Epilogue
WRECKER
Three weeks later.
Fluorescent lights hummed like bees in a jar. The badge on my chest had a name I don't answer to and the polo said SECURITY in block letters big enough to be a dare. The cameras said I belonged. The janitor said hi every morning like we'd been neighbors in another life.
The logistics hub sat in a concrete box off a feeder road that had forgotten where it was going.
Square roof, tan paint, six bays, the kind of landscaping that dies the minute the contractor stops pretending.
The sign out front had a heart logo and something about hope.
Hope probably didn't love the sound the forklifts made.
Amanda walked past my desk at 09:07 with a clipboard and a coffee cup that said WORLD'S OKAYEST ADMIN. She didn't look at me. That was the point. She paused at the printer that jams twice a day if you don't sweet-talk it, thumped it with her palm, and kept walking. That was the signal: ten minutes.
I ran my lap like always. Dock doors, break room, bulletin board about slip hazards that I'd memorized down to the misspellings. The men on the floor had learned my orbit and stopped flinching when I showed up. A guard who doesn't make people flinch gets ignored. That's when you hear things.
Back office. Door that sticks. I shouldered it and stepped into air cold enough to make my eyes water.
The IT closet was a plywood box with manners.
Router, switch, three camera feeds trying not to quit.
I closed the door, pulled the chair two inches left of the desk the way I always did, squeak-squeak, sit. Routine covers sins.
Monitor one: bay doors, numbers stenciled on the concrete, trucks nosing in, the dance of pallet jacks and hands. Monitor two: hallway, copy machine groaning, two temp badges crossing with armfuls of binders. Monitor three: basement.
The basement camera wasn't on any plan. It lived where good intentions go to rot. A dead corner in the sublease diagram with a label that read STORAGE in a font too small to be honest. You didn't find it unless you were looking. We'd been looking for three weeks.
There she was.
Not Amanda. Sunshine.
Hair hacked short now. Eyes too big in her face. Chained. Breathing. Alive. A blanket on her shoulders that had never seen laundry day. A paper sign on a rolling cart next to her that said RELIEF in black marker, like that made it sacred.
"You were right," I said, low. "They're still moving them."
Amanda came into the doorway without touching the frame and closed the door the way you close a secret. She leaned a hip against the rack like she was born next to blinking lights. The fluorescent found the purple under her eyes and the new tightness at her jaw.
She didn't look at the monitor first. She looked at me. That's trust, or trouble, or both.
Then she looked.
Her hand went to the clipboard without thinking. Her thumb ran along the metal edge until it came away clean. She swallowed. "There's a second sub-basement," she said, barely above a breath. "It doesn't exist unless you know the code. The manifest shows pallets. The delta shows bodies."
"Proof?" I asked.
"Incoming," she said, eyes still on Sunshine. "Two nights ago they logged a humanitarian shipment from a flood county four states over. The donation numbers are real. The timing isn't. The pallets don't weigh right. The signatures don't match the county office. Someone rubber-stamped an alias."
I watched the girl on the monitor not cry. Strong isn't the right word for that. Strong is what you say when you can't fix something and need to fill the air.
"The watcher?" I asked.
"On site yesterday," she said. "He likes the glass hallway. Loves to see himself in it when he talks."
"Figures."
She pulled a flash drive from inside her jacket and didn't hand it to me.
Good. We did the drop offsite, separately, when nobody was watching.
"I can't pull a clean download of their internal delta without tripping an audit log," she said.
"I can print. But if it lives in this building, it gets shredded the second they feel the wind change. "
"Then we don't spook the wind," I said.
She nodded like it hurt. "They move the relief pallets on weekends. Fewer eyes. Fewer volunteers. This weekend is a blanket drive." The way she said it could've cut your hand open. "They load at the north bay at dawn. A supervisor who isn't a supervisor signs with a name that isn't a name."
"Drivers?" I asked.
"Contractors. Turnover like a tire fire. Two regulars. One with a limp, one who brags about his flashlight like it's a pet."
"Two uniforms, two ball caps, a clipboard," I said. "We pass the gate. We pass as them."
She blinked. "Ghost said you'd say that."
"Ghost is a smart man," I said.
She looked at Sunshine again. On the monitor, the girl shifted like she'd remembered what legs were for and then thought better of it. A cup sat on the cart next to her. A camera stared. A lock sneered. My hand did something in the air that wanted to reach through the screen and tear it open.
"How many downstairs today?" I asked.
"Three in that room," she said. "Two in the corridor. A sixth in intake. Seven if you count the one who—" She stopped. "Didn't make it."
I let the number land. Numbers are freight. You load them careful, or you drop them and they blow up in your chest.
Amanda's jaw set the way I'd come to recognize, not loud, not dramatic, just locked in. People talk about brave like it's a sound. Sometimes it's a woman in a bad office wearing a badge that lies, memorizing the rhythm of a paper shredder.
"We don't stop," she said.
"No," I said. "We go ghost."
Her eyes cut to me. That was it. The thing neither of us had said out loud because saying it makes it real and we weren't ready for the devil to have a calendar invite.
We ghost in. We ghost out. We live inside their blind spots long enough to open the right doors and walk people through them in broad daylight. We make it look like paperwork. We make it look like an accident. We make it stick.
A door banged somewhere down the hall. I leaned back, rolled the chair, squeak-squeak, the exact right amount of bored routine.
Amanda took one step back and then another, and by the time the IT kid poked his head in to ask about a toner box, she was a temp again and I was a guard with nowhere urgent to be.
"Check the dock," I told the kid. "People hide things in pallets."
He laughed because I said it like a joke. He left because he's twenty-two and hasn't learned yet that the joke and the truth can be the same sentence.
We stood in the humming room for half a breath. Amanda tapped the clipboard twice. That meant later. That meant drop. That meant hold.
At the door she paused and angled her body so that anyone walking past would see a woman checking a checkbox. Not a sister making a war.
She didn't look at the monitor again. She didn't have to. Sunshine was already in her head the same place she was in mine. Tucked behind the ribs, right next to the reason we were still in this building at all.
The door clicked shut.
The humming went back to being the only sound in the room.
I looked at the monitor. Sunshine shifted under the blanket and pulled it tighter, and something about the way she did it, careful, like she was conserving warmth she didn't know when she'd get again, put a hard line through my jaw that I let sit there.
We were coming.
She didn't know that yet. But we were.
I pulled my chair back to center, squeak-squeak, and picked up my clipboard.
Back to work.