Calvert's phone buzzed in his pocket, a vibration she could see through the fabric of his slacks, and his hand moved toward it with a reflex that told her the call was exactly who she thought it was—Tremaine, or someone like Tremaine, someone watching this conversation unfold through camera feeds and deciding in real time how much disruption one woman's last eighteen hours were worth containing. He didn't answer it, just let it buzz itself out while his gaze stayed locked on hers, and when the silence returned he said, with a softness that was worse than anger, "Five o'clock, then," and turned away with the controlled movements of someone who'd just lost a round but not the game, leaving her standing in the center of the floor's attention with Jonah beside her and the countdown she couldn't see anymore still burning down toward whatever ending she'd managed to make unpredictable. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, indifferent, and Maya sat back down at her desk—not because she had work to do, but because staying was the only weapon she had left, and she intended to use every minute of it.
Jonah lingered beside her cubicle for a moment, his hand gripping the partition edge with white-knuckled tension, before he seemed to make some internal decision and pulled out his phone, thumbs moving in quick, furtive jabs that she recognized as someone texting under duress. She didn't ask who he was contacting—didn't want to know if he was covering his own ass or trying to help her or simply documenting this for whatever investigation might follow—but when he glanced up and caught her watching, he held her gaze long enough to mouth "lawyer" and tilt his head toward the exit in a gesture she interpreted as either get one or I'm getting you one. The word felt absurd in her mouth, a relic from a world where legal protections meant something against a system that had legislated murder into a right, but she found herself nodding anyway because maybe that was the point—to drag this into depositions and discovery, to make her last hours so procedurally complicated that someone, somewhere would have to explain in writing why the Institute's behavioral analytics unit had been watching her die in real time. Around them, the office was beginning to thaw from its frozen shock, colleagues returning to their screens with the studied intensity of people pretending they hadn't just witnessed a subordinate call their director a liar, and Maya opened her laptop again, pulled up her draft, and began adding timestamps and names with the meticulous spite of someone building a case she'd never live to argue.
She typed until her fingers cramped, each addition to the draft a small act of arson—the exact time Calvert had checked the donor awareness screen, the phrase "rotating committee with no permanent chair," the login timestamp that put Tremaine at his keyboard four minutes after her death notice went live—and she felt a grim satisfaction watching the document grow from accusation into evidence, something too specific to dismiss as paranoia, too documented to scrub without leaving traces. At 18:24:33 by her mental countdown, an email arrived from an address she didn't recognize—no name, just a string of numbers @institute.internal—with a subject line that read "Draft Review Required" and a body consisting of a single sentence: "Please be advised that unpublished materials referencing internal operational structures require clearance before archiving." She read it twice, feeling the threat dressed up as policy, the implicit reminder that they could see what she was writing, that even her final act of documentation was happening inside their panopticon, and instead of deleting or complying she hit reply and typed back, "I'll make sure my executor knows where to find the backups," then added her personal email to the draft's share settings and watched the sync icon spin, buying herself the thin insurance of redundancy while somewhere in the building, she imagined, someone was realizing that killing her had just become significantly more complicated than they'd planned.
The sync completed with a soft chime that felt disproportionately triumphant, and Maya allowed herself a breath that was almost steady, aware that copying the draft to her personal account was barely a safeguard—they could still scrub servers, could still classify the whole mess under some national security pretext she'd never thought applied to domestic kill-right administration—but it was something, a fragile thread of accountability stretched beyond the Institute's walls. She glanced up to find that the anonymous email's sender had gone offline, their status dot graying out as if they'd decided further engagement was above their pay grade, and the pettiness of that small retreat made her want to laugh again, this bitter, jagged sound that would definitely get her escorted out if she let it loose. Instead she screenshotted the "Draft Review Required" message, added it to a new folder labeled with today's date and her own name—a digital breadcrumb trail for whoever might care enough to look—and felt Jonah's presence return to her peripheral vision, his phone now pocketed, his expression caught between alarm and something that looked unsettlingly like pride. "You're really going to make them work for it," he said quietly, not quite a question, and she nodded once, thinking that if her last eighteen hours were going to be useful to anyone, it would be as a map of exactly how much the system feared its own transparency, a case study not in how people died under the Right, but in how far the machine would go to keep anyone from documenting what it looked like from the inside.
