Water lapped my ankles like a warning that had run out of patience. The alarms didn’t ring; they bled—long, pulsing tones that turned the corridor into a throat. Red washed everything, from the vertebrae sculpture lying about posture to the slick hair at my temples. The iodine tang rode the air, and the storm shoved breath through the slats so I could taste salt and city both.
“Dr. Kincaid,” I said, filling her name with the space the alarms left me.
She stood at the far junction, coat half-buttoned, rain beading and sliding off fabric engineered to say budget and not price. The red light made her cheekbones into razors. She kept her hands visible and empty like someone trained by lawyers and mirrors.
“You made me scream,” she said, almost amused. “Congratulations. Everyone enjoys a first.”
“I prefer recordings,” I said, and I rolled my shoulder to make the lapel mic catch the sentence clean. June had patched the upload paths; my job was to feed them.
“Recordings love omissions,” she replied, voice steadying into lecture. “You’ll learn that in court.”
Water slapped the bulkhead, surging with the barge’s small list. The knife I’d left wedged in the panel sang a faint residual note behind me, a tuning fork for bad decisions. I kept my feet wide and my center low. “How many omissions fit in ‘friction—high’?”
Her mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “You broke into my clinic to parse adjectives?”
“I swam to correct nouns,” I said. “Nurse, not asset. Sister, not risk.”
She tilted her head, listening past the insult to the engineering of it. “Asset is neutral,” she said. “Asset means we maintain.”
“You scuttled.”
“We contained,” she corrected. “Containment is mercy when failure spreads.”
I let the silence open, the alarms coloring it, the water giving it texture. Red and wet and iron. The sculpture’s shadow cut the passage in ribs. My palm throbbed inside the glove where the knife had taught me heat.
“Walk me through your mercy,” I said. “I’ll keep up.”
She straightened a cuff with two fingers. “You’re a bodyguard, Ms. Quill. You already understand triage. You guard the future by hardening it against variables that don’t obey. Pain now, survival later. Harbor Eleven calls it resilience every hurricane season and turns it into a festival with chili and children in sandbags. I call it policy.”
“Policy,” I said. “That’s what drowned the janitor named in your manifests?”
“Policy didn’t drown anyone,” she said. “The river did. You live here. You know the river is older and less sentimental than you are.”
I stepped closer until her perfume—a clean lab note with citrus and something metallic—started to lose to the iodine wind. “Older, yes. Less sentimental, sure. Less predictable, no. The tide clock is three minutes fast. The whole marina knows it. You counted on that lie to keep your barge safe. We counted on it to keep your victims breathing.”
She held my gaze; I could see the second calculus flit behind her eyes. “You brandish superstition as strategy.”
“I brandish timings,” I said. “The nurse traded bands to buy those minutes. You tried to buy silence with a flood. I wedged your mouth open with a knife. We can compare toolkits or we can talk about ‘predictive compliance.’”
She finally looked, really looked, at my lapel. Not a flinch—she didn’t do flinches—but a small adjustment of chin to move her words into a safer pattern. “You misunderstand the model,” she said. “Everyone does. Prediction prevents harm by pre-empting brittle failures. It measures friction.”
“Friction like people who ask why their heads hurt every night?”
“Friction like non-adherence,” she said. “Like staff who collect sensitive material on personal devices. Like a whistleblower who lacks context.”
Lila’s name burned the roof of my mouth without being said. I kept my tone even. “You label them, then you cleanse them.”
“I reduce exposure,” she said. “When a system is fragile, the ethical act is to decrease variance. Our donors don’t pay us to lose to noise.”
I nodded at the vertebrae sculpture. “They pay you to make spines bend until they’re art.”
The barge groaned, more complaint than crisis. Outside, drone rotors beat the storm in a cicada rhythm. Algae-lit glass across the barrier shivered in the flicker, distant as another city’s conscience. I stood in a corridor that smelled like hot copper and wet rope and told myself to breathe where the alarms told me to panic.
“Let’s not do poetry,” she said. “Let’s do arithmetic. You’ve removed a fuse. You’re proud of the wedge. You saved, what, a dozen? Two? Meanwhile, a technology that could save thousands will be destroyed when your panic reaches the feeds. Your lover will be discredited. The board will retreat to projects less monitored and less humane.”
