I built the room out of lists and caffeine. The clinic’s break room had a microwave that gave off a burnt-popcorn ghost and a kettle that clicked like a metronome for nerves. I stole two rolling whiteboards from pediatrics and parked them side by side until they made one large field of intent. Names went in blue, needs in green, risks in angry red. The cap of the marker dug a groove into my thumb as if the ink wanted a vein.
“Read me the next five,” I said.
June’s voice drifted from the hall where she’d commandeered a folding table. “Margo T.—concussion, NDA signed under sedation. Mr. Cho—lost access to meds, wants a lawyer who speaks Korean. Rivera—union shop steward, has three workers with night migraines and a line on a shell company driver. Dev—ex-intern, will only talk if we can move their sibling out of Palmetto housing. And Carla—the janitor from the manifests—found.”
“Alive?” I asked, marker hovering.
“Alive,” June said. “Scared of the word.”
I wrote each name with the care of a prayer. Lila sat wrapped in a dock blanket that smelled like diesel and the back of our father’s truck. Steam curled from the kettle into the algae-glass light. The hurricane barrier’s green tint slid over her skin like borrowed safety. Drone rotors purred past outside, lazy as cicadas that had nothing to fear.
“You left the door cracked,” she said, watching the hall.
“So I can hear what I don’t want to,” I said. I wrote Carla—safe house + translator and circled translator twice. “And so you can see me.”
“I’m not going to run,” she said.
“I didn’t say you would,” I said, and underlined Cho—Korean counsel. My hand shook once, then found its line. Numbers settled my breath when nothing else did.
Elias’s face sat on a phone propped against a box of gloves. The camera gave him a slightly heroic angle he hadn’t earned and didn’t want. “Microgrant ledger’s live,” he said, switching windows with the tiny tic he has when he’s pretending not to be in pain. “Clinic fund, union fund, bail fund. I topped each—quietly—through a donor advised trust that doesn’t know my name.”
“Your mother will smell it through concrete,” I said.
“She can hold her nose,” he said, and I could hear the grit that’s been growing in him since he stopped letting other people narrate his life.
Phones rang back to back until I stopped hearing the difference between ringtone and cardiology monitor. I triaged by category: Immediate medical (beds, meds, food), Legal (counsel, affidavits, safe statements), Physical security (locks, escorts, routes). Dock workers barter favors faster than money moves; biotech elites date within NDAs that read like prenuptial gags. I knew which economy I trusted.
“We need a translator list,” I said. “Three languages minimum. And a grief counselor who won’t sell notes.”
“I’ll raid the community center roster,” June called. “Ms. Ibarra owes us three pies and a Spanish hotline.”
“Put her down for both,” I said, and dragged another line toward Rivera—driver ID. Outside, the tide clock in the marina flashed its smug three-minute head start on reality. Everyone plans. No one is ready.
The intercom popped like a soap bubble. A clipped voice said, “Detective Morales for Mara Quill. In person.”
I set the marker down, wiped my ink thumb on my jeans, and met him in the doorway. He wore the bone-tired look of someone who’d slept in meetings for a year and finally woke up into a fire. He showed me a shield out of habit and a palm out of negotiation.
“You picked a bad week to develop ethics,” I said.
He kept the palm up. “You picked a bad city to light with gasoline. I came to bargain for buckets.”
“Talk,” I said, standing where the algae-glass threw us both a sickly halo.
“You overwhelmed intake,” he said. “We’re rerouting—quietly—victims to three clinics. I can keep patrol off their doors. In exchange, I want coordinated statements. We can open a protective detail for your key witnesses if they hit the affidavit window in the next thirty-six hours.”
“Affidavit window,” I repeated, letting the bureaucracy roll off my tongue like a pill I might or might not swallow. The drone sound outside shifted; a private courier buzzed the barrier and got shooed by a municipal model that thought it was important. The city’s little war of rotors had never sounded so petty.
“It’s not charity,” Morales said. “It’s leverage against your favorite board.”
Elias’s voice slid from the glove-box phone. “Detective, I can route counsel to your window if your window stops slamming on fingers.”