She minimized the folder and pulled up her normal workflow—grant applications, impact assessments, the banal machinery of nonprofit administration—and began working through it with a focus that was almost meditative, because if they were watching her screen they'd see someone spending her final hours exactly as she'd spent the thousands before them, and there was a particular defiance in that refusal to perform crisis. An email from Lena finally came through at what her bones told her was around 18:19:00, the subject line just "Maya" and the body a single paragraph that managed to be both raw and careful: "I didn't do this to you, but I understand why you'd think I could have, and I'm sorry that the last real conversation we had was me telling you that not using your Right made you complicit—I was wrong, or at least I was incomplete, and if you survive this because you refused to guess, you'll have proved something I've been too angry to see." Maya read it three times, looking for subtext or manipulation and finding only her sister's voice, exhausted and honest in a way Lena rarely allowed herself to be, and she realized that whether or not her refusal to play the game saved her life, it had already cracked something open between them that years of arguments about their father's unavenged death had only calcified.
She started to type a reply, then stopped, fingers hovering over the keys as she realized that anything she said now would either be a goodbye or a promise she might not be able to keep, and both felt like concessions to the countdown she was trying to pretend didn't exist. Instead she starred the email, a tiny gesture that felt enormous, and let it sit unanswered in her inbox like a held breath—Lena would understand, or she wouldn't, but at least the silence between them now was different from the one that had come before, softer somehow, drained of the acid that had eaten through their last conversation. Around her the office had found its rhythm again, the crisis of her presence absorbed into the afternoon's momentum, and she caught herself wondering if this was what the next seventeen hours would look like: her sitting here doing paperwork while the countdown burned invisibly toward zero, everyone pretending normalcy until the moment her heart simply stopped and someone had to call facilities to deal with the aftermath. The thought should have terrified her, but instead it settled with an odd calm, because if she was going to die she'd rather do it like this—unglamorously, un-dramatically, giving them nothing but the paperwork and the draft they'd have to decide whether to bury—and she opened the next grant application with hands that had finally stopped shaking.
The application was from a small victim's advocacy group requesting funding for "Right education workshops" in underserved communities, and Maya found herself reading the proposal with a clinical attention that felt like watching her own past self through glass—all the careful language about "empowerment" and "informed decision-making," the implicit assumption that teaching people to use their kill more strategically was harm reduction rather than harm optimization. She'd approved dozens of these over the years, had written the guidelines they were citing, and now each phrase landed like evidence in a case against her own complicity, the way she'd spent eight years trying to make the machine more humane instead of asking whether a humane machine was even possible. Her cursor hovered over "Approve" and she thought about Tremaine somewhere watching this, waiting to see if she'd keep performing her role right up until the end, and the spite that flared in her chest was sharp enough to taste as she clicked "Deny" instead and typed into the comments field: "Funding suspended pending review of whether teaching people to kill more effectively serves any mission worth funding." She hit submit before she could second-guess it, aware that she'd just torched a relationship with a grantee who'd probably done nothing wrong except exist inside the same rotted framework, but if she had seventeen hours left she was done pretending any of this could be reformed from within.
The denial processed with a soft ping, and she watched the application vanish into the Institute's review queue where it would sit, she imagined, until someone with more survival instinct reversed her decision and scrubbed her comment from the record—but for now, for this moment, it existed as a small flare of honesty in a system built on euphemism, and that felt like enough. She moved to the next application, then the next, her criteria shifting with each one from *does this advance our mission* to *does this mission deserve to exist*, and by the fourth denial she could feel the attention on her sharpening again, someone in administration or finance surely noticing the pattern, flagging her activity as erratic, possibly sending another email to Calvert about the liability of letting her stay. Let them, she thought, fingers steady on the keys as she typed another rejection—this one for a program teaching teenagers "strategic restraint," as if the problem with giving children the right to kill was that they weren't doing it thoughtfully enough—and she felt something that had been clenched tight in her chest for eight years finally loosen, the exhaustion of trying to make poison nutritious replaced by the cold clarity of someone who'd stopped pretending the meal was anything but toxic.
At 18:11:27 by her best guess—she'd started tracking it in her head like a pulse, the numbers etched into her consciousness—her screen flickered and refreshed without her touching anything, and when it stabilized three of her denials had vanished from the queue, replaced by a system message in friendly sans-serif: "Administrative override applied - approvals restored by Director Calvert per operational continuity protocols." The casual efficiency of it made her vision blur at the edges, not with tears but with rage so pure it felt like light, because of course they wouldn't let her even burn her own small corner on the way out, wouldn't permit the mess of her final hours to complicate their quarterly reports or donor relationships, and she understood with a clarity that felt like nausea that this was what they'd always done—smoothed over the disruptions, restored the approvals, made sure the machine kept humming no matter who it chewed through. She took a screenshot before they could scrub that too, added it to her growing folder of evidence, and opened a new email to Calvert with a subject line that read "Re: Operational Continuity" and a body consisting of six words: "You can't even let me quit."
