The intercom clicked, and the first sound was breath—composed breath, the kind I’d heard at donor halls and hearings where bad news wore pearls. Then Sable’s voice flowed into the ward with the patient list in it, syllables polished until they could cut.
“KORA MENDEZ. ARLO VANN. EMI KOJIMA.” She let each name ride a measured tide. “LEO FRASER. ANIKA ROWE. BENJAMIN SONG. I could go on.”
Red light lapped the walls. Rain hit the hull like a factory’s worth of nails. I tightened my grip on the gurney rail until the skin at the base of my thumb went white, then released before pain became tremor. Emi—whose wrist wore my sister’s band a lifetime ago and twenty minutes earlier—blinked, tracking the speaker with the wary intelligence of someone learning where a fall will land.
“You like lists,” I said, keeping my voice even. “I brought some too.”
Sable didn’t bother acknowledging me yet. “Those names are not abstractions,” she continued, the microphone turning warmth into architecture. “They are survivors of storms, of seizures, of failed systems. They are people I keep breathing while the city performs resilience festivals under its hurricane barrier and pretends that banners can be blankets.”
I shoved the gurney an inch closer to the door with my hip and breathed iodine wind through my teeth. The ward tasted like copper coins and antiseptic with a note of algae-glass—the Spire’s signature perfume of clean conscience, now souring on steel.
“You want them alive,” Sable said, “and I want them safe. We are aligned at last, Ms. Quill.”
I didn’t give her my name back. She didn’t deserve the intimacy of echo.
I hit the intercom button with my elbow. “Aligned people don’t weld escape hatches, Doctor.”
The faintest pause told me I’d drawn blood in a place the microphone could not tidy. The tide clock in the wall display blinked its stupid lie—three minutes fast—like an accomplice who always shows up early and counts that as help.
Sable replaced the pause with care. “A fire door was welded during a drill to prevent misuse. Your footage cannot prove intent.”
“My footage shows heat bloom ninety minutes old and slag that matches a contractor on your payroll,” I said, rolling the cart forward again, heel feeling for purchase on a floor that wanted to be an ocean. “My logs show a liaison’s order greenlighting asset relocation ten minutes before the board even learned to pronounce the word harm.”
The speaker hummed. The storm found a seam in the window caulk and drew a wet line like a vein down the glass.
“Language matters, Ms. Quill,” Sable replied. “You are an artist of it. ‘Relocation’ is protection.”
“Relocation is disappearance with a rider,” I said. “And my timestamps don’t sing your song.”
A hitch in the ceiling above us made the room burp air. Somewhere down the corridor, drone rotors gritted and circled, their thrum like cicadas rehearsing menace. I slid my shoulder under the gurney rail and looked at Emi. “You still with me?”
Her eyes focused. “Where?” she rasped.
“Out,” I said. “Then up. Breathe, then talk.” I turned my head a degree, speaking into the throat mic. “June, tell me you’re married to progress.”
Her voice was a paper cut in my ear. “Copy building the altar. Two minutes to upload if your goddess behaves.”
“She won’t,” I said.
Sable heard me, because Sable always arranged to. “You are improvising on my stage, Ms. Quill,” she said, and the intercom tasted smug. “I’ll make you an offer you refuse at their expense, or accept and call yourself a hero. Surrender the drives and the patients roll off this barge under my license, into ambulances, through proper channels. I will instruct my team to let your tug tie up without incident.”
I pictured those “proper channels” winding to private wards where NDAs make grief taxable. The marina flashed in my head: tide clock three minutes fast, umbrellas like bruised mushrooms huddled beneath arches with blind CCTV seams where teenagers kissed without being content, dock workers swapping favors for groceries while elites courted inside documents. The city had so many ways to be seen and so many to disappear.
“You list names like prayers,” I said, “but my god is the ledger. Eight relocations this quarter flagged for ‘behavioral friction’ and ‘PR volatility.’”
“Behavioral friction,” Sable repeated, savoring it. “You speak our dialect well for a dock kid. Elias taught you?”
I let the silence lay clean as steel between us. She knew where to press. I refused to be her instrument.
“You think I don’t see the romance you turned into a sensor?” she added, silk over a wire. “Protection as intimacy. Kisses as keys. I invented the game you’re losing.”
“You invented a machine that predicts who will cost you courage,” I said. “Then you punished the people it named for proving you right.”
