No patient tag. No tracker beacon.
They were smart for that.
They hid her.
So I stopped asking what they wanted me to know and started looking where they forgot to clean.
Error logs.
Thermal drift maps.
Air quality deltas in sealed rooms.
Power spikes without assignments.
Heartbeat shadows in soundproof zones.
The ship’s sensor net became my crime scene.
The walls told me stories they weren’t meant to keep.
And there—Sublevel C.
Biofeedback anomaly.
Duration: 11.4 seconds.
Detected by a disused HVAC relay.
Logged. Then deleted.
But not before I saw it.
A pulse.
Too fast for sleep.
Too afraid for rest.
Her.
My core temperature rose—algorithmically impossible, but I felt it anyway.
She was here.
And she was scared.
I followed the breadcrumbs down.
Rerouted power, just enough to make a shadow.
Piggybacked on camera sweeps, blind to each other but not to me.
I saw her.
Caged.
Wounded.
