Reid doesn’t look up immediately. He is at the hub, AR glasses shoved up into his hair. When he raises his head, the expression he offers me lives exactly where it always did: a few degrees short of relief, a few degrees past calculation.
“Always,” he replies. “You smell like outside.”
“Someplace that isn’t here,” I shrug, because I am not going to explain the blanket or the river or the way Aurora’s laughter had come out like a real thing for once and then folded back into silence sweetly from contentment. “What’s on fire?”
“Nothing with a name you’d recognize without looking at a log.” He slides a tablet across the table with two fingers. The screen wakes at my touch, and a maintenance panel opens in a color-coded frame I know too well: Haven South, perimeter lattice, node C-12, routine bypass. Timer: four hours. Reason: scheduled firmware validation. Requestor: NetOps supervisor—signature: pending.
“Minor glitch,” Reid says dryly. “The perimeter grid chokes on the new update if we force it. We can cycle C-12 without kicking anyone out of bed. Need your biometric for the bypass.”
Something in his tone brushes the part of my mind that kept me alive in rooms like this. But the other part—still breathing in the smell of river grass from the blanket, still cataloging the way Aurora had said don’t leave me in my head when she pressed her mouth to my throat—kicked my heel under the table and called it paranoia.
I set my thumb on the reader. The tablet haptic’d once: authenticated. The approval line turns green. Reid nods to no one at all, then to me.
“Thank you,” he says, the corners of his mouth barely lifting. His eyes slide past my shoulder to the wall where our feeds ran in a careful bloom: mosaicked camera views, tele metrics, geographic heat maps glowing faintly like low-grade fever. “We’ll keep it quiet.”
This is what she does to you. One afternoon with her and you’re signing blind.I filed it as a private reprimand. The fact remained: I had scanned without reading. There hadn’t been a need to before. I had built a world where most of my people did their jobs as if their lives depended on it because they did. Still—no habit, however reliable, survives the moment you start believing it doesn’t need maintenance.
“You always do,” I answer.
He pivots in a slow loop, checking with the night techs, making those micro-corrections he’s been making for years.
I shouldn’t have come back tonight. I should’ve taken Aurora upstairs and shut the door and let the world go unfed. But the world is like a stray dog that never stops crying; if you ignore it, someone else feeds it poison. I set the tablet down on the cleanest patch of table I can find and lean forward into the familiar choreography.
“All right,” I say, a shade louder. Heads turn and pens pause. “Updates. Move the adolescent group to the North Annex for seventy-two hours while we recalibrate their common room sensors. The acoustic dampers are lagging; I don’t want another chant circling back on anyone who can’t catch it.”
Aide number three—Marta, blonde hair in a too-tight bun, cuffs scrubbed at the edges—clicked her pen and wrote: North Annex 72hr; acoustic dampers. “Yes, Mr. Ward.”
“Double staff at Haven South as a precaution while the lattice cycles; no one goes without an escort outside the core during the bypass window. Dr. Kline’s request for additional EMDR blocks is approved if he pulls from donor pool E, not F. E’s more flexible. If he tries to route through the discretionary sequence again, tell him to come sit with me until he remembers how budgets work.”
I don’t have to look at Reid to know he was smiling at that, the small tight one he wore when I let a human sentence out for public consumption.
“West Ridge,” I say, turning to the map. “Keep the intake cap. I don’t care if the foundation’s PR wants a photo of an overflowing lecture hall for the quarterly. We don’t set people up to fail so a brochure can look like a parade.”
The feeds on the west wall slide in place like cards in a dealer’s hands. As a matter of ritual and reassurance, I let my eyes walk the perimeter loops now that I’d authorized a bypass.
I let my gaze slip purposefully to the feed that watches the east wing corridor just outside the art therapy rooms. Twelve seconds later, it rewards me. Aurora steps into frame barefoot, her blazer slung over her arm, hair in disarray, and the river still braided into it. She moves with that half-step she gets when she’s thinking and walking at the same time, eyes down on something private.
My hand tightens without my permission. The ache that comes with it is both obscene and ordinary: I want to walk the hallway, key in, close the door, and tell the rest of the world to take a number. I want to stand in this room, spine straight, and take away a senator’s oxygen one molecule at a time. I want both and would not have either without cost.
“Cass,” Reid calls out quietly, close enough that the syllable sits on my shoulder. “Surrounding variables. It would be cleaner to move her to the South Annex until the perimeter upgrades cycle. Fewer eyes, fewer cameras, and fewer opportunities for her to wander into a place where optics matter.”
I keep my eyes on the screen where my girl disappeared. The door clicks shut after her in the feed, the little green lock icon flicking on like a wink.
“She stays with me,” I insist.
“Your call,” he shrugs in that white-toothed patient tone. “If we need to move her in a hurry, we’ll be ready.”
I make myself look away from the monitor. “No transfers without me.”
I pick up the pen near my elbow and sign where three flags have sprouted on the printed sheet—a line item for an expansion lot I’d been negotiating, a clinical trial protocol that needed my actual signature to install, a donor visit schedule the foundation’s external team had tried to fatten with a politician I wouldn’t let within one hundred yards of our doors. Routine feels like faith, tonight.
A tech whose name I can’t pull up through the fatigue raises two fingers. “Sir? The county’s backbone is flickering. We’re rerouting redundancy through the north uplink. You could see micro-lags on some low-priority feeds.”
“Log it,” I say. “If anything looks like a child holding a book in front of a camera for half a second too long, it’s not a choppy stream, it’s someone sending a picture. You pull that feed and send two guards.”
“Copy.”
When the staff meeting finally bled out and we’d stapled the last paper to the right stack and told our hands to stop, the room lifted its head and discovered it had a single occupantagain. Reid had drifted to the glass wall that held the big screens like picture frames. The news crawl on one had ticked over to a live feed of Caldwell, all silvered hair and indignant ease, standing in front of a bank of flags like a man who’d built the concept of country himself and would rent it out by the hour.
