the hours don’t fit.”
“How much is it?” the mother asked, automatically.
“A pen,” June said, and flicked one from the bowl. “You already paid.”
A grandmother across the room muttered something about weather exemptions on shuttle runs; dock gossip had a way of growing a spine when someone else took the first risk. A man in a shipping jacket stared at the floor and said, to no one, “I woke up with gloves on. Home. Gloves.”
I thought of Lila’s journals, the early pages where her handwriting held a swagger and the later ones where the loops thinned like winter light. She had drawn boxes and arrows around phrases like microblackouts and predictive compliance, and penciled a note that read: If you can’t remember what consent felt like, did you give it? I had pretended the question was philosophy when it was a road flare.
The lullaby playlist shifted to a version with strings, expensive sounding and poorly compressed. A poster behind reception urged people to “partner with innovation,” a slogan that always made me look for the exit.
“I should go,” the mother said, tucking the pink into her bra like a heartbeat. “He’s better when I’m there when he wakes.”
“Text the advocate when you can,” I said. “No names. Just symptoms and dates.”
She nodded, stood, and left the rabbit in the toddler’s lap with instructions I couldn’t hear. The door opened again, coughed in a lungful of Harbor Eleven’s salt, and shut on it.
Micro-hook 2
The nurse rolled her cart past us and didn’t look at my boot. Up close, I saw the frayed stitch at her shoulder where she’d mended her own sleeve between shifts. “We don’t keep lists,” she said, tone registering neutral. “If anyone asked, I would say we never write anything down.”
“Of course,” I said.
“And if someone wanted to talk about side effects,” she added, “I would tell them I am not qualified to say the words they need to hear.”
“Which words are those?”
She flattened her mouth. “Dissociation. Memory gaps. Words that don’t look good on a grant summary.”
I thought of Elias under algae light, the brow-crease that appeared when ethics touched practice, and the maintenance drone with the curious eye. “Off the record,” I said, “did you ever treat a girl who laughed about teaching a machine to lie?”
The nurse’s eyes softened. “Off the record, I remember a laugh like that. Off the record, I don’t remember her name.” She pushed the cart on, tires complaining softly at a rip in the floor seam.
June leaned into my shoulder. “I can buy us eight minutes,” she whispered. “Not twelve. The clinic’s cams are rented through the city, and the city loves a log. If I loop them, they’ll call Facilities. If I freeze them, someone gets written up. But eight? A blip—easy to blame on bandwidth.”
“Do it,” I said. “And then start swapping.”
She cracked her knuckles, then her neck, then the back cover of the wall-mounted router with a laminated brochure’s stiff edge. The router gave up a tiny sigh and blinked into a pattern that looked like sleep. Down the hall, a monitor stuttered; the security feed froze on a quiet hall and a stray balloon left over from a morning birthday stuck to the ceiling.
“Cameras offline,” June announced softly, more to the room than to me. The receptionist’s eyes flicked to the monitor and then back to her crossword. We were conspiracy in lowercase.
June set up at the vending machine like a missionary offering pamphlets, but her pamphlets were SIMs wrapped in foil and dumbphones in improbable colors. She worked efficiently: “You’ll get a test text in an hour. Delete it. If anyone asks about a second phone, you’re raising money for the resilience festival and you need to coordinate bakes.” The dock workers nodded; they knew about bakes as a currency of favor and grief.
I moved chair to chair in the lull. “Tell me what hurts,” I said, and people did, eventually, because I asked like the asking mattered even if we never met again. A father described his son dropping a fork midair and staring at it like it was a planet. A woman with a yacht club blazer over scrubs said she keeps dating men whose NDAs are longer than their vows and asked what to do when love requires a lawyer before it will hold your hand.
“Don’t ask me about love,” I said, feeling the rooftop argument like a bruise under clothing. “Ask me about leverage.”
The blazer woman smiled without humor. “They are the same,” she said, and walked away with a yellow phone that would never be invited to a gala.
The double doors at the back opened a crack, and for a second the hallway sang with a higher pitch. Outside, a patrol drone drifted past the window—civil tone, municipal logo—but the rotors’ thrum matched the cicada call that had chased me across rooftops last night. For eight minutes, we were invisible. I could feel it on my skin the way you know when someone has stopped watching.
“Five minutes left,” June murmured.
I used one to call the advocate from the pink phone’s twin. “We have a pattern,” I said. “Transfer windows tied to tide and to clinic spikes. Side effects: dissociation, memory gaps. We need quiet slots at the fountain for interviews.”
