I pinned my left palm to the cold wall so the floor knew where my body ended and the ship began. The terminal yawned awake in a storm-stuttered glow, status bars inching like afraid animals. Through the angled slit of window, rain threaded in silver ropes across the hurricane barrier; the park arches beyond were hulking ribs, the CCTV blind zones under them pooling into pockets of useful dark. The wind pressed its whole mouth to the steel and howled. Drone rotors in the rails rasped like hungry cicadas.
“Come on,” I breathed to the machine. I hadn’t brought prayer today, only proof. The reel of INTAKE_SIDE_GATE_CAM_03 circled its buffering coil; a tiny icon in the corner blinked a tide clock that loved lying. Three minutes fast, always; everyone plans, no one is really ready.
I opened a second pane, hands moving by muscle memory and spite. The folder tree read like a confession in corporate: /PREDICTIVE_COMPLIANCE/THRESHOLDS/—subfolders named for friction scoring, risk appetite, liability heatmaps. The last modified date matched the night a concierge whispered “assets must move” near the memory garden back at the Spire. My jaw locked until my molars complained.
The footage hiccuped and spat a frame: empty hall, rain shimmering in a diagonal sheet beyond. I cued it back three minutes to counter the city’s favorite lie and let it roll. Wind slammed the hull; the terminal’s speaker coughed static like it wanted to be human.
“Talk to me,” I said, not to June, not to anyone—just to the proof that owed me its voice. “Tell me what you ate.”
A figure slid into the frame, cap low, body balanced at the door’s edge to avoid the cone of the camera—someone who had learned a camera’s reach the hard way. Another shape hovered behind, smaller, careful, a shadow in a disposable smock with hair tucked under a clinic cap. My chest forgot to count oxygen for one rude second.
“Lila,” I said, and the word was a gear clicking into a longer machine. I put my knuckles to my lips and tasted salt and iron.
The buffer spun. Wind hunted every seam in the room, found one, and whistled through it—sharp enough to be a warning. Water hissed along the deck so close I could hear its skin.
Focus, I told the part of me that wanted to sprint through walls. I trimmed clipping points in the predictive folder, dragged model_friction_ruleset_v4.json and compliance_predict_dossier.mp4 into my slate, and started a copy. The progress bar moved like a measured heartbeat. I let my palm flatten harder against the wall because when proof travels, people live.
The footage pushed another second forward.
The tech reached up to the hook where storm gear hung like skins. He took a raincoat, shook it once to undo its sulk, and held it open like a door he intended someone else to own. The backlit spray made the plastic flare silver. The small figure turned to face him for half a breath.
Even pixelated, I knew the tilt of that chin. I’d teased it with fingers in high school, turning Lila’s face to the light when she refused to sit still for photos. She had the same habit now—a tiny lift of defiance that translated fine across bad cameras. Her mouth shaped words I couldn’t hear; the tech leaned in, hands steady, settling the hood over her hair and smoothing the shoulders like the gesture could rough her less.
“Let me see your face,” I said to him before the camera did, a superstition with teeth. My heart sprinted in tight circles beneath the ribcage.
Buffer. Spin. A flicker. The wind laid the barge on its side and picked it up again. I widened my stance, ankle muscles catching the slip, and the chair legs skittered across the floor like shy crabs.
The tech lifted his head to check the hall. The light caught half his face, carving cheekbone and the corner of a mouth I had kissed for misdirection and then for want. His eyes were in shadow; the line of his jaw wasn’t. Stubble marked a night without sleep and a choice made in it.
“Elias,” I said, and the name hung in the room like a hook.
My free hand curled around the edge of the desk. The metal bit my palm. Air scraped in and out; the room smelled like wet dust and hallway bleach, with a fern note of algae-lit glass the Spire pumped into its lungs to signal money’s clean conscience. Relief ran under my skin hot as fever. Rage rode it cold.
On-screen, he reached past Lila to the reader. He didn’t touch her. He blocked the lens with his shoulder, big enough to be a shield without touching the person he was shielding. His badge wasn’t visible. The reader flashed and sang its little compliance chime anyway.
There it was: the lie in the ledger had a face and a hand.
The timestamp in the top-right corner rolled numbers in miserable honesty: 02:57:14—which, corrected for the eternal three-minute lie baked into their system, meant 03:00:14. The night matched the concierge’s smoke-break whisper. The liaison’s relocation order had fired ten minutes after. Lila had beaten a machine to the door by a technician and a wish.
“You did this,” I told the screen. “And then you let me scrape my knees on your omission.”
I didn’t let the words carry judgment into the hallway. I folded them into a small compartment where I could feed them later. I slipped the cursor to the exact frame his face tipped into light and marked it. I clipped the sequence of him lifting the raincoat, smoothing the hood. I tagged the reader beep, because the beep was a confession: the system hadn’t been bypassed, it had been told to love him.
Around me, the barge argued with the river like two old men who shared a memory and refused to share the story. I dragged the escape_gate_030014_F.mp4 into the slate, watched bytes tick, felt each tick.
The predictive compliance pane blinked another file to the top: patient_behavioral_offset_scores.csv. I opened a preview. Rows of names, many redacted to initial-and-number; a column labeled friction within a nine-point scale; a column for evacuation priority that mirrored philanthropic spin and legal risk, not heartbeats. I scrolled until I found the padding that hid Lila’s ID in this barge’s taxonomy: Q-LL-39. Her friction score screamed high; someone had raised her flag, which means someone had tried to save her by naming her dangerous.
