Wind roared through the shaft and peeled our voices thin. The grate above rasped like a saw in a bone, and rain mist corkscrewed down into the corridor, stinging my eyes. I pressed two fingers against the throat-mic to steady the channel and kept one hip braced to the gurney so the sea couldn’t take what I’d sworn to deliver. The red emergency strips pulsed, turning the ward into a heartbeat I could push against.
“Elias,” I said, and the storm ate half his name. “We’re done with half-truths.”
Static braided with his inhale. “I’m here.”
“Good. Because I’m holding your face in my pocket and I need the why.” I let the gurney’s wheels kiss forward. “You opened a gate for my sister.”
The shaft’s wind made a low animal sound, the kind docks make when night shifts trade gossip for prayers. I angled my body to shield the patient from a cold draft and watched the door sensors blink their indifferent green. My mouth tasted like iodine and old pennies.
“Yes,” he said, and the word scraped clean. No theater, no spin, just a floor to stand on.
“When?” I asked, though I already had the timestamp bright as a burn under my eyelid.
“Zero three hundred,” he said. “Fourteen seconds past, if we’re being strict.” He had learned my religion.
“And you didn’t tell me.” I made sure that sentence had steel in it and not the tremor I kept finding under my tongue.
“I didn’t tell you,” he said. Wind rushed, a long shiver through the shaft. “I was protecting two people I cared about from a model that punishes friction and a board that pays it to.”
“Say her name,” I said, low.
“Lila,” he answered, immediate. “I opened the side gate for Lila Quill. I took my badge apart, I palmed the reader, I told the camera to blink. She asked me if I was sure. I wasn’t, but I said yes.”
The gurney bumped a seam in the floor; the patient’s lashes fluttered; the tape whispered against skin. I shifted the weight with an old rhythm my body remembered from moving sleepers into safety when the government calls were colder than the rain. Above us, the shaft breathed again, the intercom grille vibrating like a trapped dragonfly.
“Why hide it from me?” I asked. “You watched me chase phantoms through your tower.”
“I watched you make ghosts feel seen,” he said. “And I watched the predictive compliance flag your name—yellow trending red—because you ask the kinds of questions that break expensive futures. If the board learned I’d helped Lila, they would have cut my spine out of the company and used it to club you.”
“They still might,” I said.
“Then we speed up,” he said. “I’ll testify. I’ll burn the board and make ash look like progress. I’ll wear wires if you need me to. But let me tell you all of it first.”
A drone skimmed past the exterior window with a cicada’s thrum and a hint of diesel breath. The river’s voice pressed palms against the hull. I palmed the gurney’s brake, listened for the pumps, and gave him the silence that meant: continue.
“We met twice,” he said, voice threaded with wind. “You know that. The third time was the night before she disappeared. She’d seen a training deck for the model, not de-identified like policy says, names peeking through like bones in low tide. She made a joke in the hall about, ‘teaching the machine to lie,’ and a tech laughed too hard. The model started watching her—little things: bathroom breaks too long, keystrokes inconsistent during migraines, unusual time in the memory garden. Sable frames it as safeguarding, but the rule set reads like hunger.” He drew breath, thin. “I told Lila if the model turned her red, the only safe room left would be outside.”
“Outside where?”
“The arches,” he said, fast and quiet, like the word could break. “Under the hurricane barrier. Blind CCTV zones where the city plays at being unobserved. She liked that place. You liked that place before you learned to carry knives in your throat.”
My jaw clenched at the arches’ image—ribs of concrete the city hung swings from and banners on after every storm, blind corners where teenagers carved initials, columns I’d used to hide caches the week the forecast smelled like lawsuits. The tide clock in the marina was three minutes fast there. Everyone planned. No one was ready.
“You told her to go there?” I asked.
“I told her to go there if she got out,” he said. “I gave her a raincoat, a nontraceable band, and a burner that only calls one number. Yours. She said she’d make marks you’d understand.” He coughed something like rain. “She asked me to keep you out of it.”
The sentence cracked the air between us. I put my palm flat on the patient’s forearm so I wouldn’t punch the wall.
“You hid her exit to honor her,” I said, tasting the bitter in honor.
“I hid it because I thought your proximity to me was its own scuttle charge,” he said. “The bracelet PR sent—the one that buzzed too often? That was keyed to me. They’d map you by me. If I told you right away, you’d light up like an indictment and they’d decide to solve their prediction with your pulse. I wanted to buy you both days.”
“You bought me weeks of wrong turns,” I said.
“And enough time to learn their system,” he said quickly. “To cache gear under the arches, to take a job that gave you a shaft to the river, to make me brave enough to stand on a stage and say the part of the truth I could carry without wrecking it. I am not excusing. I am making the math I did at three in the morning visible.”
I tasted algae-lit glass in my mouth, that clean, curated calm of executive floors, and pushed it away with a dockyard swear. The ward’s red light pulsed against my wrists like a blood pressure cuff. A pump rumbled to life and my molars complained.
“Sable’s on the line,” I said, more to myself than to him. “She’s rehearsing a drowning.”
“I heard her,” he said, voice tightening. “She will push the scuttle to the edge. She always wants proof that she’s the only adult in the room. Give her an audience and she’ll wait for a better monologue.”
“She asked me who opened her gate,” I said.
“Tell her the model did,” he said. “Tell her the room ate its own key.”
I let the ghost of a smile touch my mouth and do no good. “You offering to testify is a clean sentence,” I said. “It doesn’t make the reel less real.”
“I know,” he said. “Tell me how to be useful in the next five minutes.”
“You’re at the Spire?” I asked.
“In the panic-shaft antechamber,” he said. “Wind is a throat in here. Power’s in teeth. I can reach the emergency backbone in Sublevel C if I can keep Security playing whack-a-mole with their own alarms.”
