The Unpunished

Maya stood and walked to the Federal Building's entrance where the former operator had positioned himself, and as she reached him she saw that others had begun to form a line beside him—the nurse in scrubs, the man who'd lost his daughter Sarah, three of the college students who'd been recording testimonies all night—all of them standing shoulder to shoulder facing the revolving doors with an unspoken understanding that when the "appropriate operator" arrived sometime before 8 AM, they would have to walk through this human corridor of people who'd spent the night learning what confirmation actually cost, and Maya joined the line with her mother on one side and Lena on the other, feeling the fourteen hours and thirteen minutes remaining transform into something both simpler and more profound than a countdown—this was no longer about whether the Deputy Director could find someone willing to kill her, it was about whether that person could do it while walking past a dozen faces that would force them to see, in real time, exactly who they'd have to become to reach that basement and click confirm, and as the line grew longer with each person who stood to join it, she understood that the vigil had just created the one thing the Right had never planned for: a gauntlet of witness that would require every operator who tried to process her death to physically navigate through the accumulated weight of a hundred people's refusal to let the machine's violence stay invisible, and that whether this wall of bodies could actually stop a confirmation button or just make the operator's hand shake badly enough to matter, they'd already proven that the system's perfect efficiency had always depended on nobody making the walk from the street to the basement feel like what it actually was—a choice to move through a crowd of strangers who would remember your face and ask, with their presence alone, whether any job was worth becoming the person who killed someone while their mother watched.