Sirens test the city’s nerve at 07:58, a thin wail that slides along the algae-lit glass of the Vance Spire and into my bones. The first rain starts like a rumor, bead by bead, until it becomes policy. I taste iodine in the drafts sneaking through the window seals and the copper of a cut I didn’t notice last night. The tide clock over the marina blinks its three-minute lie; everyone plans, nobody is ready.
“Again,” I tell Elias, because repetition is armor when belief alone won’t hold.
He faces the storm-dark window the way he faces code: watching for edge cases. “Consent is not a checkbox you coerce at intake,” he says, voice steady, breath a little short. “Consent is informed, revocable, and real only when power can be refused without penalty.”
“Slower,” I say. “Don’t rush the knife.”
He nods and lowers his shoulders until his neck stops talking to his jaw. The algae light tints him sea-glass green, makes him look like he belongs to a gentler city than this one. “There can be no ‘innovation’ that requires silence bought by hunger or threats. If our models punish ‘friction,’ then friction is the only honest data we have.”
I mark a beat with two fingers. “Good. Now breathe at ‘honest.’ The board will want to swallow that word and pretend it tastes like wine. Make it taste like salt.”
He glances at me, a quick heat I pocket and refuse to spend. “You’re sure about the timing?” he asks. “June’s window—”
“We’re coasting it tight,” I say. “Your vote starts on the half. June’s release sits at minus ninety seconds, then a second pulse at plus sixty. I want them reading while they raise their hands and blinking when they can’t stop the hands from showing.”
Rain hardens into policy. Somewhere below, drone rotors thrum like stubborn cicadas that refuse to migrate. I run my thumb across the microdrive clipped inside my jacket—ledger, model configs, the photos I stitched of panic-lined corridors. Under my tongue, the coffee lingers bitter and necessary.
Elias tries the next segment. “We cannot be a company that sends patients to sea for convenience.” He stops, then corrects himself. “People. We cannot be a company that sends people to sea.”
“There it is,” I say, softer than the sirens.
The conference room door opens without a knock because that’s how June loves me—permissionless. She tracks in damp air with her and a bag that clinks like a snake charmer’s kit. “Rain’s our accomplice,” she says. “Security’s rerouting foot traffic and a third of the cameras just reset on the wrong firmware image. I’m not saying I bribed a contractor with pierogi, but I did hand someone hot food near a switch.”
“Tell me the coiled thing is ready,” I say.
She flicks her wrist and the laptop on the table wakes to a countdown against a black screen: 00:47:12. A green line curves in a looped figure-eight, beautiful and dangerous. “Meta-mirror goes live on the feeds and clones to the union cloud at T-90,” she says. “Ledger subset A—trial IDs, board votes, liaison initials—queues first. Subset B—embargoed comms, budget notes, the hush payments—drips after the raise-of-hands, timed to cut through applause.”
“The liaison initials,” I repeat.
“AV for ‘Asset Vector,’” June says, rolling her eyes. “Cute how they thought changing initials would make me forget acronyms. Our friend at Logistics signs as ‘LZ’ now. Don’t worry, I braided both monikers into the pattern. Which reminds me.” She digs in her bag and hands me a printout with rain-dented edges. “You’ll love this.”
Paper crinkles with the sound of old guilt. I scan the top line. POST-VOTE REMOVAL PROTOCOLS: Assets to be transferred to offshore holding at T+15 via storm exemption; documentation purged under ‘contingency event.’ My teeth set so hard the cut in my mouth hums.
“They’re going to sweep the barge clean the second the hands drop,” I say. “Fifteen minutes from bang to vanish.”
“Fifteen minutes if nothing jams their gears,” June says. “Which is why the snake has fangs. We leak A right before the vote, let the board realize every hand is fingerprinted by the ledger, then we sink in B with the transfer schedule. I want panic to split attention. Panic is inefficient by design.”
Elias leans over the table, eyes darker than the glass. “If we trigger that much panic, Sable frames us as arsonists,” he says. “We’ll be accused of causing instability on a vote day while a storm is literally coming in.”
