Rain drilled the glass so hard the boardroom turned into an aquarium, and I was the one watching the sharks.
The algae wall on the west side glowed its pharmaceutical green, all reassurance and no mercy. Under it, the Vance crest looked honest for once—just a mark etched in stone that couldn’t stop a storm or a vote. I took the hinge spot between the exit doors and the aisle, where I could see the podium, the screens, and the first three security posts without turning my head. The iodine wind crawled through the air system and salted the back of my throat. Drone rotors throbbed outside like cicadas learning Latin.
Elias touched the mic and the room’s noise folded. He wore a dark suit that made his face brighter and his refusal harder to ignore. I caught his eyes and gave him a half-nod: the plan holds until something cracks. My collar mic warmed. June’s voice slid in, low, steady. “Three. Two. One. Bite.”
The screens didn’t just switch; they bloomed. Ledger columns unscrolled in waterfall view, line items multiplying into branches, branches into fruit: stipends, transport invoices, sealed settlements, clinic “donations,” Sable’s barge maintenance under a benign nonprofit shell. At every third row a red timestamp winked into being, our proof-of-life for the lie.
The board held their faces the way people hold glassware in an earthquake. Then the blanching started—one by one, heat leaving cheeks, chins setting hard. A woman near the head of the table tried to lift her bracelet toward the mic but her hand trembled and the bracelet interpreted stress with a calming blue pulse. A man reached for his water and knocked it; the ice skipped across the agenda packet like tiny lifeboats fleeing print.
“This—turn that off—” someone barked.
“Leave it,” Elias said, voice even. He didn’t lift his volume; he clipped it clean, like cutting a wire you’d rather not touch. “Consent is not silence purchased with care. We will not fund research that converts fear into compliance. We will not—”
The room crackled with the storm’s distant static and the closer static of reputations failing to self-heal. On the center screen, June pinned our flourish: a side-by-side of Sable’s preemptive denial from yesterday, stamped 14:02, against access logs showing her team inside the atrium server 14:19—editing the very entries she claimed didn’t exist. The tide clock in the marina, visible through rain-laced glass, ticked its three minutes fast with smug indifference, the city’s favorite liar cheering for its own accuracy.
“This is unsanctioned content,” a board member announced, standing too fast. He kept one hand on the table to steady his image. “Security.”
My shoulder blade kissed the door frame. I cataloged the room in a single sweep: four guards inside, two in the hall, one elevator team on standby. Radios, no long guns—insurance preferred optics over outcomes. The nearest guard’s jaw worked like he was chewing ethics; the second’s pupils were blown glass.
“Hold,” I said into my mic, soft for June, while I shifted weight to the ball of my back foot. “Let them look.”
June breathed a smile across the line. “Give them thirty seconds and I’ll give them a decade.” The files cascaded to the next view: a clean ledger branch labeled Predictive Compliance—Pilot with a red footnote: consent collected via NDA in exchange for care; confidentiality includes symptom progression. The names were gray but the dates weren’t.
Elias put a hand on the lectern. His fingers went white at the edges and then relaxed, the way he does when he chooses to stay. “You told yourselves this was philanthropy,” he said to the table. “What we funded was a machine that turns pain into a spreadsheet field and erases people who fail to conform to its idea of loyalty.”
A director laughed, sharp and late. “That’s theatrical, Elias. Where did you get these files? Stolen data cannot be—”
“Careful,” I said under my breath, forgetting to mute, and felt the word strike my own ribs. Elias heard it; his mouth twitched then straightened.
“The ledger is ours,” he said. “What’s on it is our responsibility.”
—micro-hook—
The lights hiccuped then cut, a single blink that made every face naked. The hum under the floor swelled from purr to growl as the building shifted to generator. Emergency strips along the floor lit the edges of the carpet like runway markers. Electricity changed the smell of the room; hot plastic and damp paper started a brief marriage in my nose, officiated by ozone.
June’s voice sharpened. “I’m still on. UPS is carrying the stream to the feeds. We’re good. For now.” Her typing pattered against the storm, a metronome for my nerves. “Heads up: liaison just pushed an ops order.” A beat. “Green light for ‘asset relocation.’ Time stamp is ten minutes ago. They started the purge while the room was praying for optics.”
The word relocation hit me in the stomach. Lila’s name fluttered upward from memory and I had to let it pass without grabbing it or I’d break. I scanned the doors again, not because I didn’t trust my own count but because everything counts change during storms. “Confirm recipient,” I said.
“Dockside liaison to barge ops,” June answered. “CC’d a private emergency logistics contractor—the one with the river tugs. Model says heavy weather lowers discovery risk.” She exhaled. “They updated their goddamn machine.”
The power stuttered again. A blackout rolled across the glass like a wave; the city returned in a ghosted way, lit by emergency grids and the bruised gleam of the hurricane barrier. The public park on top blurred to a smear of umbrellas and ponchos, the blind CCTV zones under the arches darker and more useful than any prayer. Somewhere out there, the tide clock still lied on schedule. Everyone plans, no one is truly ready.
The chief of security moved. He tapped his earpiece and nodded at his two nearest. Their vector aimed straight for the mic, not the screens—cut the voice so the pictures can be explained away. The calculus was correct. The calculus disgusted me.
“Elias,” I said, and he heard the tone and lifted his chin.