She sent it before the impulse could curdle into caution, and in the thirty seconds before his reply arrived she watched her hands tremble against the keyboard, adrenaline finally catching up to the bravado, her body understanding what her mind had been holding at bay: that she'd just escalated from documentation to direct confrontation, had named the thing they were all pretending wasn't happening, and whatever thin tolerance had kept her at this desk until five o'clock was now almost certainly evaporating in real time. Calvert's response populated her screen with the speed of someone who'd been waiting for her to crack: "Maya, I understand you're processing a traumatic situation, but undermining active grants based on personal crisis isn't resignation—it's sabotage, and I can't allow it to continue regardless of your circumstances." The word *circumstances* sat there like a slap, so carefully chosen to avoid saying *your impending death*, and she felt something in her snap cleanly, the same way a bone breaks when the pressure finally exceeds what it was built to hold—not dramatically, just a quiet fracture that changed the architecture of everything.
She replied with just the timestamp—18:09:44, typed manually since her phone was still dark in her pocket—and watched the message sit there in the thread like a ticking clock made visible, a reminder that his "operational continuity" had less than eighteen hours left to smooth over before her particular disruption resolved itself permanently. The cursor blinked in the empty composition field, waiting for her to add context or explanation, but she left it bare, let the numbers speak for themselves, and felt a grim satisfaction when the "read" receipt appeared almost instantly followed by nothing, no response, just Calvert's presence going silent in a way that told her he'd finally understood that she wasn't going to spend her last day pretending the countdown didn't exist, that every email and denial and screenshot from here on out would be timestamped evidence of exactly how the Institute treated someone it had already written off as dead.
She stood abruptly, the motion sharp enough to send her chair rolling backward into the cubicle wall with a muted thud, and walked toward the break room without explanation or permission, needing movement, needing to be somewhere the cameras had to track her deliberately instead of capturing her as ambient surveillance. The hallway stretched longer than usual, each step measured against the countdown she could feel in her pulse—18:07:15, :14, :13—and when she pushed through the break room door she found it mercifully empty except for the coffee maker's tired gurgle and the hum of the vending machine offering its grid of preserved calories to people who still had time to worry about lunch. She poured herself water she didn't want from the cooler, watching it spiral into the paper cone, and caught her reflection fractured across the steel surface of the refrigerator: hollowed out, furious, still here, and she thought with a clarity that felt like vertigo that if Tremaine or Calvert or whoever was watching her feed right now expected her to collapse into terror or bargaining, they were going to be disappointed, because the only thing she had left to give them was this—her refusal to perform the ending they'd scripted, played out one mundane, deliberate action at a time.
She crushed the paper cone in her fist, water seeping between her fingers, and turned to face the break room camera mounted in its discreet corner bracket—she'd helped write the policy justifying its placement, some memo about "workplace safety" that everyone understood meant surveillance—and for a long moment she just stared directly into its lens, letting whoever was on the other end see her seeing them, refusing to let the watching be invisible anymore. The red recording light blinked its steady rhythm, indifferent as a heartbeat, and she wondered if Tremaine was at his desk right now, coffee going cold beside his monitor as he watched her stand here doing nothing, saying nothing, just existing in frame like a problem that wouldn't resolve itself on schedule, and the thought made her smile—not warmly, not sanely, but with the specific satisfaction of someone who'd realized that the most radical thing she could do in her last seventeen hours wasn't to name her killer or destroy evidence or even run, but simply to take up space in their field of vision until the machine had to acknowledge that she'd never stopped being a person, even when they'd reduced her to a data point with an expiration stamp.
She let the smile fade and dropped the crushed cone into the recycling bin with exaggerated care, each movement deliberate and slow, drawing out the mundane into something almost ceremonial, because if they were going to watch her last hours they'd have to sit through every tedious second of her refusing to give them anything useful. The bin's lid swung shut with a hollow slap and she stood there, hands braced on the counter, staring at the bulletin board's collage of HR announcements about wellness initiatives and upcoming potlucks—events scheduled weeks into a future she wouldn't see—and felt a sudden, vicious curiosity about what they'd do with her desk after, whether they'd send the half-dead succulent to some supply closet or if Calvert would put it in his office as a reminder that even the most inconvenient variables eventually resolved themselves. She pulled out her phone, powered it on for the first time in an hour, and wasn't surprised to find the countdown had adjusted itself during the darkness—18:03:51, :50, :49—still ticking with the same relentless precision, still offering her the Guess field she'd decided hours ago would stay empty, and as the screen's glow washed her face in that familiar government blue, she opened her camera and took a single photograph of her own reflection in the darkened microwave door: tired, alive, unguessing, a portrait for whatever archive came after.