“We’ll be accused either way,” I say. “The only question is: do we give the people who don’t wear NDAs enough proof to pick a side while there’s still a side to pick?”
He looks at me, then at the countdown threading away our options. “I don’t want anyone hurt.”
“Then let’s be precise,” I say, resisting the pull to touch his hand because precision and skin are dangerous in combination. “We choreograph exits. We assign eyes to the hallways that matter. We put someone at the Red Hall stairwell who knows how to stall with a badge and a smile.”
June taps her screen. “Already wrote the script for the building alarms if we need to reroute. Fire code is your friend, baby. Also, I mapped the hurricane barrier’s blind CCTV arches as egress vectors. If we have to move bodies, we move them through public park cover while the drones count lanterns, not faces.”
The sirens cut to a burr, then quiet. The room exhales. I hear the tick of the tide clock again—three minutes fast, three minutes honest. The microdrive under my jacket presses against my ribs like a vow.
Elias runs the second paragraph of his speech. “Consent without the option of refusal is coercion. We will vote today not just on a revenue line, but on whether Harbor Eleven becomes a city that sells pain in the language of resilience.” He hesitates and then looks at me for permission I don’t deserve.
“Say the next sentence,” I tell him, and I hold my breath because I know what it is.
“If I lose this vote,” he says, “I will take what I know and walk it into daylight.”
Heat climbs my neck. The room gets smaller, not because the storm presses but because his risk does. I put the printout of the removal protocols between us, a sheet of moral friction. “Then don’t lose it,” I say, and it sounds heartless until I let him see my mouth soften. “But if you do, make daylight loud.”
June chews the inside of her cheek the way she does when she watches two friends stand at the edge of a promise. “I’ve got your daylight set on a hair trigger,” she says. “Deadman is armed and renamed something cute so I don’t have to say ‘dead’ out loud.”
“Tar?” I ask.
“Tar,” she confirms, and we both hear the river hiss under steel.
—micro-hook— The storm knocks on the glass, polite, like a killer with table manners. I count the beats to stay calm and feel the microdrive counting with me.
We shift stations for the next hour like dancers who refuse to admit we’re rehearsing for a funeral. I walk exits, check camera loops, label breathing spaces with tape on the floor only I will read. I rub chalk on my fingertips so I don’t smudge touchscreens with blood—the grazed rib is quiet now but holds its grudge. I brief two union stewards by text with a code June insists a toddler could crack and no one else will see. On the balcony two floors down, I inhale the algae-lit calm a therapist once told me to picture when I couldn’t sleep, and the taste of iodine and glass puts that advice to bed permanently.
Elias stands with me for thirty of those minutes, speech open in a window he barely glances at. “You burned the contract,” he says finally.
“I burned her price,” I say. “I kept the photo.”
“The sea behind Lila,” he says, remembering details I didn’t give him. “Green like the algae wall when the filters are tired.”
“Timestamp was hours before she vanished,” I say. “Sable sent it to show me what she holds.”
“She’s wrong about what you hold,” he says, and it’s not the compliment that gets me; it’s the certainty like a rope I could pull if I needed to climb.
“Hold your lines,” I answer, because I will always turn tenderness into tactic when the room requires it. The algae light dims, then recovers. I mark the glitch without letting fear build a house inside it.
June whistles up from the table the way she does when she wants our eyes without our panic. “Heads,” she says, and rotates the laptop so the countdown sits between us. 00:12:21. She points to a panel that isn’t a panel until you learn to see. “Board assistants just requested a storm-variant catering reroute and used the liaison’s new initials. Also, the Logistics channel is scheduling a shuttle at T+30 from Dockyard K that doesn’t legally exist. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a vacuum truck for human beings.”
I grip the edge of the table so I don’t curl my hand into something less legal. “We need to lock the stairwells and keep them here long enough for B to land,” I say. “If they vote and run, the barge is a ghost town before the second pulse. Can you choke the elevators on a safety loop?”
