I flood the van with river and blood smell when I slam the door. June shoves a towel at me with the exact tenderness of a triage nurse who charges hazard rates.
“You’re leaking on my hash table,” she says, already dragging a cable to the first drive. “Sit. Don’t faint. If you code blue, do it to rhythm.”
“I don’t faint,” I tell her, and my voice misfires on the first word. I peel my suit at the hip, skin lifting where the graze kissed me. Diesel and iodine wind crawl into the van. The arches outside hum with rain; the blind CCTV zone holds us like cupped hands. Drone rotors thrum by the seawall, that cicada chorus Harbor Eleven calls safety music.
Elias gets there before I can lie about gauze. “Let me,” he says, softer than the storm. His jaw works like he’s chewing glass. He opens the med kit with thumbs that don’t agree with the rest of him.
“Alcohol,” I say. “Then butterfly, then wrap.”
“I know,” he says, and his hands shake anyway.
June’s workstation chirps a cheerful death knell. “Checksum mismatch on block six,” she snaps. “Don’t you dare brick on me, sweetheart.” She types with fury that makes the keys sound like rain on sheet metal. “Deep clone, bit-level. Come on, come on—”
I breathe through the sting as Elias swabs my side. The cold bites like a clean lie. I brace a palm on the bench, eyes on the tide clock through the van’s windshield—three minutes fast, lying with confidence like an heir. Lanterns from the resilience festival flicker under the arches, bravado pretending to be comfort.
“Hold still,” he says.
“I am still,” I say.
His fingers tremble again, the tape flirting with the gauze instead of committing. I catch his wrist and anchor it to my ribs with one steadying touch. “We can’t afford pretty,” I say. “We need pressure and mobility.”
He nods, swallows, and tapes with purpose until the white wraps the red into silence. His breath fogs in the wet, close air; mine scrapes.
“Block six passed,” June barks. “Seven… eight… hell yes. First drive mounted. Mirroring to cold iron. If I die tonight, bury me with my checksum report.”
“I’ll laminate it,” I say. “Glossy.”
She flips me a glare that lands like a hug. “You brought me presents?” she asks, more business than awe.
I reach into my soaked bag, slide out the second drive, the third, the chip that wasn’t labeled like the others. “Lab C predictive suite. Trial folders. Access logs. And this—clipped off a panel that didn’t want to talk.”
June’s eyes catch that last one the way a jeweler catches light. “Hello, little renegade.” She slots it into an adapter and the monitors go algae-lit, soothing nobody.
Elias finishes the wrap and lays his palm flat over it without meaning to. Heat blooms through his hand into me, reckless. “You’re warm,” he says, voice gone thin.
“You’re cold,” I answer. I don’t move his hand.
The van fills with fan noise and the peppery smell of solder. June’s code scrolls like wet ribbons. “Okay,” she breathes, shifting to that low register she saves for miracles. “The suite’s index is nested under clinical outcomes, anonymized, blah blah—no, you smug thing, you hid your teeth in finance. Mara, look.”
I lean forward; the wrap tugs, and the pain pushes my attention diamond-sharp. Columns bloom: TRIAL_ID, OUTCOME_SCORE, ETHICS_FLAG, and then, tucked at the end like a joke told at a funeral—VOTE_TALLIES. Names disguised as hashes; timestamps that smell like boardrooms.
“That ledger,” I say.
June nods. “It’s cross-wired. They paired trial outcomes with board votes to predict who would back protocols that cut corners. The model didn’t just police subjects; it policed directors. It knew who’d rubber-stamp what and when.”
Elias goes still. “Timestamps?” he asks. “During the quarterlies?”
“During resilience speeches and gala weeks,” June says. “And here’s the rot—look: trial flagged ‘adverse cognition spike,’ ethics override prompted, same day a vote log shows four directors greenlighting ‘expanded risk tolerance.’ Guess what the model predicts for the lone ‘no’.”
I read the field. The word is elegant and ugly in the same breath: MARGINALIZE.
My mouth tastes like pennies. “They didn’t just remove Lila’s risk,” I say. “They trained the machine to remove people who’d make risk inconvenient.”
June scrolls, hands steady now. “Lila’s file,” she says, voice a little too careful. She opens it without drama. The red banner I photographed in the lab blooms like an infected rose: FRICTION—HIGH. Under it: access to whistle channels, a cluster of clinic volunteer hours, a private message to an ethics liaison titled concern. The output beneath: PROBABILITY OF BREACH: 0.82. Action tree: ISOLATE → DISCREDIT → REMOVE.
Elias’s fingers tense against my side. “She was trying to do the right thing,” he says to the wrap, to the wet floor, to me.
“Of course she was,” I say, because love and fury don’t cancel in my life; they add.
The monitors hiccup. June swears in several languages, then whips a cable like a lash. “Don’t you hang now,” she commands. “Checksum error on the tiny outlaw. Patching… injecting missing parity… okay. Okay. We’re whole.” She exhales, and the van exhales with her.
The second clone tick-ticks across the screen; the fans breathe warm. Out in the arches, the festival crowd cheers at nothing, because Harbor Eleven loves to clap at the weather and call it resilience. A drone dips low, rotors sawing the rain into confetti; its light lingers on our lane and glides away, bored.
Micro-hook (I keep the name in my head to discipline my fear): We have proof, so now we’re a target with a mailing address.
“There’s an internal memo,” June says, yanking a text file out of a nest like a magician stealing a dove. “Encouraging directors to accept the model’s ‘compliance guidance’ as a tool for governance efficiency. Key phrase: ‘aligning human variance with predicted outcomes.’”
Elias laughs once, quiet and violent. “Human variance,” he says. “They mean conscience.”
