I counted the microphones the way I count exits—one, four, eight—and measured their reach like I measure arms in a fight. Foam windsocks wobbled in the iodine wind; cables coiled like kelp around the plywood riser we’d bolted over milk crates. June’s gaffer tape made straight borders where our soft boundary signs hung: Trauma-Informed Questions, No Faces Without Consent, Advocates First. The storm had scrubbed the sky to a hard rinsed blue, and the hurricane barrier’s arches threw long pale ribs over the grass, blind zones stippled into shade where families pretended to stroll and cops pretended not to watch.
I tucked a laminated run-of-show into my back pocket and checked the tide clock on the marina piling. It lied, three minutes fast, like always. I took the lie and made it mine. “We start on its twelve,” I told the advocates, “which buys us three minutes on the real.”
“Rotors at ten o’clock,” June murmured in my ear. “Civics, press, and two private feeds pretending to be civics.”
“Geofence?” I asked.
“Set to polite,” she said. “Get them on-record early and we can throttle the rest.”
I slid in behind the lectern to test the mics. The wood smelled faintly of salt and clinic bleach. I tasted metal at the back of my tongue—the old warning taste, sharpened by microphones and the knowledge that a misquote could crack prosecutions like eggs. Beyond the crowd, the algae-lit glass of the clinic glowed a soft aquarium green, the facade still humming from backup power that made the building blink like a patient.
The advocates formed a shoulder-to-shoulder line behind me: nurses in thrifted windbreakers, a dock steward in a clean beanie, a public defender with purple frames. Dock workers had traded favors for the truck we used as a stage; biotech kids texted me offers couched in NDAs, which I declined with a link to our open policy doc. Harbor Eleven’s culture loves resilience festivals—face paint after catastrophe—but I wanted a liturgy, not a party. No confetti, no applause, just air and truth.
“Ready?” Lila asked, and my chest did something my training doesn’t have a name for.
I nodded because she could see the shake in my fingers if I tried to speak.
“You’ll take the first two,” I said, tapping the printout. “Then Tanya sets the boundaries again, then Elias. He’s on cleanup and promise-making. You don’t answer about the barge doors or about night migraines; you route that to counsel and the clinicians. You say the line once, the same each time: I’m here to protect others by telling what happened to me.”
Lila’s hoodie still hung too big and perfect. She’d tied her damp hair in a low knot that said I will not be ornamented for your comfort. Her breathing measured itself against the drone-thrum overhead. “You stand close?” she said.
“Until they ask me to move,” I said, and shifted a half-step to give cameras her face without handing them the whole of it.
Elias waited at the edge of the line in a salt-stained blazer he refused to change. A mic pack bulged under his lapel like a second heart. His hands were steady; the skin over his knuckles was abraded from a door I’d told him to run through. When he met my eyes, I saw the earlier chapters—rooftop kisses timed to theft and the panic-shaft’s breath—reflected and deliberately not examined. Not yet. He touched the edge of the lectern, small, private, like testing the pulse of a body he might commit to.
“We don’t over-promise,” I told him. “We pin them in process.”
“I can pin and still mean it,” he said.
“Then do both,” I said, and let the corner of my mouth lift, because love is leverage and I had spent a lifetime learning to use it without breaking what mattered.
I stepped to the mics and let the storm-clean air fill my lungs. “Thank you for standing here,” I said. “You’ll get what you need today if you respect what we need. No live faces of patients without explicit consent. Questions go through advocates first. We’re releasing updated filings on the hour, with redactions to protect people who still need to eat and walk home.”
I glanced at the tide clock. Its twelve was our nine. “We begin.”
The microphones bloomed toward Lila when she took my place. The wind lifted her words and brought them back heavy.
“My name is Lila Quill,” she said, voice steady, hands open. “I worked as a temp analyst. I saw a machine trained to punish prediction of disobedience. I was flagged as friction when I asked about long-term effects. I left. I was pursued. I’m standing here to make the pursuit stop for the people still inside.”
Tanya, our clinic advocate, leaned forward and re-drew the chalk line we’d laid metaphorically on the ground. “We’re not answering about specific nights or dosage here,” she said. “That belongs in affidavits and medical care.”
A reporter with a careful mustache raised his mic. “Were you coerced into participating—”
“No,” Lila said, not waiting for the trap to finish baiting itself. “I was coerced into silence afterwards. The coercion failed. We’re done with coercion.”
Phones lifted in a mutual salute; drones adjusted altitude to capture clean audio. The rotors throbbed like cicadas in a heat that hadn’t reached us yet. I clocked the social economy at work—biotech elites in crisp neutrals hugging themselves as if to retain plausible neutrality, dock workers in bright windbreakers shoulder-bumping in small protect-their-own rhythms. The city holds two truths at once and calls it resilience.
“What do you want from prosecutors?” another voice called.
“Protection without performance,” Lila said. “Charges that face what was done, not what is easiest to prove. And no bargaining away anyone in exchange for anyone else’s reputation.”
The murmuring shifted pitch. I felt the question I’d been dreading building like static toward the back. A young woman in a glossy raincoat leaned over a rope line, eyes bright with a story that wanted to trend. “Is it true your sister is dating Elias Vance?”
The old me would have cut the mic and broken the drone feed with a pulse of static and a lie. The present me lifted a hand.
“We don’t traffic in women as access points,” I said into the microphones, cool as the wind. “We traffic in evidence. We have enough to move courts. We will not turn a survivor’s narrative into gossip so you can sell skincare between segments.”
Lila’s shoulder brushed mine—gratitude without script. Tanya stepped in and took the next few, washing the questions through clean language. We posted a link to resources; the chat on the mirrored livestream swelled with unions and public defenders, clinic rideshares offering routes, lawyers offering pro bono hours without the word heroic attached.
