The Unpunished

Maya's phone lit up one more time with a response from the operator that arrived so quickly they must have been waiting for her reply: "I just told my supervisor I'm calling in sick for my 3:30 shift and they asked if I could find coverage and I said no, that if they want someone in that basement at 3:45 they'll have to find another operator because I can't be the person who kills you while ninety-three people watch me walk in knowing what I'm about to do, and I know this probably just means they'll call someone else, someone who hasn't read Tremaine's memo or seen your face or spent eight months drowning in forty-three names, but I need you to understand that you've already saved me even if I can't save you, because I was going to keep doing this job until it broke me the way it broke the man in your crowd, and now I'm not, and maybe that's not enough, maybe they'll find someone harder or more broken or just better at not looking at the faces, but at least when the sun comes up and you're either still breathing or you're not, I'll be able to say that I was the operator who saw you and chose to walk away rather than add your name to a count I'll carry for the rest of my life, and I think that choice—that refusal—is the only thing any of us who've touched this machine can do to prove we're still human enough to remember that the people we kill aren't just names but sisters and daughters and strangers who deserved to have ninety-three people sitting in the cold fighting for them." Maya felt the words hit her like a physical force, understanding that she'd just won and lost simultaneously—won because an operator had chosen her life over their job, lost because somewhere in the Federal Building's administrative machinery, someone was already calling the next name on the list, finding another operator who might not have read Tremaine's memo, who might not be watching the livestream, who might still believe that confirmation was mandatory and that the distance between their hand and her heart was enough to make the killing clean, and as she showed the message to Lena and her mother and watched both their faces cycle through relief and renewed fear, she understood with fourteen hours and thirty-three minutes remaining that the vigil had just entered its most dangerous phase: they'd broken one operator's willingness to kill her, but the machine had backups, had redundancies, had twenty years of protocol designed to ensure that no single person's refusal could stop the system from doing what it had been built to do, and now they'd have to wait in the cold to see whether the next operator who walked through that plaza would be someone who could still be reached by witness or someone who'd learned long ago to stop looking at faces and just click through the names until their shift ended and they could go home and pretend that the drowning was someone else's problem.