I return to the ribs of the barrier the way I learned to return to grief—quiet, sideways, with a tool already in my hand.
The arches above host joggers who call this place uplifting; down here the air tastes of wet steel and iodine. Algae-lit glass hums a cheap calm along the service corridor, painting my knuckles green while I pull the marina keycard from the pocket where my pulse kept it warm. INTAKE GATE B kisses the reader with a soft chirp. The lock opens like a lie politely told.
“You welded my exit,” I tell the dark. “I’m here to make it honest.”
The panic-shaft hatch waits thirty paces in, waist-high and mean. Last week it coughed us into the river like a birth canal; now a gleaming collar of new bead stitches the door to its flange. I crouch until damp cold climbs my knees and pull out the calipers, the UV penlight, the little mirror I lifted from a hotel kit. The lens in my lapel blinks alive and I let the camera see what my hands feel—the ridges and troughs, the rhythm of a wrist I don’t recognize in person but know in pattern.
“Talk to me,” I whisper to steel. “Tell me who touched you.”
I sweep UV light. The weld fluoresces faintly, a newborn bruised by heat. Spatter dots the concrete like constellation freckles; the slag is glassy at the edge. I know this flavor—flux-core wire, too fast a travel speed, a welder who likes to hum while he pushes. I measure bead width: five-point-five millimeters at its bravest, narrowing to four-point-three where the hand tired. I tilt the mirror and catch an internal weave, a lazy cursive S stitched along the seam, the kind of flourish a man leaves when he believes no one’s looking.
I click the camera to macro and hold my breath while the auto-focus noses the metal. The timestamp burns clean in the corner: Thursday, 06:13. The tide clock in the marina still lies three minutes fast, but my recorder tells the truth down to the second. I run the calipers, speak measurements into the throat mic, and feel the corridor’s chill bite through my jacket.
“Five-point-five to four-three,” I murmur, making my breath a ruler. “Travel too quick. Slag glassy. Weave signature: cursive S. This hatch was alive last week.” My finger taps spatter still gritty. “This is a new coffin.”
The system believes panic-shafts are sacred. Only an intent to harm welds one shut. I need proof that intent has a payroll.
I pull a magnet off the sleeve and sweep for iron filings left by the grinder. A few cling, black glitter on the magnet’s rubber smile. I collect them in a bag marked with the date and the tide, then lean to the side panel and unscrew a tiny cap no one ever notices. Inside, a diagnostics port glints. I click in a thumb drive with a rat-tail of wire. The drive tastes for heartbeat: ping—building access controller, ping—door status last changed two days ago, ping—badges in proximity. I copy logs like a thief stealing time.
“You’re giving me names,” I breathe. “Good.”
A hum migrates through the wall, heavier than algae, lighter than guilt. Drone rotors chase each other overhead like cicadas that learned currency. Above me, families rehearse resilience festival chants and buy fried batter in the rain. Down here, the air smells like a battery licked too long.
I compare the weld to the photos crowded in my head: the contractor June flagged months ago when a clinic door came back with the same lazy weave—Leroy’s Fabrication & Floodproofing, a boutique firm that sold “risk offsets” to labs with compliance issues. The file from June’s van had a shot of Leroy laughing on a dock, cigarette hooked to his lip like a comma. On his site, the weld-bead glamour shots showed the same S-stitch flourish he wrote into everything metal he touched. He liked to sign it.
“Hello, Leroy,” I whisper. “You left your autograph on my escape.”
I lock the macro on the S-stitch, then frame the shot so the hatch placard—PS-13 RIVER—sits in focus with the bead and the portable timestamp. I put my flushed cheek to cool steel and let the camera catch the temperature difference: heat bloom has faded but the metal still remembers hands. I slide a fingertip along the edge; it rasps my glove with that new-weld sandpaper. Recent, then. Recent enough to scald.
I pocket the drive and snap the cap back in place, then take one more still of the corridor with the algae light and the drip line and the tiny rust tide climbing the wall like old maps—the city’s secrets geography in miniature.
—micro-hook—
“Footsteps, left,” I mutter, a habit so deep it’s a prayer. The sound tickles the ribs of the corridor before I hear the actual boots: heavy soles, a cadence that says bored until the last three beats flare alert. The angle of light changes at the far turn—silver slice, then a wider fan.
I count. One flashlight, two bodies. The kind of pair that believes the third is a camera they can call later.
The maintenance niche sits six paces back, a technical recess barely wider than my shoulders, hidden by a rack of filter canisters that smell like wet tea and copper. I kill the UV, tuck the calipers into my sleeve, and step backward into shadow with my breathing cinched to the beltline. The keycard’s edge nudges my ribs. The hatch film continues because I left the lapel open; it will record feet and voices in the same breath as metal.
The guards’ chatter arrives before their faces. “Resilience stage goes to eight,” the taller complains, voice razored by sugar. “Then the board feed.”
“As long as the tide clock keeps ‘em three minutes scared,” the other says. “Heh. Floodproof PR.”
They stop at the turn to the hatch. The flashlight washes the welded seam with a bright surprise. I keep my eyes averted; pupils drink less light that way. One boot toes the spatter. The noise is a small dry rain.
“Looks clean,” sugar-voice says.
“Leroy does clean,” the other answers, pride in a contractor he doesn’t know like a fan for a team he can’t afford. “Kincaid pays for clean.”
The name skitters across the concrete and hides behind the hatch in my evidence. I let the recorder eat it.
“You hear about the purge after the vote?” sugar asks.
“You didn’t hear anything,” the other says, and the flashlight moves on with their obedience.
