I kept the gurney moving, wheels complaining over the threshold, my palms slick and stinging where the rope had kissed skin to bruise. The ward’s air tasted sterile, too clean, and under it I caught the iodine breath of the river shoving at the hull. Water threaded the floor in bright veins. The wristband blinked on the woman’s arm—QUILL, LILA—a pulse too quick for peace.
“Vitals?” June asked, voice clipped in my ear. The tug’s engine groaned like a tired animal behind her.
“Resp twelve, sats ninety-seven, pressure stable,” I said, playing human metronome to keep nerves from taking the wheel. “Sedation drip at twenty, per your call.”
The woman’s eyelids flickered—the barest tremor—and my stomach turned to ice that cracked. “June,” I whispered, “I’ve got flutter.”
“Good sign,” June said. “Tilt her ten degrees, head elevated. Check pupils.”
I lifted the head of the bed until her cannula tugged gently. “Hey,” I said, keeping my voice at the pitch I used for disaster, the one that replaces panic with assignments. “You’re safe right now. Breathe with me.”
Her eyes opened a slice. Brown under storm-shadow, rimmed with salt. She tried to wet her lips and failed. I touched a sponge to them; saline wove through the plastic taste in the air. The gurney frame hummed under my hands as the barge took another wave.
“I’m right here,” I said. “Stay with me.”
“Syringe on your tray,” June said. “Microdose flumazenil, point two. Slow. I’ll bury the reversal in storm protocol.”
I cracked the cap, bled the bubble, slid the needle through the port. The river knocked again, the ceiling lights blinked like skittish birds, and the drone hum on the rails jittered.
“In,” I said, pressing the plunger. “Talk to me, angel.”
Her eyelashes flurried, then steadied. Her gaze found my chin, then climbed to my eyes with painful work. She mouthed a syllable that remembered being a word.
“Water,” I said. I touched the sponge again. Her throat worked; her fingers twitched in their straps.
“Loosen,” June said gently. “But hold the left hand. That’s your ID.”
I freed her right wrist and her ankles to one loop I could tear fast. Her skin ran cool under my fingers, the way metal does right before it agrees to cut you. She found breath and banked it.
“Who are you?” I asked, voice small and certain together. “My name is Mara.”
“Na—” Her voice scraped like sand in gears. She tried again. “Nurse.”
Sick dread rose like the tide. I swallowed it back to its kennel. “Name?”
“Emi,” she whispered, consonants catching. “I—worked nights.”
“Talk later,” June said. “Keep her in the pocket.”
“Emi,” I said, anchoring the name with my palm. “Do you know Lila Quill?”
The wristband blinked between us, a calm liar.
Emi closed her eyes. A tear slicked out of the corner and disappeared into gauze. When she opened them again, there was a stubborn light I recognized from mirrors—the one that survives bullies and policy.
“She ran,” Emi breathed, the words shaped like a prayer turned into an instruction. “Hours—before you looked.”
My knees loosened, then locked, then remembered how floors work. Relief and fury collided so hard my ribs rattled gifts onto the shelves of my lungs. “How?”
Emi licked her lip, slow and miserable. “Traded—bands.”
“Oh,” June said in my ear, a word that held ten years of rage and gentleness. “Mara—”
“Stay with me,” I told Emi, fingers tightening. “You put this band on yourself.”
She nodded, the tiniest nod, a confession you only make when you’ve chosen your punishment already.
“She couldn’t pass the scan,” Emi whispered. “Model—flags ‘friction.’ I told her—don’t look at the lens. She laughed. Said I sound like—like a nurse from a movie.”
I bit the inside of my cheek until copper bloomed. The tide clock in the marina had always been three minutes fast; that lie swallowed lives just like this—good timing that refused to be good enough.
“Who helped?” I asked.
Emi’s eyes rolled briefly with the effort to keep the world in focus. “Archive,” she said. “Room… by intake stairs.” Her left hand drifted up and her finger lifted, pointing behind me, toward the corridor I’d stormed through. “He—let her—out.”
