Fine. Not the front door then. The side.Mara Patel Ward Foundation,I know her face from the conference circuit, frompanels where she made sense while the men made noise. She has talks online. In one of them she says a sentence I cling to: “Safety isn’t silence; it’s structure.” I write it down, not because I love the idea of being someone’s structure but because it’s a leverage point.
I search public records the way you learn to when you’ve had to find someone with only two letters and a rumor. Building permits. Fire inspections. Nonprofit filings. Names that repeat in the right ways and names that repeat in the wrong ones. I don’t need an address. I need a pattern. Staff who hop from clinic to clinic. Contractors who install the same hardware. Vendors who supply medical waste boxes and someone in procurement who forgets to use a shell company one time because it was midnight and his kid had a fever.
If I can find one place that smells like a Sanctuary but doesn’t say it out loud, I can go stand on the street near it and listen. I don’t want to go in. I want to hear how the door moves. I want to watch who uses it. I want to see whether the locks match what I painted by accident. If I find one thing, I can paint differently. If I find nothing, I can tell him that too and watch his face for the tell he can’t suppress when I get close by guessing.
I text Lila,2pm tomorrow. Contract + lawyer. Bring your wasp voice.She returns a hornet emoji and a link to a noodle place with a discount code because she can’t do intensity without carbs. I start a list in my notebook because lists are the only way to put teeth in a plan.
Pull every public grant Ward gave to clinics in the last five years. Check recipients against addresses.
Find the contractor who likes smart locks. Cross-reference with Ward’s filings.
Call Nia at the shelter. Ask off the record what she’s hearing about “whisper clinics” and what they call themselves when they aren’t being watched.
Ask Jonah where he went, even if he doesn’t want to say.
Walk four blocks that smell like cedar and see what the wind tells me.
I write his number at the bottom of the page to remind myself that if I find something that makes my skin crawl, I can pull a lever that moves heavy things. I hate that it comforts me. I accept that it’s true.
The rain shifts to a lighter patter. The city hums like a beast that remembers it has to wake up in six hours. I steel the brush and run one last stroke along the left edge of the doorway on the canvas. It cleans the line and makes the shadow honest. The hand remains. I let it. As a warning mostly to myself.
I clean the brush. I wipe the knife. I cover the palette with plastic, so the paint doesn’t skin over. I rinse my cup and set it upside down on the rack. The rituals let me work when I’m not working. They are the spine when my back gets tired.
The phone chimes to inform me that the battery is at twenty percent, enough for a little more digging if I need it. I don’t. I’ve got enough for one night. My body is heavy now in a way that will let sleep come if I let it. I look one more time at the canvas. A dark doorway with a figure in shadow. It’s not him. It’s what he does to rooms.
“If you won’t tell me,” I say to the painting, like it could answer, “I’ll find out myself.”
The work light throws a hard circle around the easel. I turn it off and the studio returns to its shape in the dark. I move toward the sofa and the blanket I keep there, the one with the paint stains I never washed out. The contract stays on the table where I can see it when I wake up and the list stays open.
Chapter 16 – Cassian
Predawn sits on the harbor like a sheet of uncut obsidian. From up here the cranes are outlines and the water is black glass. Inside, the only light is what the monitors give me: a grid of squares that turn the city into solvable problems. I’ve been here since the hour most people start asking their nervous systems to slow down. Mine won’t. The tie is folded next to the keyboard. Sleeves up. A glass of water I never drank sweating a ring near the edge of the desk.
I pick up the glass of water and don’t drink, then set it down exactly where it was. I’m done pretending I can outwait the thing that’s awake in me. The medic in me knows hesitation is a tool when it’s deliberate and a failure when it’s a reflex. Tonight it’s the second. Hesitation gets bleeding people killed. It also gets women like Aurora turned into targets while they believe they’re wielding a spear.
The secure line murmurs with a tone that only three numbers on the planet know how to make. “Reid,” I say.
“She’s searching,” he says without preface, his voice flattened by a speaker that makes everything sound like it’s happening in a tunnel. “Sanctuaries, Ward, floor plans, security. Minor pivots—permits, vendors, Mara’s name.”
“She’ll find polished fronts and idiot theories,” I say. “And one thread that reads plausible enough to make her keep pulling.”
“Do you want us to block?” he asks. He knows the answer. It’s still his job to ask.
“No,” I say. I don’t block. People like her don’t stop when you put up a wall; they put a light on the wall and ask why it exists. “Seed. Give her bread crumbs to what we want her to see. Clean leaks. The pilot site. The shell vendors. The white paper legal scrubbed for the senator. Nothing real.”
Silence on the line is Reid reminding me of actual lines. “That crosses into entrapment,” he says finally. “If it were anyone else, you’d call it manipulation and tell me to build a higher fence. She hasn’t consented to being managed like this.”
“We’re past lines,” I say, evenly. “She’s hunting in the dark. I’m turning on lights in a hallway where I control the doors. You’ve seen what happens when someone wanders into a ward with a camera and a mission. I’m not watching it again.”
He doesn’t argue with the premise. He argues with the scale. “If we steer her, we’re responsible for where she lands,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I want her landing where my people hold keys.”
He exhales; it fuzzes the line. I can hear keystrokes. He’s already standing up the decoys and reroutes. “I’ll need comms to hang a few new shingle sites in the right places,” he says. “We’ll put them two directories deep, so she thinks she found something we forgot to bury.”
“Do it,” I command. “And pull DMV on Jonah’s day. Where did he go when he forgot he was supposed to see her?”
“A meeting he didn’t know he wanted,” Reid says. “We bought him a wall. He likes it. He’ll like it more when he sees the mock-up.”