June pinged my phone with a line that made my throat loosen: civil suits filing: twenty-eight in the first hour; class action counsel requesting intake grid; investors issuing statements… majority pro-reform.
I lifted my head as if relief had scent, and it did—the faint, green-clean smell of the clinic facade, algae lit and hopeful. Money had begun to move with us, which meant the board would start to fracture openly instead of behind vowels in emails.
I gave Elias the nod.
He stepped to the lectern like a man walking into a current he had chosen. The microphones bent to him; the drones took half a breath.
“I’m Elias Vance,” he said, not adding the surname that usually arrives like a title. “I have failed to lead where it mattered most. Effective immediately, I’m suspending the predictive compliance unit. We’re inviting an independent governance board with clinic and labor representation and a mandate to publish findings. We’re seeding a whistleblower fund with unrestricted support for legal fees and long-term care. No more NDAs that hide harm—if you have one from any entity I own, consider it nonbinding where harm is involved.”
He glanced at me, only a flick, and then at Lila. “I’m asking investors to choose reform over rot. If you cannot, you can leave. We will buy you out at the last honest valuation we can calculate.”
A wave of sound rolled through the crowd in a low, surprised way that had very little to do with applause. The tide clock on the piling clicked its lie; the real tide slapped the marina’s boards with a more patient rhythm.
“Will you resign?” a voice shouted from the back where the tech sites cluster like carrion birds with ring lights.
Elias breathed through his nose the way I taught him to keep speech steady under adrenaline. “If the independent board asks me to, yes. Until then, my value is in dismantling the parts of the machine I know how to reach.”
“Do you admit criminal liability?” another reporter asked, scenting blood they could monetize.
He didn’t look at me this time. “I admit moral responsibility,” he said. “Legal liability is for prosecutors to decide. My lawyers will cooperate. I’m here because people I love were hurt by what I benefited from.”
The word love sizzled on the mics like salt water on a coil. I kept my face still and let it be evidence of something that did not belong to the feeds.
Tanya reclaimed the podium before the questions could spiral into a story that would use Lila’s steady voice to sell outrage. “We’re filing updated declarations at the half,” she said. “We’ll take three more and then transition to one-on-ones with advocates only.”
A man in a directional jacket tried to push a lens closer; a dock steward put two fingers to his sleeve and drew him back with a look that would outlast hashtags. The wind shifted; the iodine smell lifted to a cleaner salt that made my sinuses sting.
My phone buzzed with June’s updates, each one a small plate sliding into place: AG’s office: on camera thanking advocates; civil suits: forty-two; union pension board: statement supporting overhaul; two funds: pausing short positions; one fund: divesting with footnote that signals disgust, not fear.
We were boxing prosecutors with optics they could not publicly refuse. The Court of Public Air had convened and decided that silence was now a liability instrument, not a virtue, and nobody wants to hold a melting asset.
Lila leaned into the mics again for the last question. “What do you want for yourself?” someone called, softer than the rest.
She looked at the arches, at the long park that made blind pockets under its ribs where she had learned to breathe without being watched. “I want quiet,” she said. “And I want the people who were hurt to have a place to go that isn’t a bargaining chip.”
I swallowed. The microphones caught the movement. Let them.
We closed the line the way we opened it—clear, concise, with the advocates’ hands visible and ours behind the lectern. I stepped off the plywood and felt the give of damp grass under my boots, a softness I hadn’t afforded myself in days. The drone rotors climbed, satisfied with their harvest. The algae-lit glass shifted from green to gray in a cloud’s pass.
Elias fell in beside me, not touching. “You were right about process,” he said.
“You were right about meaning it,” I said.
He almost smiled. The almost hit me harder than the broadcast. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. We were learning to time our distance like tides.
Cameras thinned to the paid kind. Nurses began to shepherd patients back inside with warm tea, metal spoons clinking against paper cups. The dock steward passed me a folded card with handwritten ride codes and a note: barter settled—your cartons of gloves will meet you at dusk. Harbor Eleven runs on formal invoices and favors; we were fluent in both.
June slid up with a tablet under her arm, hair damp from air she’d fought. “Investors are doing their performative soul-searching,” she said, smug but tired. “You teased them into wanting to be on the right side of the after-movie.”
“Box checked?” I asked.
“Corner drawn,” she said. “Prosecutors can charge without losing the mood. I’d call that pinned.”
I let the words land where adrenaline used to live. My shoulders dropped a fraction. The tide clock clicked toward another lie; people began to disperse in eddies, carrying away pieces of us to argue over dinner.
My phone vibrated again, different—two short pulses I assign to bad math.
I looked down. A text from Morales: Status: Sable processed. Complication: liaison transfer missed. Custody gap. Working theory: internal assist. A second bubble sprang beneath it: Off-record: he asked for you by name.
The sky stayed clean; the arches kept their shade. Lila’s hand found the hem of my jacket, a child’s tether we’d outgrown and needed anyway. Elias exhaled into a question he didn’t voice.
I slid the phone back into my pocket and schooled the microphones’ memory out of my face. “We did what we came here to do,” I said, to them, to myself.
“And now?” Lila asked.
The rotors pulsed higher, hungry for the next story. I lifted my eyes to the hurricane barrier and its blind spots, to the park that taught us how to vanish and reappear on our own terms, to the algae-lit facade that promised clean air if not clean hands.
“Now we make sure the court with walls keeps pace with the one we just held,” I said, and felt the optimism ground itself like a pole in soft mud. “But first we find the man who thinks he can still barter people.”
I started toward the clinic doors, and the tide clock clicked its three-minute future into the present, daring me to be ready this time.