“Sunshine,” I said. “You alright?”
“Leave her be,” the older voice across said. Not unkind; law laid down. “Let her borrow quiet.”
The door above creaked again and didn’t open all the way. A rectangle of light fell across the top step. The clipboard man came first, beam up, light pointed at the ceiling to keep the rest of us shapes. He squatted and braced the board on his thigh. I heard the pen click. Then the counting started, not withnumbers out loud, but with movements a man makes when numbers matter.
He dragged the beam along the row like a ruler and ticked his pen every time it hit a door, little strokes that sounded dry.
“Intake returned,” he murmured to himself, not us, when the light landed on Sunshine’s cage. The pen made one short line, then he crossed it on the third pass like he was building a box.
He fanned the pages, spit on a finger, flipped back, tapped the top corner to square the stack, then counted the locks with his knuckles, tap, tap, tap, like a mechanic checking lug nuts.
When he reached the empty cage two down, he didn’t say zero; he paused long enough to tell the paper to leave a space, then moved on.
The careful voice stood over his shoulder. “Staged?” he asked. He didn’t look at us. He watched the column being filled.
“Two held. One down,” clipboard said, pen scratching a tally stroke and then another. “Return one, mark breathing.” The pen lifted, came down again with a scratch, like that made it truer.
He shifted the light to our side, skimmed faces instead of eyes. The beam reached my door; the pen made that same small scratch. It slid to Ariel’s. Scratch. He didn’t say her name; he didn’t have one to say. “Red, hold.” The careful voice didn’t argue. He gave the kind of silence men use as permission.
The beam kept moving. Across, the older woman lifted her chin into it. The pen hesitated, then wrote something that sounded like age even if it wasn’t a word. He rolled his wrist, put a slash through a box farther down the page, and I knew exactly which body he meant it for.
He didn’t count like a shopper. He counted like a ship’s manifest: columns, boxes, tiny notes that turned people into movement, incoming, holding, gone. Every line was a decision somebody upstairs already made.
He finished our side, flipped the page, did the other row the same way. When he had the total he wanted, he tapped the board twice with the pen like the room was a desk that had to pay attention.
“Copy for staging,” he said to the careful voice.
“Keep it clean,” he answered himself, and turned. The light tilted off the wire so we could have our eyes back. The board edge knocked the rail once as they climbed. The door thought about closing and then did.
“They’re counting,” Ariel whispered into the dark the board left behind.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Us.”
“Yeah.”
She got quieter. I felt it in the pause through the wire when her breath emptied and stayed out too long. I set my wrist to the seam so she could find it and count my pulse. When she got to seven, she remembered to breathe.
“Left cage,” I said. “What do I call you?”
“Juno,” the careful voice said in a whisper that tried not to exist.
“Across.”
“Tess,” the older one said. Dry as gravel, kind in the corners. “The kid’s Sunshine.”
“Locked,” I said. “Juno left. Tess across. Sunshine to our right.”
Ariel pulled closer to the seam. “Are they coming back?”
“If they do, they’ll look past us again,” I said. “I’m not the right problem yet.”
“You’re always a problem.”
I smiled and felt the pull across split skin. “There she is.”
She tried to smile back and gave up when her lip shook. I set my thumb to the mesh where the tear would’ve tracked. Tiny. Gentle. Not a claim. A promise.