Morales didn’t look at the phone. “Mr. Vance, I’m not asking you to bless me. I’m asking you to stop dropping surprises on my desk and call them warrants.”
“You have warrants?” I cut in.
“Two,” he said. “Kincaid and the liaison. Judges like confessions.”
I felt the floor move very slightly—just the building settling, or the tide flexing its shoulder against the seawall, or my center of gravity acknowledging a fact it had demanded for months. I wanted to love the word warrants. I refused to. Paper arrests people. Money un-arrests them. I nodded once and returned to math.
“Protection details mean uniforms and attention,” I said. “Our people don’t trust either. Offer plainclothes. Offer ride-alongs from union stewards. Offer child care while they sign.”
Morales’s mouth twitched, not a smile. “You have notes on how to do my job, Quill.”
“I have notes on how to do mine,” I said. “Protection that doesn’t protect is a performance. We’re out of those.”
He took it, because he had come to take. “I’ll send two of mine. They’ll answer to you in the building and to me outside it. You make them useful or send them home.”
“Names,” I said.
“Cates and Singh,” he said. “You’ll like them because they don’t like me.”
Lila pushed the dock blanket off her shoulders and stood. She’d stolen June’s hoodie and made it look like a question she dared anyone to answer wrong. Her hair stuck in kelp strands to her cheeks; the iodine tang on her skin traced the route from arch to van. She didn’t wobble. She set her feet wide and looked at the detective like he owed something she could name.
“I want to speak,” she said.
The room went too quiet around the hiss of the kettle. Elias exhaled in my ear. June stopped rustling lists and came to the door, towel slung inexplicably over one shoulder like we were at a fight gym.
“No,” I said, reflexively, because reflex kept her alive and made her hate me. “Not yet.”
“Yet is a slippery word,” she said. “They told me to shut up in small rooms for months. I did. The rooms didn’t get bigger. I want to speak. On the clinic livestream. Today.”
I chose action over the explanations she would slice to ribbons. I walked to the board and wrote PRESS—staggered statements and underlined staggered until the ink bled through. “We sequence voices,” I said, not looking at her. “Nurses first. Families. Then Lila, if I can keep her route clean.”
“I’m not fragile inventory,” she said.
“You’re evidence and blood,” I said, turning. “And both are precious. The liaison will swing for you. Sable will watch, do nothing with her face, and move three pieces off the board in the time it takes you to smile.”
“Good,” Lila said. “Let her watch me live.”
Morales cleared his throat. “We can assign a media liaison.”
“No,” I said with meanness as a tool. “You assign me two bodies who don’t flinch. I’ll assign the words.” I tapped the board with the marker’s butt. “Elias, I need a safe stream mirror that won’t fail when bots dogpile the clinic’s feed.”
“Three mirrors,” Elias said. “One through the union server, one through a church that thinks I’m a benevolent ghost, and one on a civic arts channel too boring to attack.”
“Arts channel,” Lila said, lip curling. “Perfect. I’ll read my list like a poem.”
“Tiny stanzas,” I said, because I knew what attention does. “Three names, one ask, one fact. Then you step off.”
“You’re coaching me not to say everything at once,” she said.
“I’m coaching you to survive telling the truth,” I said. “Truth heals victims but it breaks bystanders; we pick which bystanders we’re willing to break and we stop pretending we can save them all.”
June leaned in. “And we don’t put her under the tide clock. The webcam there is three minutes fast and three seconds hungry.”
“We use Arch Nine,” I said, already mapping. “Blind CCTV zone under the park benches. The resilience festival banners are still up; they’ll give us cover if patrol asks dumb questions.”
Morales shook his head like the city made new laws while he blinked. “You’re going to hold a press minute under the barrier.”
“I’m going to hold a life minute under the barrier,” I said. “The city can tune in.”
My phone buzzed with a number I recognized from a lawyer who never called unless the billable hour had a heartbeat attached. I let it go to text and scanned the preview: Board fracturing. Two independents flipping. Counsel for Mother requests a meeting without you. I wrote Vance Board—fracture and let my hand pause over Mother before I moved on. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. I had to love and guard with different hands.
