The bow surge hit wrong and the tug slewed; spray ripped across my face and tasted of copper and iodine. I yelled, “Now,” and threw the grapnel. The hook bit the barge rail with a shriek so clear it cut through the engine’s growl. The line went harp-string tight.
“Hold her, Nina,” I told the tug, useless but necessary. To June: “Locks?”
“Half-ready,” she said through chattering teeth. Drone rotors above us thrummed like cicadas with bad attitudes. “Give me a minute to spoof their door authority.”
“You get fifteen seconds,” I said, planting my boots wide. The tide clock’s wrong-eyed glow winked from the marina, three minutes fast and three lives late. The hurricane barrier’s park arches hunched behind us, CCTV blind spots like closed eyelids. Storm cover was our borrowed cloak; the rent came due with every gust.
I took the line hand over hand and jumped to the barge ladder. The world kinked. The rope snapped.
The sound cracked through my bones and the recoil slapped my wrist so hard light flashed in my eyes. I pinwheeled, shin smashing steel. Pain tolled up my leg. I bounced off the barge’s flank and dropped toward the tug’s tire fender, a black doughnut that wouldn’t care either way.
“Mara!” June’s voice punched through the wet air.
I slammed hip-first into rubber, skidded, clawed steel with my nails, and caught the ladder’s lowest rung. Everything in me swore. My tongue found blood.
“I’m good,” I grunted, which meant I was a bruise with opinions. I dragged myself up rungs that had been rained into oil. The barge hull sang a low whale note as a wave shouldered us. I climbed anyway.
At the rail I hooked my arm and rolled over, then flattened against deck like I’d married it. Cold bit under my jacket and knifed down my spine. The deck lights were clinical and cruel. Water ran in silver snakes toward the scuppers and, failing that, toward my boots.
“Door status,” I said, breathing steam.
“I’ve got an edge,” June said in my ear, fingers stuttering on keys through the tug’s cheap mic. “They’re running a storm-downscoped security tree. I can jam the mid-deck locks open for thirty seconds, then slam shut behind you.”
“Good,” I said. “Do it when I say.”
I crawled to the near door, a white panel that claimed AUTHORIZED STAFF in black sans serif—friendly font for unfriendly rooms. The badge reader blinked lived-in green. I could smell antiseptic threaded with diesel and the sweetish undertone of saline. The barge’s drones ticked on their rails, failing to like the wind.
“Go,” I said.
The door hissed. June muttered something obscene and triumphant.
“You’re inside,” she said. “Cameras are blind under the arches and blind where I just burned them.”
“You’re a saint.”
“I’m a mechanic with grief and broadband,” she said. “Move.”
I slid into a corridor that had all the warmth of a surgical tray. Condensation ghosted along the ceiling tiles. The algae-lit glass aesthetic from the Spire had been stripped here; this was white on white, with occasional black floor arrows that told the obedient where to go. My boots squeaked. Alarms somewhere else argued in a language of whoop-whoop that asked us to be reasonable and die.
“Left, then right,” June said. “There’s a flight of industrial stairs. I’ll hold the door to the ward deck until you’re through.”
“Hold, then lock,” I said. “Make prison work for us.”
“Copy.”
I took the left. A splash of water hammered the hull and the corridor shivered. I smelled ozone—overworked generators pushing against the storm’s opinion. My thigh complained with heat and ache where steel had kissed me too hard. The railing on the stair had grit under its paint like a secret. I counted steps because count beats pain.
“Mara,” June said softly, and that tone shrank the world to the size of her breath in my ear. “You still with me?”
“I’m with you,” I said, and hoped that was a promise I could keep in more rooms than this one.
At the base of the stairs, another door. June breathed into the line like a bellows. “Jamming now. Three, two—door.”
The seal relaxed. I slid into colder air. The sound changed; I heard air handling that was supposed to be calm and wasn’t. The chemical clean hit my sinuses like a slap. Behind it, the faint metallic sweetness of blood not yet admitted.
“Security to your front, ten meters,” June warned. “Two heat signatures, one standing, one leaning.”