I tilt my head to look at him. His lashes are wet; his mouth is set like a seal under pressure. He’s beautiful the way a locked drawer is beautiful to a thief. I want to open and inventory everything. I do the useful thing instead.
“We’ll need three redundant hide sites for the clones,” I say. “One under the arches, one with the union medic at Dockyard K, and one where your mother won’t think to search because it’s beneath her.”
“The night market,” Elias says, catching my pace. “Vendor coffers. They trust cash and favors, not cloud.”
June is already duplicating to a cold drive the size of a matchbox. “I have a stash in the hinges of the bench under the tide-clock pavilion,” she says. “Three minutes fast keeps the tourists on schedule; it keeps me anonymous. You can kiss public art and hide crimes at the same time.”
“I’ll kiss later,” I say, and then I feel the way his hand hasn’t left my side, the way my own hand covers it without orders. The van watches us with a thousand tiny indicator lights, patients waiting for diagnosis.
“Your wrap holds,” he says, although he’s no longer checking it. His thumb strokes once against the edge of tape like he’s soothing it. Or me.
June doesn’t turn, but I hear the smile in her voice. “Professional reminder,” she says. “Protection demands closeness. Closeness destroys cover. Pick your poison and your dosage.”
“I know,” I say. I do know. I also know I’m a better fighter when my skin is reminded it belongs to someone alive.
“You’re shivering,” Elias says.
“Body cold,” I answer. “Data warm.”
He hesitates in the narrow corridor between caution and want. I save us both time. I lean in and kiss him.
It’s not a movie kiss. It’s a field dressing. It’s a sealant. It’s half promise, half anesthesia, because I am both surgeon and wound. He meets it with a sound he tries to swallow and can’t. His hand slips to the back of my neck, not to own, but to steady. The van narrows to breath and damp and the soft thud of his pulse against my mouth.
I pull back, taste copper and rain. “Focus,” I whisper, my forehead against his. “We use this or we lose this.”
He nods into my skin, so small it’s a tremor. “Use it,” he agrees.
June clears her throat without theatrics. “Clones complete. Three verified. The chip’s ledger split clean. We’re good to scatter.” She angles the monitor to Elias. “Look at the vote ledger again, prince. That hash is your mother’s block,” she says, not cruel, just factual. “She’s on seventeen of the twenty approvals tied to ethics overrides.”
He watches it like a slow car crash in glass. His hands go still on their way down from me. “Seventeen,” he repeats. “Did she ever vote no?”
June scrolls. “She abstained twice,” she says. “Both after public blowback at a resilience festival. Optics management, not conscience.”
The air shrinks and gets teeth. The arches outside funnel the wind into a throat-song; the festival cheer stutters and reignites, refusing to let weather win on camera. A pair of joggers chases a PR camera in ponchos, grinning like saints who sell sneakers.
“We’ll prove model harm without turning this into a mother-son morality play,” I say. “If we make it personal, they’ll call it vendetta. We stay systemic. Victims first. Directors as pattern, not as soap opera.”
He looks at me like I’ve told him there’s a way to live through his own house fire. “Teach me how,” he says.
“By not bleeding on the script,” I say. “And by not letting me bleed on your shirt.” I tap the gauze. “We move the clones, then you go somewhere public, camera-friendly, and very boring. Boredom is armor. I’ll drop one at Dockyard K. June will feed the clock.”
June snaps the cold drive into a rubber case and tosses me another towel. “You’re on crabber time,” she says. “Under the arches to the night market is fifteen if we don’t flirt with any cops. The drones are flying like cicadas in August; don’t swat.”
I pocket the matchbox drive, the towel, my pain. “Checklist,” I say. The old cadence is a raft. “One: clones verified. Two: ledger indexed and backed. Three: wrap holds. Four: alibis.”
Elias squeezes my fingers once, quick and private. “Five,” he adds. “We remember why.”
“Lila,” I say. “And everyone like her.”
June nods without looking up. “Six,” she says. “We don’t forget where power breaks skin. I’ve got the addresses now.”
The van’s exterior camera pings. A chime, polite and wrong. June freezes. She taps a key; a tiny display shows a man in a courier slicker at the rear doors, cap down against the rain, a legal-sized document bag hugged to his chest like a secret. The barrier arches frame him like a chapel window. The tide clock in the distance keeps lying, loyal to its myth.
“Anybody order gifts?” June asks.
Elias shakes his head, then stops, then doesn’t commit. His face learns something and tells me nothing. “Maybe PR,” he says. “They like to hand-deliver threats and apologies.”
The courier lifts his face just enough for the camera to catch a smile tuned for customer service. He knocks again, three taps in slow code. My spine answers before my brain names it.
“Encrypted cadence?” June murmurs.
“It’s a handshake from a board liaison channel,” I say. “Old contract days. Top-shelf meetings. They want us to open the door.”
“We won’t,” June says.
“No,” I agree, even as the van fills with the sense of a tide about to flip. I think of the ledger in our drives, of the heat still on my mouth, of the way Harbor Eleven forgives storms that behave and punishes storms that choose a path across good real estate.
The courier knocks a third time, those polite bones on metal. Outside, the festival band hits an upbeat, strings high over the rain, resilience with a merch table. The drones drift, humming choices. The courier raises the document bag to the window and presses it there like a fish against glass. The silhouette inside looks like a contract.
“Let me guess,” June says dryly. “An offer we don’t survive.”
I slide my hand from Elias’s to the bench and feel the cold iron of our clones under my palm. “We don’t open,” I say, more to myself than to them. “We scatter first. We decide later if we answer the door.”
The courier watches the camera like he can smell our breath. The tide clock ticks its fast lie. I count the seconds anyway and ask the van the question that keeps me useful: Can I hold this line between heart and evidence long enough to win—before one of them breaks and drowns the other?