“You don’t get to borrow ‘humane,’” I said.
“A model that removes human error is by definition humane,” she said, and the certainty in her tone was a monument. “People lie, Ms. Quill. People with attachments lie most elegantly.”
“And you don’t lie?” I asked.
“I ration truth,” she said. “I triage it.”
I felt the mic at my collar like a small, bright weight. “Say the word again,” I said, softer now. “Say ‘friction.’”
“Friction.”
“Say what you do to friction.”
“I mitigate,” she said.
“Say the rest.”
She took one small step toward me, water folding around her boot. “I erase points of catastrophic resistance so the patient survives.”
“Points like Lila Quill,” I said, dropping the name between us like a metal coin. The alarms swallowed it and spat it back shinier.
For the first time, she blinked. Not much. Enough.
“You’re sentimental,” she said.
“I’m specific,” I said. “And I’m timed. The night stamp matches the ledger. The side gate camera watched a lab tech become a better man than your board. The nurse paid with a band swap. The model spat something red. You signed.”
Her jaw tightened where red met bone. “I approve protocols,” she said. “I do not sign individuals.”
“Then who checked the box?” I asked, the way I ask witnesses to identify a face they’ve already admitted knowing. “Who escalated the flag from caution to cleanse?”
“Language,” she said, a last reflex. “Not cleanse. Mitigate.”
“Who escalated?” I repeated, stepping again, letting the water loudness cover me like a blanket while I cut under it. “Name the hand.”
Pride met math. She ground the words the way people grind their teeth to shape pain into a task. “Mine,” she said. “I escalated. Your sister represented catastrophic friction. She was preparing to distribute proprietary material to actors who misunderstand cost.”
The corridor seemed to tilt even though the barge held. I watched her mouth say it. My body took a breath in pieces and stacked it into a ribcage again. The mic should have hummed; it felt like it did.
“Describe the flag,” I said.
“High,” she answered. “Irreversible trend toward non-compliance. Correlated with outside influence.”
“Describe the remedy.”
“Removal from system,” she said. “Immediate. Quietly.”
I let that hang, not because I needed more—June would be writing exclamation points in code—but because she did. She needed the sound of herself to reach the far wall and come back heavier. I watched it land.
“Necessary harm,” she added, almost gently. “You have no idea how much worse we prevented.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“I won’t give you names,” she said. “But I will tell you this: I ate a generation’s rage on their behalf. I stood between their bright ideas and our funders’ carnivorous timelines. I let the algorithm do what families beg me to do in hospitals every night—decide.”
“Families ask to end pain,” I said. “You ended witnesses.”
“Witnesses to what?” she snapped, finally slipping. “To the fact that innovation requires a sieve? That we can’t let one unvetted variable domino us into a class action that kills ten trials? Grow up, Ms. Quill. Love is leverage. You used it expertly. Why pretend you were doing something else?”
“Because I learned the cost from both sides,” I said, and the anger in me organized itself into a plank I could stand on. “I weaponized closeness to protect. You weaponized distance to control. Try telling a dock worker whose kid gets a night migraine that your sieve is humane.”
“I don’t tell them,” she said. “I pay for results.”
“With bodies.”
“With outliers,” she said, and pride smoothed her face again, a surgeon’s mask. “We remove friction so progress accelerates.”
“There it is,” I said, low. “Say it clean for the feed.”
She looked past me at the slats where the barrier arches ghosted through rain, algae glow haunted by drone motion. Harbor Eleven’s blind zones had let me kiss Elias without a camera once; they had also hidden hands that pushed people off ledgers. I thought of the tide clock that lies for our own good and of how much truth a city can survive.
“We target friction,” she said, crisp now, each syllable trimmed for a deposition. “I signed approval to escalate Lila Quill’s flag because leaving her inside the system posed existential risk to a program designed to reduce human suffering at scale.”
“At scale,” I repeated.
“At scale,” she insisted, and the word gave her back her spine. “One becomes many. That is the only ethics a city this size can afford in a century like this.”
“And when the many are watching?” I asked, tilting my chin to the mic without breaking eye contact. “When the unions and clinics and public defenders hold your sentence in their hands?”