She sent the photo to her personal email with no subject line, just the raw image file and the timestamp it generated automatically, then watched it sync to a server somewhere beyond the Institute's reach—or at least she hoped beyond their reach, though she was learning that hope and certainty had become very different things in the last fourteen hours. The break room felt smaller suddenly, the walls pressing in with that specific claustrophobia of knowing she was still performing for an audience she couldn't confront directly, and she pocketed the phone and pushed back out into the hallway, passing a cluster of junior staffers who went silent as she approached, their conversation dying mid-sentence in that way that told her she'd become the thing people talked about in her absence, a ghost already even while her heart kept beating. Jonah was waiting near her cubicle when she returned, holding two cups of the terrible vending machine coffee like an offering or an apology, and when he held one out to her she took it just to have something to do with her hands, the heat of it seeping through the thin plastic in a way that felt almost grounding, almost real, a small proof that her nerve endings still worked even if the system had already decided they'd be offline by morning.
She sipped the coffee and it was exactly as bad as she remembered—burnt and thin, with that chemical aftertaste that came from sitting too long in the machine—but she drank it anyway because Jonah was watching her with an expression that was trying very hard not to be pity, and she needed him to see that she could still perform the small rituals of normalcy even while the countdown in her pocket pressed toward eighteen hours flat. "They're talking about sending you home," he said quietly, glancing past her toward Calvert's office where she could see shapes moving behind the frosted glass, multiple figures now instead of just one, and she understood that her small rebellions had escalated from nuisance to crisis somewhere in the last hour, that a meeting was happening about her right now in a room she wasn't invited to, people with titles and authority deciding how to manage the liability of a woman who'd refused to die conveniently off-camera. She set the coffee down on her desk, half-finished, and met his eyes with a steadiness that cost her more than she wanted to admit: "Let them try," she said, aware that forcing them to physically remove her would create exactly the kind of scene that couldn't be smoothed over with administrative overrides, the kind that would require incident reports and maybe even security footage that couldn't be quietly buried, and in the arithmetic of her dwindling hours, making herself that expensive to erase felt like the only currency she had left to spend.
Jonah's face did something complicated—a wince, a nod, a flicker of what might have been respect or might have been fear that he was standing too close to someone who'd decided to detonate—and he opened his mouth to say something just as Calvert's door swung open and two people she'd never seen before emerged, both in the kind of unremarkable business casual that screamed corporate security or HR enforcers, their lanyards marked with clearance levels higher than hers. They moved toward her with the practiced efficiency of people who'd done this before, and she felt her body make the calculation before her mind caught up: she could sit down, force them to physically lift her from the chair, turn this into a spectacle that every phone camera on the floor would be morally obligated to pretend not to record—or she could stand, meet them halfway, deny them the satisfaction of touching her but also deny herself the scene that might actually pierce the Institute's carefully maintained veneer of dignified operations. Her hand found the edge of her desk, steadying herself as the countdown she couldn't see anymore burned behind her sternum—17:58:33, :32, :31—and in the half-second before they reached her, before whatever came next began, she made herself memorize the weight of this moment: Jonah beside her with his useless coffee, Calvert visible through the glass wearing an expression she'd never seen before that looked almost like genuine regret, and her own pulse loud in her ears like a clock that hadn't stopped yet, hadn't stopped yet, was still keeping time.
The taller of the two—a woman with steel-gray hair and the kind of neutral expression that came from years of delivering bad news professionally—stopped just outside the boundary of Maya's cubicle and said, "Ms. Ortiz, we need you to come with us," her voice calibrated to sound like a request despite being phrased as a directive, and Maya felt the entire floor's attention contract to this single point, every pretense of work abandoned as colleagues swiveled in their chairs or froze mid-step to watch what she'd do. She didn't move, didn't sit, just stood there with her hand still braced on the desk and said, loud enough to carry, "On whose authority, and to where, and for what specific policy violation—because I'd like that documented before I go anywhere," watching the woman's jaw tighten fractionally as she realized Maya wasn't going to make this easy, that every word from here on out was going into the record she'd been building all afternoon. The second escort, younger and visibly uncomfortable, glanced back toward Calvert's office as if hoping for guidance, and in that hesitation Maya saw the crack she needed: they had procedure, they had authority, but they didn't have a clean script for someone who insisted on reading her lines out loud.