I pulled the file to the slate and the slate to my pocket. “Truth heals victims,” I whispered, because Lila loved to throw my themes back at me, “and breaks bystanders. Guess who we are tonight.” The words tasted like mud.
The screen returned to rain and the emptiness after two decisions. Lila’s small back slid through the gate. Elias kept the door for three seconds longer than necessary and then closed it like a secret he had agreed to host. He stood there alone, hood down, face cloudy with a thought he didn’t give me.
“You could have told me,” I said to the pixel that was also a man. “You could have asked me to be brave with the right story.”
White noise filled the archive room, equal parts rain and fans. I reached up and traced the air where his jaw had been. My fingers shook; maybe the cold did it, maybe the real reason. Resistance to the urge to sprint back to him pulled on every tendon.
“Not yet,” I told my legs. “Not yet; not while beds need moving.”
I let the footage keep playing. My body remembered the ward’s floor climbing with river and the sedated nurse—Emi—holding a door for us with her body and a borrowed band. The predictive model’s flowchart haunted the corner of the screen, a grayscale map of who had earned rescue by costing less to save.
I opened another directory—/ACCESS_LOGS/OVERRIDES/—and found the entry keyed to the side gate. OVR-INTK-17 | USER: TEK-AXON-109 | 02:57:12-02:57:19 | REASON: WEATHER EGRESS. The reason stamped itself like a shrug. Weather. Egress. Words that forgive any choice if you put them in a storm.
I screen-capped that too, pinning the event to the same ugly minute.
The floor shifted. A wave slapped metal. Spray whispered under the door. I needed to move the patients and then move the truth. I needed to carry both like a body—head, feet, spine, careful down the stairs.
I took one long breath and exhaled through my teeth until the white thorned brightness behind my eyes retreated. This wasn’t the place to argue with the person I loved about the way he loved me and my sister. This was the place to stack files like sandbags and not drown.
I closed the predictive pane, encrypted the clips on my slate, then opened a tiny recorder app and narrated a breadcrumb I could drop for later without burning fuel now. “Archive room, intake level two,” I said, voice low, a metronome under the scream of wind. “Clip shows 03:00:14 corrected, side gate, cap and raincoat. Tech’s face half-lit—Elias Vance. Assistance deliberate. Predictive compliance ruleset v4 indicates classification of friction—high for Q-LL-39; evac priority deprioritized. This is your map, Mara. Don’t mistake it for a promise.”
I stopped the recording and checked my hands. They had gone cold and precise. Good. Precision saves strangers. Precision might save a sister and a man who had gambled his mother’s machine against itself.
“You were brave,” I told the ghost of his face. “You were also wrong to carry me in the dark.”
I eased the door an inch and listened. The corridor breathed in red pulses; the emergency lights made the air taste like hot coins. Down the hall, a safety poster grinned with its idiot crate. I decided to hate it later with snacks.
The barge creaked deeper. Somewhere above, something heavy slid and clanged; the drone chorus dipped and rekindled. Through the angled window I caught a smear of Harbor Eleven’s shore—resilience festival banners wrapped tight to poles, their cheer drowned, the public arches’ blind coves full of rain-dark families sharing flasks and lending towels because docks barter favors while biotech elites date within NDAs and hire lawyers to phrase love.
“Hands back on the wheel,” I told myself. “Move bodies, move bytes, move.”
I tucked the slate into the inner pocket between my ribs and my rage. I palmed the door and stepped out, knees bending to meet the ship.
The hallway was a throat. I jogged it, palm gliding the wall, boots slicking water into commas. My head wrote and unwrote sentences I couldn’t afford to say yet. You saved her. You lied to me. You used your body as a door. You used mine as a lockpick. None of them would keep a patient breathing.
I reached the ward door and pressed my ear to the seam. Monitors ticked, quiet but stubborn. The air tasted thinner; the river had taken what it wanted and was waiting to take more.
“I’m coming back,” I told the room, and the confession in my pocket. “We leave together, and then we argue where no one drowns.”
I pushed inside. Red washed the rows of gurneys; the tape on Emi’s face had loosened into a damp curl. Her eyes wobbled open at the noise and skimmed my face for answers I didn’t have yet.
“Not her,” I said softly, touching her shoulder. “Not Lila. But she’s out there. Someone opened the gate.”
Emi’s mouth formed a question. I shook my head. “Later,” I said. “Right now I need your breath.”
I slid my hands to the rail and unlocked the wheel again. My wrists twinged where the snapped rope had made its promise earlier on the deck. The ward door’s bottom edge wept river.
“One,” I said to my legs and the gurney. “Two.” We rolled. The threshold knocked, a lesser enemy now that I had a bigger one.
At the far wall, the intercom’s LED glowed dead, then blinked, then breathed like a thing learning lungs. The speaker crackled with a presence I recognized by the dryness of its vowels and the smooth weight of practiced mercy.
I squared my shoulders at the red light and put one finger to my lips, a promise to my own fury.
“Not now,” I told the anger that wanted to run ahead and wreck the bridge. “You get your day. Today belongs to exits.”
The intercom popped, a voice clearing its throat.
I planted my feet, reached for the next bed, and braced to hear who thought they owned the story.