“They will thank me later,” she said.
“They’ll bill you first,” I said.
The alarms shifted, a register lower, like someone had traded out the reed. Water kissed my boot again and withdrew, coy. Somewhere above, a drone’s rotors ticked against the barrier, confused by the rerun of a resilience festival firework show June had looped into the skyline. For a heartbeat, I saw flags and kids and chili steam and thought about how easily celebration can be hired to cover harm.
“You won’t get out,” she said, quieter. “My doors answer to me. Your little wedge bought you minutes. Minutes don’t make miracles.”
“Tell the nurse,” I said.
“She will survive,” Sable said, not a promise—an assessment. “Because you dragged her into your narrative.”
“My narrative is oxygen,” I said.
“Narratives as oxygen,” she repeated, smiling like a teacher pleased a student had found the metaphor at last. “That’s the century.”
“Good,” I said. “Breathe.”
I reached toward my collar and tapped the mic once, a habit I didn’t need—the line had been live since I’d said her name—but the gesture felt like punctuation. The touch hurt; my palm complained, skin bubbled under glove, the brand of a fuse I’d refused to spare myself.
She watched the tap and understood too late that this wasn’t rehearsal. Call pride a disease or a door; it’s both. She had walked through.
“You think legal will let this stick?” she said, voice flattening into the expensive calm of someone who owns options. “Your upload can be kneecapped. Discovery can be buried. Judges golf.”
“Judges also read,” I said. “Unions breathe. Clinics talk to reporters who like their names on awards.”
“Tabloids love scandal more than safety,” she said. “They’ll make your lover the story.”
“He’ll have to live with that,” I said, and the words cooled as they left me, not unkind. “We all live with something.”
The bulkhead at the far end coughed. A lock thunked. Green bled into the red like a bruise healing in reverse. A hatch nudged open two inches, then stopped—either a friend with bad timing or a trap with good manners.
Sable’s eyebrows rose, a minor chord. “You brought help to a place where my cameras watch?”
“Your cameras nap under arches,” I said. “Your drones chase festivals. Your model missed love.”
She exhaled, not a laugh, something softer and more dangerous. “Love didn’t miss you, Ms. Quill. It made you reckless enough to bring a mic to a flood.”
“And you proud enough to speak into it,” I said.
The alarms wavered again. The barge held. My glove stuck to my palm and every heartbeat reminded me I was still here, not underwater, not stalled inside one of her polite words. The corridor smelled like singe and river mouth, that specific cocktail of Harbor Eleven nights when the barrier moans and the city pretends not to hear.
“Step away from the reset,” I said. “Hands on the rail.”
She didn’t move. “If I refuse?”
“Then the next door is an indictment,” I said. “And the one after that is a camera without arches.”
“You think blind spots save you,” she said. “They do not. They only let you choreograph the angle of harm.”
“No,” I said, holding her eyes. “They let me choreograph the angle of truth.”
She studied me, a clinician measuring dosage. She could order a lot of things here. She could also count. Pride had already cost her. Pride might buy me the next ten feet.
“You were always going to be a problem,” she said softly. “You learned to make intimacy a weapon. I did the same with distance. We will meet in the middle of those methods one day and cut each other open.”
“Not today,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “Today you won.”
The words landed like metal on a deck. I didn’t smile. Triumph isn’t warm; it drafts.
The hatch at the far end twitched wider and the green light stuttered as if the ship wanted to shake it off. I kept my stance and my burn and my breath, and waited for a face to claim the gap, for a threat to show its shoes.
“Who’s there?” I asked, not taking my eyes off Sable.
I got an echo and a gust for answer. The iodine wind came back through the slats, salt and algae and the city’s lie about being ready. I heard a new rotor note, heavier, cutting low over the arches. Either a rescue or a recon. Either way, the feed had the confession; the world had to decide what to do with it.
“You’re thinking about your sister,” Sable said.
“Always,” I said.
“You won’t find her where you left her,” she said, and the last shard of pride gleamed. “Friction learns.”
“So do wedge-makers,” I said.
I lifted my burned hand, not much, just enough to ask it to keep going. Then I nodded at her rail, and the hatch breathed again, and the corridor kept its secrets one more heartbeat before choosing a side.