Heads bend; notes are taken. I don’t look at the screens yet. If I look, I slow. If I slow, I start to weigh three options against four and forget that this work bleeds when you hesitate.
“Ward.” Reid’s voice comes from my left shoulder. He doesn’t sit either. He leans one hip against the table, casual threaded through readiness. He slides a sheet in front of me with a fingertip, the way you’d pass a scalpel to a surgeon who doesn’t like chatter. “On the expansion,” he says, quiet enough it doesn’t read as an interruption. “If you want to keep it under the radar, we can loosen perimeter checks at North for seven days. Tight routines read like pattern on satellite. A lull looks like disuse.”
I scan the bullet points he’s already organized under my headings: access, optics, and fallout. He’s not wrong aboutsatellites or about pattern. “A lull is when someone slithers,” I say.
“True,” he concedes, unruffled. “But a lull also looks like nothing to an overeager staffer looking to impress a senator. Let them pull on an empty string for a week. You hate bait; I know, but sometimes it’s a useful lie.”
Useful lies are my least favorite kind because they leave the best taste in your mouth. I tap the paper twice, the signal that meansNoted, not Approved.I don’t commit yet.
“Next,” I say, and we move. The adolescent group to North Annex because I want them around windows and dirt under fingernails. Lock-step movement on a map would bring Caldwell nothing; chaos would hurt the kids. We’ll shift quietly.
“Clinic D?” I ask, reaching for the folder with blue tape on its spine. “I want an update on yesterday’s incident.”
The head clinician for that site—a man with two decades of ER experience and the kind of eyes that have seen everything and still volunteer to see more—leans forward. “Resident had a flashback during sensory integration. Lashed out at staff when they moved too fast with grounding. No one seriously hurt. We paused the program group for the day and individualized sessions.”
“Sedation?” My tone stays even; I can hear my mother’s voice in my head every time I ask it. I’m not asking to catch them. I’m asking so no one on this network forgets what sedation costs.
“Only for immediate safety, five milligrams midazolam. Debriefed at four. Our internal review suggests we rushed the sequence.”
“Fix the sequence,” I say. “Debrief with the staff who got hit.”
“I’ve already scheduled it,” he says. He’s good. They’re all good. It’s why the Senator might win in the court of public opinion and still be wrong.
A knock on the glass interrupts us. Anya from legal steps in, tablet in hand, eyes alert. “You’ll want this now,” she says, and crosses the space quickly. “Caldwell’s people killed the trauma funding bill in committee this morning. He’s on live at noon with phrasing a comms director should be ashamed of.”
“Which is?” I flip the tablet, so my eyes catch the words before my blood does.
“‘Unregulated compounds.’ ‘Off-book clinics.’ ‘Taxpayer-funded hiding places for criminals and foreign nationals.’” She doesn’t roll her eyes; she’s trained not to. I feel the long muscle in my jaw notch. She adds, “Rumors indicate he’s paying for cyber support. It is crude, but plentiful hands.”
“Lock down sensitive files across the network,” I say. “Residency rosters, relocation details, therapy notes. Air-gap the intake servers. Anyone in transit gets parked at secondary locations for forty-eight. Internal emails go short and boring.”
“I’ll draft,” she says, already moving.
“I’ll handle the cyber team,” Reid adds, half aside to me, half to the room. “We’ll set up decoy endpoints. If Caldwell’s paying kids to run scripts, we’ll make him pay per click.”
I nod. “Good. No one gets cocky. The dumbest approach becomes dangerous when it’s multiplied.”
The map on the wall ticks a degree to the right as the satellite feed updates. I glance at the empty black square on the far right of the grid and let it anchor me.Leave room for unknowns. Leave a space you don’t fill with your own story.
I don’t let my eyes drift to the feed that shows the art therapy room until the room has cleared once and filled again. When I do, I find her instantly in the north studio: the tall windows pouring a flat wash of light across the floor, the far walla scatter of canvases in various stages of honesty. She’s cross-legged on the drop cloth in the sun, shirt untucked under a blazer, sleeves shoved to her elbows, the shape of her shoulder blade visible through cotton when she reaches for a knife on the tray. There’s paint on her left cheekbone that is a single streak like an afterthought she forgot to wipe away. She leans into a kid’s eye line without bending her spine, gives instruction like an offering instead of making it a test. She sets a limit in the way she moves a water cup away from a too-eager hand reads through video like care, not control. She looks like she belongs. The carved place I didn’t know I had under my right rib aches with it.
“She’s adapting well,” Reid says at my elbow, as if I asked, and he didn’t know I was already watching. “Vera said Hale took the morning group. It was useful.”
I nod, eyes still on the monitor. Aurora tips her chin to listen to a girl I recognize from intake—Kenzie with quick hand, and a quicker anger—and says something that makes the girl’s mouth do the tight smile that isn’t quite ready to be a smile. “Keep her safe,” I say. It comes out like a line item and an oath.
“Always,” he says. I don’t watch him say it. Later I will wish I had.
I think, with the particular arrogance that sews itself into men who are good at their work and fatally convinced that goodness and capability are the same, that I still hold the strings. I don’t feel one slide.
Chapter 50 – Aurora
The sink in the art room makes a little shudder before it settles. I hold the brush under the stream and watch gray paint ribbon off the bristles, then ghost down the stainless-steel basin in a spiral.
The sink hisses. I turn the water off and stand there with the damp brush pinched between two fingers, watching a final bead fall and burst. I’m stalling. It would be noble to say I’m letting paint dry. I’m counting the reasons I should leave versus the reasons I’m still here like I can tally a life the way you check off groceries.
He used me,the part of me that still tastes the ballroom thinks, flat and bitter.Useful for now, the words I heard through his half-open door repeat, louder than they should, louder than they were when he said them because I’ve coated them with my anger and now they ring. The other part of me lying in a dark room under his breath last night says:He keeps saving people and you see it.Both things can be true. I know that. I learned early that monsters sometimes have hands you want on you because they keep other monsters away.
I set the brush in the rack carefully, handle pointing the same way as the others.
