The Unpunished

Maya's phone buzzed with a response from the Deputy Director that arrived with the particular timing of someone who'd spent the last hour consulting lawyers and crisis managers and probably the mayor's office: "Ms. Ortiz, your refusal to engage in good-faith negotiation leaves us with limited options, and I want to be clear that the suspension of your processing was a courtesy extended in recognition of extraordinary circumstances, not an admission of systemic failure, and while we acknowledge the public attention your vigil has generated, the Right's protocols remain in effect and your window will be processed according to standard procedures once an appropriate operator has been identified, which we expect to occur before 0800 hours," and Maya read the careful language—"appropriate operator," "standard procedures," the implicit threat that they'd find someone who could ignore a hundred faces—and understood that the machine was preparing for one final attempt to kill her in front of everyone, was betting that somewhere in the city there existed an operator damaged enough or dutiful enough or simply exhausted enough to walk past the former colleague who'd resigned, past the hundred witnesses who'd stayed through the night, past the newspaper story that would hit doorsteps in less than four hours, and click confirm while knowing that every person watching would remember their face for the rest of their lives, and as she held up the phone so the vigil could see the Deputy Director's threat dressed up as procedure, she felt the fourteen hours and fourteen minutes remaining compress into the next few hours before dawn, understanding that whether her heart stopped or kept beating would come down to a question the Right had never had to answer before: could the machine find even one person willing to become the operator who proved that a hundred witnesses weren't enough to make confirmation impossible, or would the vigil force the system to finally admit that the killing had always required darkness, and that once you flooded that darkness with this much light—this many faces, this much documentation, this stubborn refusal to let anyone involved pretend they were just following protocol—there was no one left who could reach for that button without understanding exactly what they were choosing to become?