The Unpunished

She looked up from the notebook to find that Sarah had pulled out her own phone and was typing something, her face lit by the screen's glow, and when she noticed Maya watching she turned the phone to show a social media post she'd just drafted: "Sitting outside the Federal Building tonight with a woman who has 16 hours left on her countdown and refuses to spend them hiding—if you're in the area and you believe the Right should require more than a name in a database, come bear witness," and Maya felt her breath catch because Sarah was about to make this vigil not just visible to the operators and security cameras but to the entire network of people who might see that post and decide that a Thursday night in October was worth spending on a cold bench in solidarity with a stranger, and she understood with a clarity that felt like vertigo that she'd just lost control of her own resistance in the best possible way—that what had started as her solitary refusal to die quietly was about to become something she couldn't contain or predict, and that if Sarah hit that post button the next sixteen hours and three minutes would transform from a private siege into something public and messy and impossible for the system to smooth over without everyone watching seeing exactly what it took to make a woman with a countdown disappear.