I park the van beneath the hurricane barrier where the arches make the cameras lazy and the wind tastes like iodine and old pennies. The drone rotors above thrum in the key Harbor Eleven uses for sleep—cicada-low, never silent. I leave the door cracked to keep the solder stink from winning; rain needles through, dotting the tarp and the coils of rope.
June lifts her headphones and leans toward the laptop so that algae light paints her cheekbones. “Ready for the magic trick?” she says. “I’m going to make a door confess.”
“Make it sing first,” I say, because my throat has its own song tonight and it’s not gentle. I roll the thermos lid between my palms to keep the shake honest.
She drags Lila’s shard into view—a waveform I’ve memorized like a prayer and a bruise. “Listen for the attack bloom,” she says, tapping the first spike. “Then the sustain. Most doors on the barge are pneumatic, but the gaskets age different, and the compressors fall out of sync. Each one hisses with its own accent.”
Elias stands in the doorway, rain seeding his hair into dark commas. He doesn’t step in; he’s learned the van’s moods. “Tell me when to be useful,” he says.
“You’re already useful,” I say, and the words land too tender in the cramped air. He hears it; he looks away, pretending to watch the arches where couples test bravery under resilience banners left over from last storm’s festival, the vinyl still flapping like exhausted flags.
June splits the screen into columns of hiss. She’s recorded every door she could from maintenance walkthroughs and the occasional borrowed clip, naming them with dry jokes: Pharmacy East—Wheezer, Cold Lab—Tea Kettle, Stairwell 3—Snakebite. Lila’s shard sits at the top, anonymous and pulsing.
“Okay,” June says, fingers hovering. “Comparing hiss signatures like fingerprints. Stand by for my TED talk on gasket narcissism.”
I close my eyes and try to be only ear. The shard starts, and the memory slams me back: hiss-woof, a pause like a held breath, then the low return. I count under my breath—one, two, three—because timing kept me alive long before proof did.
The computer chews, then spits probability bars like tide charts. Not this one, not that. June hums along with the drone chorus until two bars leap higher than the rest.
“There,” she says. “Lab C west entry. Tie score with Sublevel B analytics, but watch the harmonics.” She zooms in on the sustain tail. “Lab C has a fatter decay. Someone replaced the muffler sleeve with a cheaper polymer that blooms at the end. Hear that wobble?”
She plays them layered. The wobble moans like a tired reed. I feel something in my ribs settle with a click I both hate and crave.
“Say it,” I whisper.
“Lila’s shard came from outside Lab C,” June says, not triumphant, not cruel. “The one Sable euphemizes as compliance research.”
Elias steps inside now, slow, not to spook the moment. He braces one hand against the van’s ceiling. “Predictive compliance,” he says, eyes on the spectrogram like it’s a map of a country he misdrew. “They pulsed it through budget meetings to sound dull. Decision support for HR. Early-warning for ‘misalignment.’ They never let me in during live runs.”
“You know the access pattern?” I ask.
He nods without taking his gaze off the screen. “Weird schedule. Not standard twenty-four on-call. They do ‘quiet hours’ to avoid logging noise—half-hour blocks where the reader queues entries and backfills with a bundle stamp.”
“A bundle stamp,” June repeats, already hunting for it. “Show me in a log or I’ll call it lore.”
Elias unlocks his phone, shoulders brushing mine, warm through the hoodie in a way that derails my pulse for one half-second. He brings up a terminal he shouldn’t have and an API token he will regret. “I had a dev tunnel from before they audited me,” he says, mouth crooked. “You can lecture me later.”
“I’m not going to lecture you for opening a door,” I say. “I’m going to save the lecture for keeping it open.”
He sends the query and the van waits with us. Outside, the arches collect bracelet laughter and sneaker squeaks; blind cameras forget faces beneath their ribs. Harbor Eleven sells courage by the cup at these parks. Dock workers barter favors under the same arches, trading a night shift for a ride, a ride for a place to sleep out of the spray. Love lives here too, signed under a thousand NDAs in mansions with sound-deadening gardens. The city picks who gets privacy.
June’s screen pings; a narrow text log arrives like contraband fish in wet newspaper. She scrolls. “Bundle stamps,” she says, pointing. “Every thirty minutes. West entry, east entry, interior anteroom.”
