Chapter 23
STING
I hear them that evening.
Vi’s room. The door is closed but not latched. I can tell because there’s a quarter-inch gap between the door and the frame, the gap that remains when someone pulls it shut without checking. It’s careless and not like Vi. Which means either she’s distracted or she doesn’t care who hears.
I’m walking the residential corridor on my way to check the second-floor access stairwell, which is a thing I do and have always done and has nothing to do with the fact that Vi’s room is on this corridor.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
Through the gap, voices. Low. Two of them. Vi and Mara, close together, a conversation you have when you’re leaning in and keeping your volume down.
I slow my pace. Don’t stop. Stopping in front of someone’s door is obvious, and obvious is something I don’t do. But I slow enough to catch fragments as I pass.
Vi: “…east wing, past the…”
Mara: “…how far beyond the…”
Vi: “…said it’s behind a maintenance hatch in the…”
Mara: “…and if someone’s there?”
Vi doesn’t answer that one. Or she does, but I’m past the door by then, and the words dissolve into the general murmur of the residential section—other conversations, other lives behind other doors, the ambient noise of people occupying space they’ve made habitable through stubbornness and salvage.
I don’t need to hear the rest. The fragments are enough.
East wing. Maintenance hatch. The question of what happens if someone’s there.
They’re not reminiscing. They’re not catching up on lost time or doing any of the things two reunited friends might reasonably do on a relaxing evening.
They’re planning. Specifically, they’re planning a trip into the section of the Rot I told Vi she couldn’t go to.
Goddammit.
I should intervene. I have the authority.
I have the justification. I’ve already told Vi no, and no means no.
If she’s circumventing that decision by planning an unauthorized excursion into contested territory with her untrained civilian best friend, then it’s my right to step in.
It’s my responsibility, as well. But I keep walking.
I keep walking because intervening means knocking on that door and dealing with Vi, and every recent engagement with her has left me worse off than the one before.
The standoff in the Skylight Room. The corridor where I almost kissed her.
The supply closet where she looked through me with those steady, knowing eyes and brushed me with her shoulder.
Each time, I go in with my logic intact and come out with less of it. She’s eroding me, and she knows exactly where those cracks are.
If I walk into that room and tell her no again, she’ll look at me. She’ll hold my gaze. And whatever she sees in my face will give her information about me that I don’t want her to have. So I keep walking.
I reach the stairwell and check yet another access point. The door is solid, the lock is functional, the hinge needs oil, but that’s been true for weeks and isn’t a priority. Everything’s in order. Everything’s where it should be.
I sit on the top step.
This is unusual for me. I don’t sit when there’s no reason to sit. I stand, I walk, I lean against walls when a conversation requires a casual posture. Sitting without purpose suggests idle time, and idle time is where unwanted thoughts live.
But I sit anyway and the unwanted thoughts come whether I give them a chair or not.
I think back to the email I saw in the pile of papers Alice provided, an email from an oversight committee denying Vi’s father’s audit request, dated three weeks before the city council session where the request was supposed to have been first raised.
A denial that predates the ask. A door closed before anyone officially knocked on it. How can a request that has not yet been made, already be denied?
I stored that detail away. Told myself it was an anomaly. Bureaucratic misfiling, backdated correspondence, one of a dozen explanations that would render it a simple clerical error.
Except I haven’t looked for those explanations. And the reason I haven’t looked is that I’m not sure I want to find them.
There was a name.
A city development officer. A signature on three shell company contracts.
Same signature on the letter denying the independent audit.
The person attached to this signature approved the money’s movement and also blocked anyone who tried to trace it.
Same person, two different jobs, both conflicts of interest. Big time.
I told myself this could be bureaucratic overlap. A mid-level admin rubber-stamping paperwork without reading it, signing on both sides by mistake.
But the signature isn’t a stamp. I saw it clearly.
It was handwritten and consistent. The same confident, unhurried hand on every document.
A person who knew what they were signing.
Both times, two important details. Two loose threads in a stack of forty pages that I dismissed as circumstantial, incomplete, and insufficient.
They won’t leave me alone.
The predated denial suggests foreknowledge. Someone on the oversight committee knew the audit request was coming before it was submitted. That means a leak. Someone in Mayor Renner’s circle, or someone with access to his communications, was feeding information to the people he was investigating.
The dual signature suggests something out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a bystander. Nor a rubber-stamper. It was an operative inside the city’s financial apparatus, facilitating the corruption and simultaneously blocking oversight. That’s deliberate, a system designed to protect itself.
And Renner was inside that system, writing memos no one answered and requesting audits that were denied before they were filed, and he was doing it alone because the people who should have supported him had already turned.
I push the thought down, but not completely.
I’m past pretending I can push it away. But it goes into the compartment where I keep the things I haven’t decided about, into my holding pen between observation and conclusion.
It’s getting crowded in there with dates, names, and the look on Alice’s face, a tired woman who’d already fought this fight inside her own head and come out the other side.
I press my palms against my knees, stand, and head back down the stairs.
On the way past Vi’s room, I see the door is fully closed now. There’s no gap, no voices. Either they’ve finished planning, or they heard me coming the first time and latched the door.
I don’t stop. I don’t knock.
But I think about what’s behind that door. Two women with a location and a plan and the stubborn, reckless courage that doesn’t pause to calculate the odds before walking into a part of the Rot that could swallow them both.
And I’m letting it happen.