“Elias,” I said, “board?”
“The independents finally counted their grandchildren,” he said, voice flat. “They want language for a public apology and a private indemnity. We can give them the first.”
“We give them a ladder,” I said, “but we don’t let them climb over corpses. Draft your language with clinic advocates.”
“Already looping them,” he said. “Quill?”
“Mm?”
“Thank you for last night,” he said, so softly the phone’s mic almost didn’t catch it.
I didn’t look at Lila. “Run your ledger,” I said. “Make it harder to be evil than good.”
Lila folded her arms and watched me walk a line she hated and owed me for. She came closer anyway, hip to the table, shoulder to mine. I could feel the tremor still rolling under her skin, a tide that hadn’t found slack water. She pressed her temple to my arm for one second and then pretended she hadn’t.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll read your tiny stanzas. Then I’m going to say the name of the nurse who swapped bands with me.”
“With her family’s consent,” I said.
“With her family’s consent,” she echoed, and that echo sanded down something jagged in me I hadn’t admitted hurt.
I moved back to the whiteboards and started the second pass, the one where numbers gave way to routes: who needed a ride, who needed a burner, which door hinge was squeaky and would trip a mood. I marked Cates + Singh—plainclothes escorts and underlined plain three times. I drew a box around Dev—sibling out of Palmetto and wrote Ibarra next to Margo T. so a pie might bribe an evening nurse to break a rule.
“You’re triaging like you’re packing a boat,” Morales said, not unfriendly.
“I am,” I said. “City’s a storm. We pick who fits and figure out why the boat was small later.”
“You’ll testify to the Scuttle Switch?” he asked, too casual.
“I’ll testify to the red hall,” I said. “And to what Kincaid called friction. And to what she did to my sister with a flag.” The room tilted again and I let it.
He nodded like that satisfied a checkbox and also like it did something to his ribs he wasn’t naming. He raised his phone. “Warrants are live on the wire,” he said. “Your feeds will know in twelve seconds.”
Twelve seconds later, the clinic’s waiting room television—muted under a sheet of plexi—flashed the banner. I didn’t savor it. I put Warrants—Kincaid, Liaison on the board and then wrote Ambulance protocol under it because hope is a habit that makes you sloppy.
“Ambulance protocol?” June asked.
“No one in or out without a badge I recognize,” I said. “Drivers keep their hands visible. We ask who ordered the pickup and who pays. We call the room before we let the wheels close distance. And we use the rear ramp only.”
Lila frowned. “You think they’ll try to steal people with sirens.”
“I think sirens buy seconds,” I said. “And seconds are currency.”
Elias cleared his throat gently. “I can post a guard at the alley.”
“Post a camera that doesn’t put faces on the feed,” I said. “Harbor Eleven loves a resilience festival more than a person. We don’t give them a parade.”
The kettle clicked another measure of time. I capped the markers, lined them up like soldiers who had nothing to fire. I looked at the boards and at my sister and at the phone where a man I wanted in ways that made me unreliable watched me choose duty seven times in a row.
“Break,” I said. “Three minutes. Then we move the first ten and prep the under-arch stream.”
“Copy,” Elias said.
“Copy,” June said.
“Not copy,” Lila said, but I heard the smile in it and took the point.
I stepped into the hall for air that smelled like iodine and hard candy and the metal tang of new vents. The algae-glass washed the corridor green; somewhere beyond it, the tide clock winked at me, daring me to be late. Drone rotors bickered overhead. Down on Dockyard K, someone fried dough and grief in the same pan.
Sirens gathered like weather.
“Mara,” June called from the front desk. “Do you have an ambulance on the schedule?”
“No,” I said, already moving.
“Because one’s turning into the alley,” she said. “No call ahead, lights full, two silhouettes in front who sit like private security and not like EMS.”
Lila stepped into the doorway, hoodie too big, eyes unblinking. The detective’s hand went to his badge, then to his radio, then nowhere at all.
I took my marker like a baton and pointed to the rear ramp. “Positions,” I said, and prayed the math I’d done was more than tidy lines on a board.