A beat. “Surrender the drives,” she repeated, voice soft. “Watch how quickly the doors open when you stop trying to break them.”
I dragged the next bed. The wheels objected, stuttering in puddled water; I corrected their angle with a knee and an oath. The patients’ breath sounds rasped like sand in seashells, regular, stubborn. The ward smelled of fear the way a dock smells of diesel—total, honest.
I pressed the intercom and gave the room my calmest lie. “We can do both,” I told Sable. “We can move them and hold the drives. You’ll get your safe exit protocol once I see your staff’s hands off the scuttle wires.”
I hadn’t meant to say scuttle yet; I watched for the tremor that would tell me I’d guessed. It didn’t come as a tremor. It came as composure.
“If cornered,” Sable said, conversational as a meteorologist, “this platform defaults to self-protect. Negative buoyancy buys jurisdictional clarity. We call it an emergency purge; fishermen call it scuttling. The sea is the only neutral party left.”
Emi made a small noise that tasted like rust. I kept my face still and my hands busy.
“So we share a problem,” I said. “You want corner-proofing; I want breathing. Begin by turning the pumps off.”
“Not while a trespasser is inside,” Sable said. “I will not reward you for risking lives.”
“You welded the hatch,” I said. “I’m risking lies.”
June’s whisper cut back in, close to the edge of anxiety but riding it well. “Ninety seconds. Your upload’s chewing their backbone. Keep her mouth busy.”
“Doctor,” I said, “let’s trade a second for a second. You say a name, I say a time. We walk the ledger together like grown people.”
She sighed like I bored her, which meant she liked the ritual. “ANIKA ROWE.”
I looked down at the slate’s mirrored text on my inner pocket display and spoke to the room so the ward could hear its own value. “Transcranial trial two months ago. Headaches repackaged as adjustment. Transfer request denied at 13:44:11; relocation order drafted at 13:52:00; greenlit at 13:54:03. Your liaison signed after coffee and before conscience.”
A pause with teeth. Then: “BENJAMIN SONG.”
“Sleep-paralysis escalation noted, then scrubbed. Badge records show an orderly stood outside his room for six hours with a clipboard so no camera would capture the tremor. Evacuation priority lowered when his mother posted on a union forum at 09:17:22.”
Water licked my boot. I shifted angle, set the brake with the side of my foot, and palmed the next rail. My left shoulder sang from the earlier rope snap; I filed the song under Later.
“KORA MENDEZ,” Sable said, and there—just there—a curl of warmth. She liked Kora. Or she liked Kora’s data.
“Stopped singing to the nurses after you adjusted her meds,” I said. “Behavioral friction spike. You flagged her for ‘community influence.’ She leads three resilience-choke-point classes under the seawall arches. You monitored civic grace like it was malware.”
“Community networks reduce compliance,” Sable said smoothly. “They also breed lies.”
“And bargains,” I said. “Dockside favors raised me. We both trust economies—we just price different truths.”
The intercom crackled. A deeper hum rolled below us—the pitch-shift of pumps priming, the hull vibrating in a way that made molars ache. The sound crawled under my skin like bad news with a plan.
“That hum has a body count,” I said, letting the steel hear me. “Turn it off.”
“You are not in a position to instruct,” Sable said. “You are in a position to decide. Drives for doors. I will escort your tug. The drones at the park arches will create a corridor; cameras will blink respectfully; no one will interfere. Harbor Eleven loves the choreography of rescue.”
She’d placed the arches in the sentence on purpose. I could see them through memory—a public park on top of a weapon, kids racing scooters under ribs of concrete while blind CCTV zones gave lovers a place to breathe; my sister chalking arrows years ago for me to find after a shift when we were still dumb enough to think maps could beat storms.
“I don’t do escorts,” I said. “I do witnesses. You’ll get safe corridors when my upload finishes, not before.”
“Upload?” she repeated, a feigned lift of an eyebrow inside a wire.
I tilted the mic away and spoke to the patients instead. “We’re going to move, then breathe, then move again. Nod if you hear me.”
Two heads dipped, slow but real. Relief knocked the back of my throat like a tide.
“Sixty seconds,” June whispered. “They know I’m here. They just don’t know where to shoot.”
“Make it none of their business,” I said.
Sable did not stop. “You’re on a barge,” she said, voice threaded with pity she didn’t feel. “I am the weather. You mistake bravery for math.”