My heart jerked. “He?”
“Can’t—say,” she whispered. “They record—names. But—archive.”
The word climbed into my spine and nested there. June exhaled, long and precise. “We can lock a corridor and buy you a window,” she said. “But if you go digging, we lose minutes on evac.”
“We lose her in the storm if I don’t,” I said. The truth tasted like a battery. “Emi, when did she run?”
“After shift—four,” she said, eyes closing again, the fight to stay present scraping her raw. “Alarm—staged at lab… door hiss—wrong. I told them—‘seal’s off,’ but they marked my file—‘friction—high.’” She coughed a thin, dry cough. “She tucked hair—under cap. Said—tell Mara—”
Every cell in me leaned forward. “Tell me what.”
Emi’s mouth shaped a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Tell Mara I owe her—two fish… from the arcade.” The words slurred at the edges. “She laughed—at the cranes.”
My throat closed and memory opened: Lila and me under the seawall arches on a cheap night, carnival lights reflected in algae glass, Lila winning fish-shaped gummies and accusing the tide clock of being a cheat. She’d said, Everyone plans, nobody’s ready, and then stole my soda.
I breathed, “That’s her.”
“Sedation’s still on board,” June warned. “Keep her oxygen smooth. You’re drawing lines on a map; don’t let the pen shake.”
A monitor chirped, annoyed. I adjusted the cannula and stroked the edge of Emi’s wristband without forgiving it. “You’re brave,” I told her. “You kept a door open with your own body.”
“I ran out—of bodies,” she whispered. “Patients—no lawyers. NDAs—buy silence—by the month.”
The barge shuddered. The lights guttered. Outside, a drone stuttered and resumed its little saw-song like it hadn’t just learned the word fear.
“We need to move two more before the water makes decisions for us,” June said. “I’ll open the intake lift again in ten.”
“Do it in five,” I said, already pivoting the gurney to angle the second bed toward the black mouth of the lift. My boot splashed; the floor had gathered another skin of river. The smell of wet rubber and bleach braided with the algae tang that always clung to Vance glass, saying wealth can be chlorophyll if you buy enough LEDs.
“Mara,” June said, voice narrowing into a scalpel, “security just got religion. They’re regrouping two decks up. I can freeze the stairwell for ninety seconds or the archive for sixty, not both.”
“Stairwell,” I said automatically, muscles voting survival while heart voted hunt. “Hold the ward. Then tell me the quickest path to the archive door.”
“Tunnel left, service lane, twelve meters,” she said. “Look for the framed safety poster that tells you a joke about lifting with your legs.”
“I hate that poster,” I said. I pushed the second gurney, freed straps, whispered names off wristbands like they were spells. “Emi, listen. I’m coming back. If someone who isn’t me tries to move you, you say the word ‘arcade,’ and they’ll blink too long because they don’t have that memory.”
Emi’s lips twitched. “You—talk—like a bodyguard.”
“I talk like a sister,” I said.
Another wave shouldered the hull. The world paused, deciding. The lights died.
Darkness hit like a held breath. For an instant the only sound was rain pummeling steel and my own pulse counting down the future. Then emergency strips woke in a bleeding red that flattened faces and sharpened edges. The ward became a submarine dream, all metal and hum and the feeling of going under.
“Generators are on, but she’s cranky,” June said. “I’m losing camera feeds in clusters. Good for you, bad for us.”
“How deep?” I asked, already moving back to Emi’s bedside. The red made her look like a negative.
“You’re fine in the ward. Corridor left is shadow country. My jams are holding; the locks listen to me better than some people. Lift is live.”
I bent toward Emi’s ear, letting the emergency light draw a line across my knuckles. “I’m going to the archive,” I said. “Point me again.”
