The Unpunished

Maya felt her mother's hand find hers in the dark and squeeze with a pressure that said *we're not done yet*, and she looked around the plaza to see that the news of the replacement operator had galvanized rather than deflated the crowd—people were pulling out phones to document this new phase, the former operator was standing now with his arms crossed facing the Federal Building's entrance like he was preparing to physically block the next person who tried to walk past him, and Rachel Chen was typing furiously on her tablet, undoubtedly updating her article with the story of an operator who'd refused and a system scrambling to find someone who wouldn't—and Maya understood that what had felt like a setback was actually exposing something the machine had always tried to hide: that confirmation required a specific kind of person willing to do it, that operators weren't interchangeable parts but human beings who could be broken or convinced or simply exhausted by the weight of too many faces, and that every replacement the system called in would arrive knowing that someone before them had looked at this exact situation and chosen to walk away, which meant each new operator would have to be either more committed to the protocol or more damaged by it than the last, and somewhere in that progression the machine would either find someone willing to kill her in front of ninety-three witnesses or it would run out of people who could still pretend that confirmation was just a job instead of what the vigil had made undeniably clear it actually was: a choice to end someone's breathing while their mother held their hand and strangers refused to look away.