“Let me talk,” I said, and walked like I belonged to a terrible idea.
The first guard was young enough to be new and cocky enough to hate being new. He lifted a hand, palm out. “Restricted—”
“I am the restriction,” I cut in, low and steady. “Storm protocol three. You’ve got five sedated patients set for transfer and a river you can’t trust. You want to be the reason a gurney goes over?”
He flicked a glance toward the second guard, bored and leaning, who let his eyes climb my clothes like I owed him change. I let him finish, then moved a step closer so he could see what lived in mine.
“Where’s your supervisor?” I asked. “Tell her the liaison sent the override.”
“We didn’t get—” the young one started.
“Then your radios are wet,” I said, and took another step. “Do you want to argue signal strength or do you want to keep oxygen in the people you’re moving?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. Behind him, a red light blinked a cadence that reminded me of the tide clock’s lie, fast and fatally cheerful.
“June,” I said, smiling with no teeth, “lock the door behind me.”
The bulkhead clunked. The young guard flinched—reflexive animal fear at a boxed exit.
“Elevator to your right leads to intake,” the bored guard said, choosing the least brave survival. He lifted his chin at the phone on the wall. “Protocol says I call.”
“Protocol says you phrase it as a courtesy,” I said. “Call, then get out of my lane.”
He lifted the receiver. June hissed, “Line jammed. He’ll get tone, no voice.”
“Your phone’s dead,” I told him. “Looks like the storm picked favorites.”
He frowned at nothing. I left them with their confusion and took the elevator, which smelled like stale coffee and denial. My face in the chrome looked older than last week and younger than the truth.
“Ward level next,” June said. “Ready for a door party?”
“I brought balloons made of iron,” I said.
The doors opened onto a cross-corridor hung with condensation; distant thunder rolled through steel. A woman in scrubs turned the corner, saw me, and froze with a tray balanced in her hands—three syringes, one labeled with a familiar drug name that wrapped my throat from the inside.
“We’re reassigning beds,” I said, calm like an ice sheet. “Which ward?”
“Two,” she whispered, because storms make everyone confess to something. “Sedation check. They said the river would be steady.”
“The river is a liar,” I said, and took the tray from her. “Go home.”
She didn’t move.
“Go home,” I repeated, softer. “If someone asks where you were, you were out getting towels.”
She nodded, eyes wide, and vanished into the noise. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. I kissed that paradox on the mouth and kept moving.
“Left,” June said, pulse in her voice. “Door coming up. I can jam. I can also brick it behind you.”
“Do both.”
The ward door slid and stopped. I stepped into a cold blue that made my teeth ache. Beds in two rows, straps on wrists, lines in veins, monitors blinking quiet agreement that none of this was their fault. Water ticked under the sill and made a creeping lace. The air smelled like saline and plastic and rain that didn’t belong to the sea.
A guard at the far end looked up, blinked, and went dead pale. I watched the moment recognition walked across his face and shook the keys in his pocket.
“No,” he said, half prayer, half curse. “Not you.”
“Me,” I said.
He backed up hard enough to knock his hip into a gurney and then ran—past the crash cart, past the code buttons, straight through a side door he didn’t lock. Fear did what training couldn’t. He left his radio on the counter, still muttering static about procedures. June laughed in my ear for one delighted second.
“He recognized you,” she said. “There’s your alibi: they’ve seen the videos.”
“They watch me to watch themselves,” I said, moving down the aisle. “Jam that side door.”
“Bricked,” she said. “It opens for fire only.”
The patients were strapped well, not kindly. Most were mid-20s to 40s, the faces of a city’s invisible labor: dockhands, cleaners, coders who never stood near light. One man had a bruise like a thumbprint fading on his temple. A woman’s hair was shaved clean over a neat scar. On monitors, pulse oximetry glowed benignly like cartoon hearts.
“Please tell me you have names,” I whispered to the machines, and then my breath left me because of a band.
Wristband, left side, second gurney: white plastic with a seafoam line. Text: QUILL, LILA. My name like a mirror and a blade. The band’s LED pulsed a little faster than a heartbeat, an anxious metronome that matched the tide clock’s lie.