Elias’s hand tightens on the ceiling brace. “Find Lila’s last day,” he says, too gentle to be anything but knife.
I recite the date because I can’t forget it even when I beg myself to. June filters, then exhales through her teeth. “Here,” she says, and we lean so close our shoulders make an unplanned braid.
The log shows “Employee Quill, L.” flagged for termination at 09:14. At 17:32, the west entry bundle stamp expands: 3 entries, one of them Quill, L. No escort code. No override. A ghost inside a bundle.
Elias moves his hand from the ceiling to his mouth, pressing knuckles against the place words come from. “That’s after HR killed her badge,” he says, voice careful like he’s defusing himself.
I feel my fingernails bite my palms and let it happen. “They re-enabled her to observe her,” I say. “Or they cloned her. Either way they wrote her back into the room she’d tried to leave.”
June is already chasing the breadcrumb’s tail. “Look,” she says, highlighting the field we’d skimmed: Model audit waive—active. “They turned off the watcher while the watcher learned.”
Micro-hook 1
I swallow, and the coffee in my stomach boils toward my throat. “Say the suite’s name,” I tell Elias, because naming corrodes denial faster than anything I know.
He lowers his hand and lets me see the hurt. “Predictive compliance,” he says. “They run sentiment drift, cohesion risk, and friction flags. If you score high on moral friction, they put you on a path to silence.”
“A path with a door that hisses like that,” I say, nodding at the wobble tail. “Now I can find it in the dark.”
June sits back, shoulders against the van wall, the plywood small of a backdrop that’s held too many bad truths. “We’ve crossed the line where I give you pep talks,” she says to me, soft. “Now I give you a route.”
“Give me yours and I’ll sketch mine,” I say. I pull out a grease pencil and a laminated map of the barge I’ve been annotating since the night I counted drone arcs by wave crest.
Elias steps closer, a careful shadow at my shoulder. He smells like rain and the Vance Spire’s algae-lit glass hallways—a clean that works too hard. “You’re going to go in through the intake,” he says, not asking, already there with me.
“Under the stern still buys the best blindness,” I say. “The service grate lifts at the right tide. The intake tunnel Y-splits past the pumps. One route kisses Sublevel B analytics, the other slopes toward Lab C anteroom. I wedge a grate, ride the negative pressure, and count breaths.”
June taps the map where I drew the Y with a split-second’s arrogance and two weeks’ research. “Cameras?”
“Pumps steal frames every third second,” I say. “I can live inside that strobe if the storm bumps voltage in my favor.”
“Storm will bump,” June says, flicking to weather. “Window still holds. Resilience vendors already setting up at the barrier park—face paint, glow sticks, banners with quotes. The city will celebrate surviving a storm they haven’t met yet.”
Elias points to a corridor line with a tiny triangle I’d inked as shorthand for iffy. “This reader,” he says. “Lab C interior. It has a tell. You badge-in and it gives a double green if the room’s in live run. If it’s idle, single green. I always thought it was a manufacturer quirk. Now I know it’s an appetite.”
“So if I see double green, the model is hunting,” I say. “Good to know what’s hungry.”
I sketch the entry plan in full lines and dotted contingencies. “Arches for staging,” I say. “We use the blind CCTV zones under rib seven and rib eleven. June runs interference at the barrier park—launch a drone-bird over the marina, give Harbor Ledger something that looks like me breaking up with a storm.”
June’s laugh is a small flare. “They’ll eat it like free fried batter,” she says. “Defense investors get a show, and your intake gets shadows.”
Elias watches my pencil and then my face. “What do I do?” he asks.
“Stay loud,” I say. “If you disappear from the feeds, Sable recalculates. Go to the resilience festival and shake hands with people who hate your family. Be brave on camera; hide nothing. And when the storm opens the river, you answer my calls on the first ring.”
He nods, then chews his lip in that way I’ve learned means he’s about to reroute a law. “I can get you a maintenance ticket,” he says. “A work order the dock will honor. ‘Pump cavitation check—priority before surge.’ If you get spotted without a badge, you’re a contractor doing a job for the public good.”
“Public good,” I repeat, feeling the words sandpaper all the places I’ve lied. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. “Send the ticket to a printer nobody monitors.”
“The marina bait shop owes me,” June says. “They let union kids laminate fake festival passes for their grandparents.”