“On a loop that says ‘rain intrusion on Level Two’ and keeps them chatting near the glass while they pretend to care about the view? Yes,” June says. “I’ll give them algae sunset while I break their toys.”
Elias stares at the shuttle note, the row of numbers that mean people wearing hospital bracelets will be moved like boxes. He speaks very lightly, like words could cut the scene open if he uses his usual weight. “We can’t let them touch that dock.”
“We won’t,” I say, and I lay my palm flat on the table so he sees I mean to hold. “But if we try to do everything, we do nothing. We win the room first. Then we win the dock.”
“And the barge,” he says.
“And the barge,” I echo, because name it, then plan it, then pry it open.
—micro-hook— The tide clock down the harbor blinks its lie again and I find myself respecting it. Telling time wrong is how you make people hurry correctly.
We run the last checks. June’s script pings a dry run to a sandbox, curls, strikes, retracts. The “coiled snake” lives, breath synchronized with the room. I position a burner phone in the Red Hall and a second under the stair rail because redundancy is my only superstition. I pin a single microreflector on the underside of the conference table lip, not because I need it but because rituals make hands steady.
“Say the opening again,” I tell Elias when the countdown slides into the final minutes.
“Consent isn’t a checkbox,” he says, and this time he looks at me, not the glass. “I have made mistakes. Protecting our reputation over our responsibilities was one of them.”
“Good,” I say, and the word is a release valve.
June lifts a hand. “T-90. Ready to coil.”
“Coil,” I say.
Her finger kisses the key. The snake unrolls into wires and rain. Somewhere in the building, an assistant’s tablet purrs with a preview she didn’t ask for. Somewhere under the arches, a union steward’s cloud stash wakes to a folder labeled “Festival Recipes” and finds instead a ledger that ties votes to people’s pain. Somewhere in Sable’s office, a notification tries to arrive and meets a door I locked when she was on the phone.
The room holds its breath with us.
The first reply pops from an internal chat as tiny as a mosquito. June reads it aloud because she’s kind. “‘Is this real?’—from someone who ends emails with sunflower emojis.”
“They always ask that,” I say. “Then they ask who to blame for believing.”
The rain hammers now—a thousand hands on the glass. The door opens and a board assistant with damp hair and dry eyes says, “We’re seating in five.” She smiles at Elias the way you smile at a prince you want to keep in the zoo. When she leaves, she forgets to close the door all the way. The sirens bump, then stop, then the building pings a monastic chime for attention.
June’s laptop blips. A new banner knifes the countdown: LOCATION CONTINGENCY: POSSIBLE ROOM CHANGE FOR SAFETY. FINAL CONFIRMATION AT T-3.
“Read the route,” I say, already moving my maps in my head.
June’s eyes go flint. “They’re floating to a smaller chamber with fewer exits. Dry corridor. Good for narratives. Bad for escape velocity. And look who suggested it.” She rotates the screen. The liaison’s initials in their new costume gleam like a fresh tattoo.
Elias looks at us and doesn’t flinch. “We adapt,” he says.
I crack my knuckles, not for threat but to loosen the next set of choices. “We adapt,” I echo, and I feel the photo inside my jacket where I put it last night, warm from skin and decision. The tide clock over the harbor clicks forward and tells me I’m late even when I’m precisely on time.
“One more line,” I tell him, because sometimes faith needs to hear itself speak. “The end of the middle section.”
He nods, and in a voice that steadies my hands, he says, “If a model predicts betrayal in people who speak up, then betraying that model is the only loyal thing left to do.”
The building chime sings again. The alert locks in: ROOM SHIFT CONFIRMED. Drones hum past like patient insects outside the glass. June keys the elevator loop with a sigh that sounds like prayer and profanity.
I button my jacket over the drive, point my chin at the door, and ask the storm for one more favor: keep them near the windows long enough for the truth to land—before the liaison’s vacuum truck learns all our names.