Chapter 28
twenty-eight
Evie
The donor names scroll on my laptop in a column I built myself, cross-referenced against the facility intake dates Vanessa pulled from the extracted server image two hours ago.
I'm standing at the secondary workstation with my laptop open on its surface.
The dates align in clusters, three to five intakes within forty-eight hours of each wire clearing, and I'm flagging the overlaps with color codes that mean something only to me when Remy's voice comes through the overhead speakers.
"Fourteen sedated, four ambulatory. Youngest is approximately fifteen, male, responsive but disoriented. Starting triage on the ambulatory group, prioritizing the fractured radius in bed seven."
My thighs press together under the workstation, hard, before I'm aware of doing it.
His command register is doing this to me while he describes a fifteen-year-old boy.
The arousal sits next to the nausea, and the mortification of being turned on by his authority while he works sits on top of both. I keep typing.
Pacific Future Initiative, wire date June fourteenth. Intake cluster June fifteenth through seventeenth. Three adults, one minor.
I flag it orange.
"Vanessa, pull the secondary node traffic from oh-six-hundred forward." Kade's voice comes from the main console where he stands, fingers spread across the edge, watching four screens at once. "I want to know if that facility pinged anyone when our team breached."
Vanessa's response is a blur of keystrokes and a murmured conversation with one of her monitors that I've learned not to interrupt.
Cross-reference. Flag. Move to the next name. You know how to do this. This is just a spreadsheet. You have built a hundred spreadsheets.
The shot comes through the speakers enormous and compressed and wrong, distorted in a way that makes my eardrums flinch.
My hands stop on the keyboard.
My face doesn't move.
"Cole, report." Kade is already leaning forward, his weight shifting from watching to working.
Vanessa's fingers hover above her keyboard for one second, motionless, and then resume at the same speed as before.
Angelina is standing six feet to my left near the briefing room entrance, and her hand has found the medal at her throat, her fingers locked around it.
The breach charge hits the speakers next, a concussive thud layered under voices I can't separate, shorthand too fast for me to parse, callsigns and numbers and directional commands in a language I never learned.
I have a political science degree and a talent for donor spreadsheets, and I'm standing in a room of people trained for exactly this moment while I taught myself to color-code wire transfers three hours ago.
I look back at my screen.
Pacific Future Initiative. Wire date June twenty-first. Intake cluster June twenty-second through twenty-fourth. Two adults.
I flag it orange and move to the next name.
The static replaces the chatter with nothing.
My right hand finds the edge of the workstation and grips it until my fingers ache against the cold metal surface, and my left hand keeps moving on the keyboard because the left hand didn't get the message yet.
I type a partial flag on a wire transfer dated July third.
The entry is wrong, two digits transposed, and I don't fix it.
Fixing it would mean looking at the donor column and seeing my father's initials next to the fifteen-year-old boy Remy described, and I am not going to do that right now.
It's fine. Comms drop during breaches. Cole said that during the briefing, he said interference from structural steel disrupts signal propagation, and this building has reinforced walls, and that's all this is.
Count something. Count the screens. One, two, three, four on the main wall, two on Vanessa's station, one on the secondary console where you're standing, that's seven, and Remy is fine because static is not silence, static means the equipment is still transmitting, static means—
"Evangeline."
Angelina is beside me and I didn't hear her move.
We've only touched once before: a brief handshake at Margaret's luncheon, warmth dialed exactly to the room.
This is different. Her hand closes over my forearm, not gently, and the grip reads as anchor rather than comfort.
She's the one who needs to hold onto something solid.
She's let go of the medal to reach for me, and it swings free against her collarbone, her jaw set so tight I can see the muscle jumping beneath her skin.
"I need you to stop typing." Her voice is steady, built on discipline rather than calm. "Because you're entering gibberish and Vanessa will have to clean it later, and right now I need you standing here with me not pretending to work."
I pull my hands off the keyboard. They shake when they have nothing to hold.
"Cole's been in worse." Angelina says it like she's cross-examining herself. Her fingers tighten on my forearm. "He plans for several contingencies. He told me that on our second date, like it was a selling point."
The laugh that comes out of me is thin and wrong.
"It was a selling point," Alina says from Kade's left without turning around.
Her arms are crossed, her weight settled, her eyes on the main screen where the building schematic glows with position markers that haven't moved in ninety seconds.
"The waiting is the job. You don't get used to it, but you learn what it costs, and you decide if you're willing to pay it every time they walk out the door. "
"For the record," Vanessa says, her fingers never breaking rhythm on the keyboard, "Obi-Wan is still receiving telemetry from all six field units.
Comms dropped, not life signs. This is not a Cyberman conversion, so if everyone could dial down the eulogies, my processing speed would really appreciate it. "
It takes me a beat to place the Doctor Who reference. Darcy and I burned through a phase the summer we were thirteen, and on any other day I'd be laughing and texting Darcy that Vanessa would be her new favorite person.
I open my mouth to say a joke about processing speed, about how Vanessa's coffee maker probably has better nerves than I do, but what comes out is "okay" and I close my mouth again.
Angelina's hand hasn't left my arm.
Forty-three seconds of static.
Then Cole's voice cuts through, clean and undamaged. "Building secure. All hostiles contained. Commencing evidence collection."
Angelina's exhale is sharp and short, and her hand drops from my arm to grip the edge of the workstation, steadying something that almost buckled. The gold flecks in her brown eyes are bright and wet. She blinks once, hard, and the courtroom composure slides back into place like a door closing.