Micro-hook 2
The van rattles when a gust headbutts the arches. Under the noise, the laptop chimes again—a little sound that tries to be invisible. June glances and freezes just long enough to make me cold.
“What,” I say.
She expands a corner of the log I hadn’t seen. Same date. Same bundle stamp. A second line under Lila’s: Escort: — then a blank where a name should live. The database shows a null and a timid apology: record redacted by data custodian.
Elias’s hands close into pockets to keep them from shaking. “Data custodian is code for Sable herself,” he says. “I wrote the role. It was supposed to be for breach containment, not for making ghosts.”
I nod, and the nod costs more than I can pay on a weekday. “She walked my sister in after killing her badge,” I say, not loud, not a question.
June tilts the screen toward me like it’s a face needing a witness. “The door log shows Lila inside after termination. And it shows someone erasing the chaperone.”
The eerie certainty sets like resin. Anticipation burns out of my muscles, replaced by a stillness I do my best work inside. “All right,” I say. “We stop walking circles around the word and cut it. Lab C.”
I flip to a fresh lamination and redraw the intake, slower now, meaner. “I go in twenty minutes before the river window. Ride the Y to the anteroom duct. Pop the grate. If the room’s in live run with double green, I kill the lights long enough to blind the model’s face-cam while it recalibrates for emergency power. Old firmware hates flicker.”
June nods, approval pared down to its bone. “I’ll send a fake fault to their lighting controller to give you cover. Short burst—enough to look like the storm sneezed.”
“I’ll be on the barrier with a radio and a smile,” Elias says. “If you say ‘rain jacket,’ I pull the trip on the pier junction and darken a third of the marina. If you say ‘orchard,’ I call the board member who hates Sable and make him owe me a favor in public.”
“Say neither unless you have to,” I say, and I let the command sit between us until it knows its job.
June brings up the audio again and plays just the hiss. We listen to the wobble tail, three times fast, then again. I picture Lila standing outside that door with her jokes all sharpened into needles that she used on herself first so nobody else could claim them. I reach for the map and anchor it with my palm so the van’s small drafts can’t slide it away.
Elias’s shoulder bumps mine; he doesn’t move. “You okay?” he asks, barely there.
I nod once. “I’m a lock meeting the key that fits,” I say. “If I don’t turn now, the whole frame rots.”
June zips the laptop into a padded sleeve like she’s tucking in a small, dangerous child. “We need copies of those logs,” she says. “Screenshots aren’t enough. I’ll spool a scraper to hit their bundle stamps every five minutes, send to the union cloud and an offshore box. If they wipe, we still have teeth.”
“Do it,” I say. “And ping the concierge’s burner. She gets a gossip tax for free protection—tell her to steer Ledger to the south side arches when the festival lights go up. I want rib seven busy with heartbreak.”
“Copy,” June says, thumbing a message that reads like a wink.
Outside, the tide clock at the marina blinks three minutes fast, proud of its lie. Everyone plans. No one is ready. Couples pose under banners that pronounce resilience in fonts that make bravery look like a drink special. The iodine wind climbs the arches and unbuttons my jacket at the throat. The city wants a show. I’m giving it a rehearsal nobody is invited to.
Elias reaches for the van’s step, then hesitates. “When you open that door,” he says, chin pointing at the wobble we now own, “what happens if I’m still in a camera frame smiling?”
“Then you’re doing your job,” I say. “Making the model mispredict love while I steal its teeth.”
He breathes out through a laugh that has no air in it. “I can live with that.”
June snaps the clipboard against my plan. “You two can be poetry later,” she says. “Right now we’re carpenters with a deadline.”
I uncap the grease pencil once more and circle the words Lab C—Predictive Compliance until the plastic complains. “We go,” I say. “We go before the logs wash clean.”
The drones shift key outside—the smallest modulation, a change only people who sleep under arches notice. I raise my head and listen until the pitch settles again. The city answers in weather, like always.
I pack the rope, the wetsuit, the pry bar, the courage I keep pretending is strategy. I look at the wobble tail, our new compass, and let it drill a hole through denial big enough to swim.
I kill the van light. The door hisses shut with a sound I measure against the one on the screen.
Close. Not the same.
I ask the ribs of the barrier a question the logs can’t: when I press my ear to Lab C’s seal and hear that wobble breathe, will the door that betrayed my sister open for me—or teach me how to disappear, too?