Her eyes opened to slits. The left hand lifted, trembled, and pointed to the door that had coughed me into this room. “Stairs,” she breathed. “Room—has… window. Angle wrong—on purpose.”
“Good girl,” I said, and hated the phrase but needed the strength in it. “June, keep her breathing. Patch me if monitors complain in any language.”
“Go,” June said. “And Mara?”
“I hear you.”
“If the room holds what I think, you’re going to lose your breath. Keep one hand on a wall when you watch it, so the floor knows where you are.”
“Copy.” I ran a hand along the bulkhead to practice.
I hit the door. Red splashed the corridor in long arterial strokes. My shadow slid ahead like it wanted to escape first. The safety poster—cartoon worker lifting a crate with a grin—hung crooked. I hissed at it and moved past, boots slipping, shoulder grazing cold steel for balance. The air out here had more river in it, more metal, less mercy.
“Left,” June said. “Then the service lane. I’m dropping a lock behind you and raising the next. Think of it like a zipper. Don’t get your jacket caught.”
“I like my skin attached,” I said. A flood of distant alarms argued with the emergency tone in my ear; the building had too many voices and none of them cared about the truth.
“Emi’s sats dipping,” June warned. “I’m bumping oxygen. Keep moving.”
“Hold her hand with your voice,” I said, and took the turn. The service lane carried a smell like wet cardboard and apology. A red EXIT glyph glowed to my right and begged to be lied to.
I found the archive room by the pattern of its sins: heavier door, better seal, a keypad with protective film unpeeled at the corner—the kind of detail a careful person forgets in a fire drill. The little sidelight glowed red. The window was narrow, angled down the hall, denying any clean view inside. Angle wrong on purpose, Emi had said. People who build secrets learn to love periscopes.
“Door?” I asked.
“You get sixty seconds,” June said. “Once I pop it, it’ll log a maintenance fault. Everyone with a toy badge will see it. Ready?”
“Born,” I said, which was true and a threat.
The lock chattered, then yielded. The emergency red poured across racks of drives and a terminal that slept like a cat who’d eaten the canary. The air was colder here; smelling of dust that had been ordered to be clean.
“Inside,” June said needlessly. “I can’t hold the corridor and this lock forever.”
I slid in, closed the door, and felt the little click of June bricking me in.
“Power’s dicey,” she said. “Terminal might boot to a restricted shell.”
“I brought different shells,” I said, pulling a cable from my sleeve like a magician with low self-esteem. I jacked into the terminal’s side port and let my wrist slate handshake the way lonely machines do. Red light breathed across keys; dust motes drifted like drowned gnats.
The login prompt shivered, wavered, and accepted June’s ghosted creds. The screen coughed up a grid of thumbnails—time codes, camera names. I saw the intake stairs, the side gate, the ward hall. My hand found the wall, like June told me, and pressed there so I knew where gravity lived. The storm pounded the steel skin and the drones outside rasped like cicadas too stubborn to land.
“Find four hours before your first search,” June said. “Offset by the tide clock’s lie—three minutes fast. They use it internally too; everybody plans, nobody’s ready.”
I scrolled, jaw clenched, breath a rope I held tight. Thumbnails flickered by: empty halls, a cart, a shadow in a cap. My chest forgot to move.
The shadow paused at the side gate. Whoever it was had the shape of urgency and competence in a frame I knew too well in the dark. The cap tilted. The gate’s reader blinked. A second figure’s hand—larger—slid into frame, not touching, just blocking the camera’s view.
“There,” I said. My voice tried to vanish. “There.”
“Pull it,” June said, voice kind. “We confirm. Then we get our people off this metal island before it drowns.”
Relief had burned itself to a white coal inside me; urgency grew around it like a nest. Lila had run. Someone had helped. The nurse had bought her minutes with her own band. The storm counted in red light and river spit.
I tagged the clip, felt the floor sway, and asked the only question that mattered to a city built on timing and bad faith:
“What price did he pay to open that door—and what will it cost us to keep it open now?”