"Extraction confirmed." Remy. Alive, whole, his voice carrying the particular calm that means his body hasn't come down yet but the worst is over. "Fourteen stable. Transporting the fracture case and the minor first. Miguel's riding with them."
The sound that leaves my body is not a word.
It is a single exhale that cracks open in the middle and turns raw and involuntary. Every person on this level hears it, and I can't take it back.
Angelina's hand finds my arm again, the same pressure grip, the same unspoken translation. I know. I'm here. We don't have to talk about it.
The screens shift.
Live feed markers dissolve into data tables, the building schematic replaced by columns and rows that populate in real time as someone on-site enters demographics into the extraction database.
The numbers appear one line at a time, each one a person who was lying on a mattress with worn restraint points twenty minutes ago.
Age, sex, estimated duration of captivity.
The columns fill from the top down and I watch them populate with the same patience I used on my father's donor spreadsheets on election nights, the same sick understanding that every number is a story someone will have to carry.
Male, 34, estimated 6 weeks. Male, 19, estimated 3 weeks. Male, 15, estimated 11 days.
The fifteen-year-old. Remy's voice described him as responsive but disoriented, and now he's a row in a table, and eleven days ago I was sitting on Remy's rooftop drinking wine while Darcy planned a ferry ride to Sausalito.
I lean my hip against the workstation and the edge bites through my skirt and I let it.
"Fracture case is splinted and stable for transport.
Vitals on the minor are within acceptable range, but I want a full panel when he gets to receiving.
His pupillary response is sluggish on the left and I don't like the lag.
" Remy's voice fills B4 in his medic register, clean and unrushed, each word placed with the same careful attention his hands use when they're working.
The same hands that mapped my body in the dark are now stabilizing a broken wrist on a man who was sedated and restrained in a building funded by wire transfers I processed with my father's account codes.
My clit throbs once, a single involuntary pulse drawn out by the sound of a man who knows exactly what he's doing with his hands, and the shame of it burns all the way down my throat to sit beside the nausea that never left.
These hands cleared the path.
"Vanessa, begin evidence logging. I want the intake records cross-referenced against financial documentation within the hour." Kade's voice has already shifted, the held-breath tension of live operation replaced by forward-momentum and method, a machine changing gears without slowing down.
"Already running it." Vanessa's fingers are a continuous sound against the keyboard, percussive and unbroken.
"Kade, the orange cluster lines up. Evie's flags, the intake dates from the server image, forty-eight-hour windows.
Every single one. The pattern was sitting in her index before we had the facility data to confirm it. "
My color codes worked. My spreadsheet saved people.
My father's signatures funded the mattresses they were lying on, and I addressed the envelopes that carried the invitations that filled the rooms where the donors wrote the checks, and the path I cleared led to a building with thirty-one people inside it, and my pattern recognition, the same skill that made me useful to him, just helped tear it open.
The senator's daughter can do data entry for either side, apparently. Versatile.
I don't cry.
I go still.
The shaking stops. The arousal flattens, heavy and low. My hands release the workstation edge and settle on the cold surface, and what I helped build and what I just helped find lands on my shoulders with a mass that is physical, that pushes my breath shallow and presses my spine straight.
The callsigns drop one by one like doors closing down a hallway.
Cole. "C1 clear."
Jax. "Nitro clear." His voice carries the faintest edge of something that might be exhaustion or might be the comedown from whatever chemical his body manufactures during operations, and then he's gone too and the frequency narrows.
Mira. "Clear."
Damian. "Clear."
I haven't moved since the extraction data started populating because moving would mean choosing a direction and I don't have one yet.
The screens behind me are dimming to standby, the building schematic replaced by a default grid that pulses slow and blue, and Vanessa is saving files with quiet keystrokes while murmuring something to Obi-Wan that sounds like a lullaby and a command at the same time.
Angelina left four minutes ago, her heels sharp on the concrete floor, her phone already at her ear, and I know she's calling Cole because I would be calling Remy if I had anywhere private to do it and anything to say that could survive being spoken out loud.
None of it lands like victory. I am still the woman who cleared the path. I am also the woman who mapped it.
The room empties. Kade nods once at something on his screen and walks out without speaking. Vanessa closes her laptop, tucks it under her arm, and squeezes my shoulder as she passes, her hand warm and brief, and then B4 holds only me and the muffled hum from the server room and the open frequency.
"Dove."
His voice. Just the name. Two syllables he gave me in the dark, that I kept, that mean something neither of us has been brave enough to define.
The sound travels through the speakers and lands in the base of my spine.
The fear that has been sitting frozen beside the want since the gunshot thaws in a single hot rush, softens my belly, pools low and heavy where I've been clenched for the last hour.
I close my eyes. My fingers curl against the workstation.
"Saint."
Two syllables back. The one Kade put in my ear in a briefing room. The one Remy answers to on this channel. I use it because it's his and because I have it now.
The frequency holds us, open and breathing, and I can feel the cold air from the vents and the residual warmth where Angelina's hand gripped my arm and the hum of equipment that doesn't know what just happened through it.
One breath. Two.
I close the laptop. Push back from the workstation and stand, and my legs hold, and the ache between them is just an ache now, one I can carry alongside everything else.
There's more work to do. The donor flags need verification against the new intake data, and Vanessa's cross-reference will generate results within the hour that someone will need to interpret, and that someone is me because I built the index and I know the codes and I am not finished.
I pick up my laptop and walk toward the hall, my flats quiet on the concrete, the channel going silent behind me.