I let six counts pass, then six more, then let my lungs rejoin the day. The niche releases me with a sticking sound, like skin peeling off vinyl. I wait for the echo of their boots to be unimportant, then roll my shoulders so the tension cracks like old shell. The iodine smell surges as the air stirs, and I taste metal, algae, and the old memory of the river climbing my throat.
“Thank you for your cameo,” I tell the corridor, and step back to the hatch.
I still need a door for later—an argument made of physics. Words won’t pry this seam. A coin in the right slot might.
I unclip the microcharge from its nest inside my belt, a flat gray circle no bigger than a jacket button. The polymer skin sweats faint solvent into the air; I pull a breath through teeth to keep the smell from traveling. I knead the adhesive with my thumb to wake it. In the mirror of my hotel kit, the charge looks like a shadow. Good.
“You get one job,” I whisper. “Be the hinge that wasn’t.”
I choose the seam three hand spans above the handle where the weld is proudest but the flange behind it thins—a place a lazy contractor overcompensated for a misfit panel. I press the charge into the valley between beads and feel the adhesive climb microgrooves. The detonator lead is hair-thin; I twine it along a natural oxide line and lay the radio tag against the underside of the placard where grime will keep it. The whole assembly disappears until even I have to trace my fingertip to find it. I paint the edge with a smear of weld-tone pastiche from a pen that smells like pennies and rain. The camera drinks the before and after.
My throat mic chirps with my own voice, and I catch myself: I’m narrating like a cop in the old vids I used to mock. Old men used to pretend that tone meant control. I speak lower.
“Charge planted at PS-13 RIVER,” I say. “Seam three above handle, right side. Adhesive, activated. Radio tag Q-B173. Yield minimal—enough to pop weld, not panel. Purpose: emergency exit when truth needs a hole.”
My hand shakes once. I tuck it into a fist and let it stop.
The access controller pings again on the rat-tail drive; I watch new badges pass in the log like fish shadows. The camera gets it all—time, badge ID, door status locked-welded, and the little laugh in my throat I don’t admit is relief.
I like the sensation of dot-connecting more than I like most food. The bead width and weave signature; the spatter; the slag’s glass tone; the guards’ loose mouths; the log’s badge: LFR-309. The contractor code that shows up dark in a handful of other places: a clinic intake valve that “failed” during an inspection; a lab side door that “jammed” when a janitor needed to get out. All roads hum back to Sable’s payroll.
“You signed my grief with your S,” I tell the flange. “I’m signing back with an O.”
—micro-hook—
The corridor coughs a new noise—metal talking to weather. On the surface, the resilience stage gears up with a song about standing up that never mentions who knocks you down. My tongue tastes like lemon polish and rust; the room where I stole the card invades my mouth until I want water to rinse it out.
I can’t stay. The board will move rooms again or not; either way the vote wants us unprepared. I close the diagnostics port, slide the cap home with the soft click I like, and blow warmth onto my gloves to wake my fingers.
“I’m leaving you alive,” I whisper to the hatch. “But I’ll kill your lie if I have to.”
I back out the way I came, weight on the outsides of my feet to keep the wet from squealing. The algae light stains the corridor; the sound of the river beyond the concrete is a patient animal. Above me, the park trees whip and give off that wet green smell like bruised mint. I listen for boots. Quiet now, except for the drone rotors that refuse to love silence.
At the turn, I stop to frame the long shot: corridor line, hatch centered, timestamp up, and a laser pointer dotting three external welds for later comparison. I tag the image with an internal note: compare to clinic valve LFR-309. My thumb smooths the edge of the keycard in my pocket; the embossed anchor presses a tiny dent into my skin, a psy-op I didn’t authorize.
“On days like this, Lila,” I say under my breath, “I need you to have run.”
The door to the marina coughs me into the iodine wind. Mothers herd kids past the arches with hot chocolate bribes; dock workers swap favors in the lee of a kiosk selling resilience flags; two biotech couples pose under an umbrella and look like a brochure. Algae glass on the Spire glows medicinal green and tells everyone their stress is being managed. The tide clock blinks its three-minute fiction and I watch a dozen people plan around it like loyalists to a charming liar.
My phone buzzes once—no name, just a dot—the kind of message June taught me to read by heart. I don’t open it; I know it says the vote page is live, the stream soft-starting. I know it says time is a river we forgot to dam.
I pull my jacket close against the wind and check my inventory by touch: recorder, drive, calipers, microcharge remote, spare battery—each in its little cathedral. Somewhere behind me, in that damp corridor that swallows certainty, sits a hinge made of my will.
“When the board pretends there’s no barge,” I tell the storm, “the hatch will disagree.”
I make myself move. The arches’ blind CCTV zones belong to people who study their drift; I’ve memorized them like the faces of people I miss. I cross when the drone angles shift and let a family’s stroller block any line of sight left. The child watches me with bright, patient eyes. He’ll grow up to call this courage resilience and buy a T-shirt about it.
I slide into an alcove where the barrier’s concrete sweats like a body and pull up the last photo I shot. The weave signature gleams like a careless flourish. My thumb hovers over the send icon to push it to June’s redundant cloud net. I hold a second, then two—my own private tide-clock ritual—and send. The packet jumps the gap and lands in a place no one but us believes in.
“Proof first,” I whisper. “Then holes.”
I breathe once, then twice, and tuck my chin into the rain. The detonator remote warms to my palm without being touched, the way futures do when they know they’re getting close.
I ask the storm a question that tastes like metal and mercy and walk into the answer before it tells me no:
If they lock the doors with people inside, will I have the courage to become their exit—and live with the blast?