“We’ll make noise the next storm cycle,” the advocate said. “For now—water covers secrets.”
The nurse reappeared with another cart, this one piled with blankets folded with reverence. She paused in front of me, edges soft with exhaustion. “When the cameras come back,” she said, “I will forget we spoke.”
“Thank you for your poor memory,” I said.
She almost smiled. “Memory is a muscle. Mine is sore.”
The security feed ticked and then lurched into motion; the balloon drifted by another inch like time had been poured back into the room from a careful pitcher. June clicked the router’s cover shut and swiped a wet-wipe over the brochure like she’d murdered nothing.
Micro-hook 3
The receptionist coughed into her elbow and slid a jar forward. “Fund for families,” she announced, voice set to mild. “No card reader.”
Coins made shy sounds hitting other coins. Dock workers folded bills small; yacht club blazer woman left the change from nothing.
I stood to leave and caught a reflection in the window that didn’t belong to the room. A shadow across the clinic’s door, too still to be waiting for a ride. The maintenance drone’s cousin? A person with an ear to sell, a lens to feed? The tide clock beyond glowed a lie into the glass, three minutes ahead, a reminder that readiness is a superstition built on hope.
“We’re good?” June asked, tucking the pouch away. Her voice had the careful tempo of someone counting steps.
“We’re good,” I said, and my boot pressed the folded list against my ankle bone until it hurt.
On our way out, the nurse brushed my sleeve with a knuckle like a benediction. “If anyone asks,” she said, “you were bringing soup to your aunt. She lives nowhere and appreciates it.”
“My aunt loves soup,” I said.
Outside, the night tasted like salt and bus brakes. The arches held their dark like a promise, and the resilience festival crew had left lantern anchors coiled in neat ropes along the curb. Drone rotors murmured near the roofline, the cicada tone turning into something watchful as it slid along the street’s wind.
June took my arm and steered me toward the alley where her van waited under a mural of fish painted to look like saints. “You’re doing the face again,” she said. “What’s the plan? Fix the world tonight or make a plan to break it tomorrow?”
“Both,” I said. “We move slow for them and fast for the evidence. We keep our heads down until the next tide window.”
She glanced back at the clinic. “The cams went down too clean. Someone inside helped.” Her mouth thinned. “We should leave a second pouch next time.”
“We will,” I said. I felt the list against my ankle, hot metal under thin skin. “And we’ll come back with better cover.”
“What about Elias?” she asked. “Your rooftop theater bought us this window. Does the boy prince still take your calls?”
“He takes them,” I said. “Whether he believes me when I say I’m on his side is a different ledger.”
We reached the van. June popped the door and slid into the driver’s seat, her hands settling on the wheel like they were home. I paused, hand on the frame, and looked back down the block.
The shadow near the clinic door didn’t move. A cigarette ember flared once and then hid behind a palm. Not Sable’s style. Not Vance PR’s perfume. New actor, patient appetite.
“We could circle,” June said. “Or we could keep our three minutes.”
I climbed in and closed the door, the thunk loud in the small street. “We keep them,” I said. “I owe those three minutes to the people who gave me eight.”
June started the engine. The drone’s hum slid away like a secret changing hands. I pressed my heel into the list and felt the edges bite. Every date was a person. Every person was a debt.
We pulled into the flow toward the seawall, the arches cutting their geometry against a sky that didn’t care. “We’ll need the concierge next,” I said, already writing the approach in my head. “Smoke break, service gate, niece with a scholarship promise.”
“You always pick the hard doors,” June said.
“The easy ones open onto cameras,” I said, and the tide clock winked from the marina like it knew I was lying to myself. “We go where cover is a person, not a switch.”
The van rolled through a light that had been yellow too long, and I watched the clinic shrink in the side mirror until it became a square of aquarium glow with a shadow beside it. I traced an arrow on my palm with a fingernail—dates to tides to manifests to faces—and made a promise only I could hear: I would not turn these people into hashtags before I turned them into protected witnesses.
June tapped the dash with a knuckle. “So,” she said, not casual. “Do we chase the shadow now, or do we keep breathing until the next tide gives us an intake to follow?”
I watched the arches slide past like ribs on a giant the city built to pretend it couldn’t drown. I counted the three minutes the clock said I had in the bank and knew I never did. “Whoever shut those cameras down did it for us,” I said. “But who paid the man at the door to wait for our exit?”