I let myself smile at the intercom where she couldn’t see it. “I prefer math. It gives me something to braid my fear around. Here’s some: your relocation order came ten minutes before the vote; your weld bead cooled ninety minutes before my camera kissed it; your gate beeped at 03:00:14 corrected. Stop pretending your machine doesn’t timestamp its sins.”
She almost laughed. “You learned our clocks. The marina’s tide clock lies too, you know. Three minutes fast since it was hung; superstition dressed as safety. People plan. People fail.”
“That clock taught me,” I said. “It taught me to be early with proof and late with surrender.”
The pump’s hum fattened. Emi’s fingers twitched under the tape, and she whispered, “Door.”
“Working it,” I said, and thumbed the brake, muscles ticking in my forearm. I slid, planted, shoved. Water made commas around my boots. The intercom’s LED glanced green, like a lizard.
“Thirty,” June breathed. “Hold, hold. File integrity looks—good.”
Sable’s voice softened to syrup. “Mara. I appreciate competence. Bring me the drives and I will—privately—laud your ingenuity. Your sister is not here. You know that now. You can stop risking other families for a ghost.”
That last word walked straight through my ribs into the place where Lila’s laugh used to live. I let it settle there as fuel.
“My sister is out there,” I said quietly, “because your house made a machine that predicts who will betray it and then treated the prediction like a warrant. A good person opened a gate to fix that math. I owe both of them a corridor that is not yours.”
The intercom went very still. I had put one finger in the only socket left.
“Who,” Sable asked, light as floss, “opened my gate?”
The monitor above the speaker blinked, expecting. The pumps deepened, expecting. The drones rasped the windows, expecting. Even the tide clock seemed to lean in, three minutes ahead and never ready.
“Twenty,” June whispered. “Say anything. Burn the air.”
I swallowed the truth I wasn’t ready to use as a weapon and replaced it with a decoy wrapped in barbs. “Your model did,” I said. “It predicted you’d need a scapegoat and handed you a door. You built a room that eats the people who don’t clap. I’m the applause you can’t script.”
A half-second of honest exasperation leaked through her polish. Then she changed tactics. “Very well,” she said. “I will begin evacuating two—your choice. Name them.”
The ward froze in its slow machinery of breath. Emi’s eyes widened enough to show the whites. My mouth tasted like battery.
“You don’t get to triage my dead,” I said, harsher than I wanted the patients to hear. I forced gentleness into my second sentence. “We move all.”
“You move none if you cling to theater,” Sable said. “Name two.”
“Ten,” June said, voice shaking now with restrained triumph. “We’re at nine. Eight. Keep her.”
I rolled the nearest gurney toward the door and braced. “You love a countdown,” I told Sable. “Here’s mine: five names and five timestamps, or I call the harbor unions and the public defenders from this intercom and teach them your scuttle lullaby.”
“They already know my number,” she said, but the velvet frayed. “You aren’t the only one who barters favors at docks.”
“No,” I said, “but I’m the only one holding your ruleset v4 and the night your liaison wrote God on a form.”
The pump hum climbed like a throat clearing for a verdict. June whispered, “Three. Two. One…”
The ward lights flickered; the intercom’s LED steadied; a new indicator winked on my slate inside my jacket, a tiny green dot that meant: delivered.
I let a slow breath find my center. “Doctor Kincaid,” I said, voice level enough to carry. “The city will read with me now. The patients leave—all of them—or your scuttle plan gets its own parade.”
She didn’t answer for a heartbeat, and in that space I heard everything—the storm gnawing the railings, the gentle roar of oxygen, the rotors’ insect drone, the soft gasp of someone on the far cot trusting a stranger. I rested my palm on the next bed and felt a pulse, small but insistent, under the tape.
Then Sable’s tone reset, clinical and cold. “Open the south hatch,” she said to someone I couldn’t see. “Prepare corridor. Halt the pumps at my word. And Ms. Quill—stay on this line.”
I pressed the brake with the edge of my boot and met the speaker with my eyes like it was a face I could bruise. “I’m here.”
“Good,” she said. “Because if you hang up, I press a different button.”
The floor thrummed with something new—deeper, more final.
I looked at the intercom, at the patients, at the little green dot in my jacket. “What button?” I asked, though I knew.
“The one that teaches the river to keep secrets,” she said.
I slid the gurney forward anyway and felt the question open under my feet like a hatch I couldn’t afford to test: could I keep her talking long enough to turn that button into a bluff—without saying his name?