“June,” I said, and my voice was too small for the room. “Wristband.”
“Say it.”
“It says Lila.” The word cut me open again. “The band says Lila.”
For a second June forgot the storm and just breathed, oh. Then she rewove herself into steel. “Scan the QR. Don’t touch the IV yet.”
My hands did the right thing even while my chest tried to do the wrong one. I lifted the band, angle tilting for the camera in my sleeve. The code popped, metadata unfurled: the date of wristband issuance, an intake number we’d seen in ledger fragments, the notation BAND SWAP: NONE RECORDED. The photo on file was a tiny, unkind rectangle: Lila’s face months earlier, hair damp like she’d just come off the barrier park in rain—smiling with her mouth, not her eyes.
The patient on the gurney had tape over the nose to hold a cannula; gauze shadowed her cheekbones like smoke. The face shape was right and wrong in equal measure, the way time plus trauma makes strangers out of family. Her dark hair was shaved then grown in ragged, like every choice had been an emergency. I wanted to pull the tape and yell her name until truth answered.
“Not yet,” June said, reading me like a screen. “Check the vitals.”
I forced my gaze to the monitor. Resp 12, sats 97, BP gentle. The IV bag hung with a sedative I recognized and hated. “They kept her soft,” I said. “Too soft to argue.”
“Sedation drip at fifty,” June said. “Turn down to twenty. I’ll flood the logs with ‘storm conserve.’”
“Copy.” My fingers were steady while my bones shook. I lowered the rate and watched the numbers shrug. “We need stretchers for the move.”
“I can unlock the intake lift,” June said. “But we need five minutes to route around a drone that’s learning the word wind.”
“We don’t have five,” I said. Water licked over my boot. “The scuppers are losing the argument.”
Another wave slammed the hull; the floor trembled; a heartbeat of light flickered. Protection demands closeness; closeness becomes leverage. I leaned close to the face that could be my sister and let my hand hover just above the wristband without claiming it.
“Lila,” I said, not touching. “If this is you, I need you to take the quietest breath you own.”
The chest under the blanket rose, fell. It was the most unhelpful, ordinary thing in the world.
“Mara,” June said, tight now. “Two more security on route. I can jam one hall door. I can’t be a god in a storm forever.”
“Do the hall. Then give me the ward.” I moved down the row, cutting straps at ankles, loosening them to one loop I could rip free with a yank. “We extract the four closest first. We pivot the beds and push like we hate lawsuits.”
“Copy.” The lock statuses on my sleeve flashed from red to amber to green as June practiced religion on circuits. “You’ll have ninety seconds before anyone realizes their keys are theater props.”
At the end of the row, a man murmured nonsense into his mask—the kind of dream talk that comes when chemicals loosen language. “Shh,” I told him, absurd with tenderness and purpose. “We’re going to move you to a place that remembers names.”
“I can get the lift now,” June said. “But if I open it, it will stay open. Choose the second.”
“Do it,” I said. “We live with the sound.”
The intake lift at the far wall thunked awake. A rectangle of black mouth opened, promising motion and risk. Air that smelled like river and machinery breathed out.
“One more thing,” June said. “The side door the runner used? Bricked for real. He went up, not through. He’s headed for a camera. I can’t cut every eye.”
“Then we beat the eye with the body,” I said. “Ready to push?”
I grabbed the first gurney’s headrail—Lila’s wristband blinking too fast, the face taped, the truth refusing to align—and angled toward the lift. Water eased around my soles and made everything a small, shimmering wrong. I braced, shoved, and the wheels sulked then rolled.
“On my mark,” I said into the storm and into June and into the part of me that refused to break even when that was the honest thing to do. “Three… two…”
The lights hiccuped; the drone hum skittered; somewhere a door took a fist. I pushed anyway.
If this is her, I’m lifting my life; if it isn’t, I’m lifting the lie that points to her. Either way, I would not leave a body in a room that smelled like forgetting.
“One,” I finished, and the gurney’s wheels took the threshold like a promise I intended to keep or die arguing with.