“This vote can still choose care without coercion,” he said, faster now, the cadence of a runner who thinks the hill will end. “You can choose to protect the trial families by ending the NDAs and funding lifetime treatment no matter what their data says about their behavior. You can choose—”
The guards stepped into his breath. I stepped out of mine.
I slid between them and the lectern like a door that didn’t exist until you needed it. The first guard’s hand rose; I caught his wrist in a handshake he didn’t expect and let my thumb find the nerve that persuades. Not pain—clarity. He blinked. “Stand down,” I said low enough to be mistaken for conscience.
The second’s fingers grazed the mic stem. I blocked with my forearm and let contact look accidental, an etiquette collision. His radio burped: “—control of podium—” He swallowed the word control the way men in suits swallow apologies.
“Ma’am,” he tried, performing courtesy like a trick. “We need to secure the system.”
“You secure people,” I said. “Systems take care of themselves.” I didn’t smile. I was the meanest version of polite I know how to be.
At the table, the matriarch who had refused us two nights ago stared at me with the exact expression she gave bad numbers: clinical, disappointed, curious about the salvage value. I didn’t blink back; she wasn’t my room, not right now.
Elias didn’t waste the interruption. He turned the blip into a beat. “Consent means nothing when need is weaponized,” he said. “Consent means nothing when care is contingent on obedience.”
“Kill the screen,” the CFO snapped. The wall panels obeyed halfway; June had a finger hooked in their spine. The sheets stuttered, then returned harder, as if insulted.
“You’re live to the union feeds and the clinic networks,” June told me, a private joy threaded into the words. “And the resilience festival forum, because poetic justice is still justice.” The drone hum rose and fell outside, wings angling against gusts.
I kept my body between the mic and the hands, a hinge again. The chief changed tactics—he gestured to the AV rack behind me. “Fire code,” he told the room. “We’re over capacity on the load. We need to power down before the generator—”
The generator chose its own punchline: a deep cough rolled up through the floor and every light fluttered once, twice, like a lost bird hitting windows. A smell like hot dust filled my mouth. The emergency strips held; the screens dropped to battery preservation—flat, bright, colorless, brutal. Numbers looked more like truth in monochrome.
—micro-hook—
The liaison ping landed in our top right corner with a neat gray banner. June framed it lovingly. Subject: Asset Relocation Confirmation. Time: T–10. From: the liaison we’d heard whisper by the fountain. To: Barge Ops, River Logistics. Note: proceed while public eyes occupied; additional cover from weather.
“Read that line again,” Elias said, not to the board but to the camera of the room, the ghost audience we’d both learned to court and to fear.
“Proceed while public eyes occupied,” I echoed, rubbing the last word into the air until someone breathed it back as responsibility.
“This is manufactured ‘misinfo,’” a director protested, voice cracking on the fashionable term. “Deepfakes are rampant during storms.” He gestured at the windows, almost pleading with the rain to endorse him. “We have generators. We have lawyers.”
“You have timestamps,” I said. “And my body.”
The first guard tried the mic again; I let go of politeness and used weight. Not violence—gravity. He met the floor with a noise only polished shoes make, surprise outraged by acoustics. The second took a step back, not because he believed me but because his feet did.
Elias didn’t flinch. He didn’t look at me like a hero and he didn’t look at me like a liability. He looked at me like a fact that helped other facts live. “The vote should be public,” he said. “If we adjourn under storm protocol, you will be voting to continue harm without the cover of ignorance.”
“Sit down,” the matriarch told him, and the word down carried the weight of a childhood I never survived and he barely did.
He didn’t sit. His voice softened instead. “I love this company,” he said, and the past tense that didn’t arrive was its own accusation. “I refuse to love it at the expense of people who trusted us with their bodies.”
For one beat the only sound in the room was rain—the storm drumming the narrative like it wanted a byline. In that beat, I tasted the iron in my mouth and knew it wasn’t blood; it was the generator’s breath, eaten and exhaled by a building that wanted to be neutral.
June cut in. “Last package in place. Redundancies spun. Whatever they try, it lives.” Then, softer, into the small space I keep for her: “If they grab him, pull the hallway. I’ll drop elevators to slow the grab.”
I angled my body to advertise consequences: hand near the emergency stop on the wall, knee bent toward the hinge point of the nearest guard’s balance, chin tipped to make my neck a dare. “Try me,” I told the room, and heard my past selves nod smudged approval.
The liaison banner pulsed once more with an update—river level rising; ETA twenty minutes to departure—and I felt the welded hatch in the barrier corridor tilt like a coin deciding which face it prefers. I pictured the microcharge asleep in its painted bed and the question that had followed me there returning now, colder:
If they lock the doors with people inside, will I blow the lie open in time?
The table erupted into motions designed to look like governance: hands counting proxies, lawyers pivoting shutters over words, someone reciting sections of bylaws like scripture. The storm outside did its own reading, line after line of water underlining the glass. I caught Elias’s eye again and he gave me the only look I could bear—neither saved nor doomed, just partnered.
“June,” I murmured, watching the chief make one more silken arc toward the mic. “How long until the feeds can withstand a blackout?”
“Sixty seconds,” she said. “Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven.”
The chief’s hand rose, and I moved to meet it, and behind me the screens burned with numbers that refused to drown.
I let the storm choose my final sentence, because storms aren’t polite and neither is truth. “Count faster,” I told June, and then to the room that wanted to rename harm: “Who here will vote to keep the river quiet—while the boats already load?”