“Do it,” I said. “Loop the drones at the park arches and the marina, give us a corridor that doesn’t announce itself. And send me your mother’s failsafe codes if you have them.”
He sighed like the request had weight, which meant it mattered. “I don’t, but I know where she keeps the copy.”
“Where?”
“Palmetto House,” he said. “Music room, hollow under the cello stand’s base. She thinks no one looks under art, only at it.”
The detail fit too well, a puzzle piece I’d already trimmed with a knife. I pushed the bed as the floor tried to slide from under me. Tape fluttered like cheap flags. My shoulder throbbed where the rope had snapped earlier. The hull creaked, old ship noises taught new tricks by money.
“You’re going to testify,” I said. “On record. Under oath. No NDAs, no hedge words. You’ll name the predictive compliance triggers, the board votes, the liaison’s order, the weld.”
“I’ll name all of it,” he said. “On feed, if that keeps the river honest.”
“You’ll burn the board,” I said. “You’ll burn the part of you that thought keeping me in the dark was a kindness.”
He didn’t flinch. “I will.”
Micro-hook of doubt picked my pocket anyway. I pictured his half-lit face on the archive footage and the way his hands had been gentle giving Lila the raincoat. Protection demands closeness; closeness turns to leverage. Which side of that line was I on right now?
“You sent her to the arches,” I said again, tasting each word. “That’s the last direction.”
“She nodded,” he said. “She said, ‘Under the arches. Blind spots. Chalk is faster than truth.’ Then she ran. I watched the rain choose a side and it wasn’t ours.”
A rotor passed low. The intercom’s LED stared green. Down the hall, a flashing panel hiccuped then steadied, three minutes fast like every lie the marina loved. June’s voice slid into the channel, breath clipped.
“South hatch shows green,” she said. “I’ve got a window. Corridor will hold for four minutes while they reboot their pride. Two drones patrolling the arches are in a soft loop. But Sable’s about to put a thumb on the scale.”
“Copy,” I said. To Elias: “You heard her.”
“I did,” he said. “I can spike a false alarm in the Spire’s sublevels—chemical sensor in a lab no one likes. It will pull Security eyes from the river.”
“Do it,” I said. “And Elias—”
“Yes.”
“You should have told me,” I said. “You should have let me carry it with you.”
Wind crowded the channel, then thinned. “I know,” he said, voice smaller at the edges. “I kept thinking love could be a Faraday cage. It’s not. It’s an amplifier.”
I swallowed the heat that rose and turned it into forward motion. “Offer stands,” he said suddenly, fierce under the breathy static. “I will testify. I will burn the board. I will wear a wire into my own mother’s house and dig under her cello stand with my hands if that’s what you need.”
“After,” I said, and let the word sharpen. “After we live.”
“After we live,” he repeated, taking the line I threw him and tying it to his ribs.
I nudged the gurney through the widening door, the floor tilting a degree that made balance a conversation with my ankles. Salt air punched the corridor, cold and clean, a promise that hurt.
“One more thing,” I said. “The model flagged me yellow trending red. What about you?”
He laughed once, without humor. “I’ve been red since the night I argued to kill the defense contract. Red is a mirror here. It tells you who you are when you stop being useful.”
“Then stop being useful to them,” I said. “Be useful to me.”
“Tell me how,” he said again.
“Stay on the line,” I said. “Tell me if the scuttle switch hum changes. Tell me if you see a drone corridor hesitate. Tell me where the tide is lying.” I rolled the bed into the slosh of near-freedom, then braced and turned back for the next patient. “And if Lila pings you—if she calls that burner—buy me two words.”
“Which two?”
“Under arches,” I said. “Or not.”
He breathed in like the sentence punctured him. “Under arches,” he repeated. “I’ll listen.”
The pumps thrummed deeper, threatening to pull the floor out from under our feet. Sable’s voice ghosted the intercom again, colder now, the kind of calm you get when you’ve chosen cruelty and dressed it in policy.
“Ms. Quill,” she said. “My patience is a finite resource. So is oxygen. Choose.”
I slid the second gurney forward, the wheels complaining, my shoulder a noise I would pay later. The corridor outside ran narrow between bulkheads, sprayed with rain; beyond, the south hatch’s seal light winked like a lighthouse with bad intentions. The hurricane barrier’s arches loomed in the distance through the glass slit, public park turned spine, blind CCTV zones promising anonymity no one truly owns.
“Deciding,” I said into the intercom, then to Elias, softer: “Do you trust me yet?”
“I did when you risked a building for a single welded door,” he said. “I do now because you’re risking the necessary number of lies.”
“That’s an ugly compliment,” I said.
“It’s the truest kind,” he said. “And Mara—if we live, I’ll ask you for better words.”
“Ask me for proof,” I said. “Words are what got us here.”
I braced, shoved, and felt the corridor push back like a body learning to breathe. June hissed in my ear: “Two minutes left on my corridor. Make choices.”
I had, and I would again. I pushed the bed, wind roared the shaft open like a throat that had a secret to swallow, and Elias’s voice came low and steady through the grit.
“One more card,” he said. “Board counsel just texted me: ‘Hold statements. Do not engage feeds.’ I’m going to reply with a photo of your ledger screen. On record. Burn the polite bridge.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Yes. Both. That’s the price.”
“Send it,” I said, eyes on the hatch, heart making math with the tide clock’s lie. “Then keep breathing in my ear until we either drown or teach the river to say our names.”
“Understood,” he said, and the shaft swallowed his word so the storm could give it back to me with a question I couldn’t yet answer: had I rebuilt enough trust to let him hold one end of my escape—while the other end disappeared into arches three minutes ahead of everyone’s courage?