The gray-haired woman's hand moved to the tablet she'd been holding against her hip, fingers swiping with the practiced motion of someone pulling up a pre-written justification, and Maya watched her eyes scan the text before she spoke again: "You're being placed on immediate administrative leave under Section 4.7 of the employee handbook—erratic behavior posing potential risk to institutional operations—and we're authorized to escort you from the premises for the safety of all staff." The words were so perfectly bureaucratic they could have been generated by the same algorithm that sent death notifications, and Maya felt a laugh rise in her throat that came out as something harder, sharper, as she said, "So to be clear, the risk I pose is being visibly dying on your floor instead of quietly at home, and you're calling that erratic," letting the accusation hang in the air while around them she heard at least two people inhale sharply, the kind of breath that meant someone was either about to intervene or document this, and she pulled out her phone one more time—17:56:09, :08—and held it up so the countdown was visible to everyone watching, a blue-lit proof that the clock they were all pretending not to see was still running, still real, still counting down her last seventeen hours in a building that had decided she was already gone.
The woman's expression didn't change, but something flickered behind her eyes—recognition, maybe, or discomfort at having the subtext made text—and she lowered the tablet slightly, recalibrating. "Ms. Ortiz, we're not here to debate policy," she said, her voice softening in a way that was somehow worse than the bureaucratic flatness, "we're here because your colleagues have expressed concern for your wellbeing, and remaining in the office under these circumstances serves no productive purpose for you or the team." It was a masterful pivot, Maya had to admit—reframing the removal as care rather than containment, making her the problem for refusing their kindness—but she'd spent eight years watching the Institute dress up coercion as compassion, and she wasn't about to let them rebrand her forced exit as a wellness intervention. "Then let my colleagues express that concern to my face," she said, sweeping her gaze across the floor where dozens of eyes immediately dropped to screens or papers, "because from where I'm standing, the only people who seem worried about my wellbeing are the ones who need me gone before I finish documenting exactly how this place operates when someone stops being useful," and she watched the younger escort's face flush as the accusation landed, his hand twitching toward his own phone like he was wondering whether he should be recording this too, whether his presence here might require the same kind of insurance she'd been building all afternoon.
The gray-haired woman's tablet chimed softly, an incoming message that made her glance down with the reflex of someone whose real orders came from elsewhere, and Maya saw her read whatever had just arrived, saw her mouth thin into a harder line before she looked up and said, with a finality that erased the pretense of negotiation, "You have two minutes to collect your personal belongings, Ms. Ortiz, and then you're leaving this building—voluntarily or otherwise." The phrasing hung there like a blade, the threat of physical removal finally made explicit, and Maya felt the floor's collective tension spike as people began to understand that this wasn't theater anymore, that the Institute was willing to have her dragged out if necessary, and she made a split-second calculation: she could force their hand, make them carry her past the security cameras and the glass doors in a scene ugly enough that no amount of administrative language could sanitize it—or she could take her two minutes, gather the evidence she'd spent the afternoon creating, and walk out on her own terms with her documentation intact and her dignity still hers to spend however she chose in the seventeen hours and fifty-four minutes she had left.
She turned away from the escorts without answering, the silence itself a choice, and began opening her desk drawers with movements that were deliberately, excruciatingly slow—not defiance exactly, but a refusal to let them dictate even the pace of her erasure. The top drawer held the usual debris of years: pens that had gone dry, a tangle of charging cables, the laminated badge from a conference on restorative justice she'd spoken at three years ago when she'd still believed the language of reform meant something, and she left all of it, taking only the thumb drive she kept wedged behind a box of paper clips, the one that held backups of every draft and email and screenshot she'd created today, a redundancy for her redundancy because she'd learned in the last eighteen hours that the only thing more dangerous than documentation was assuming one copy would be enough. Behind her she could feel the escorts' impatience thickening the air, could sense Jonah hovering just outside her cubicle's boundary like he wanted to help but didn't know how, and when she slid the drive into her pocket next to her phone—17:53:21, :20, the countdown still burning—she felt the small, solid weight of it press against her hip like a promise she was making to a future she might not see, that someone, somewhere would find what she'd left behind and understand exactly what the machine looked like from inside its own digestive system.
She closed the drawer and opened the one below it, where the framed photo of her and Lena at the courthouse still sat face-up, their younger selves frozen mid-laugh in a moment before grief had calcified into doctrine, and her hand hovered over it for a long beat while she decided whether taking it meant sentimentality or evidence—proof that she'd once believed standing outside the system and speaking against it was enough, that proximity to power could be leveraged into change rather than just another form of complicity. The gray-haired woman cleared her throat, a pointed sound that meant the two minutes were becoming negotiable in the wrong direction, and Maya left the photo where it was, a small monument to the person she'd been when she'd thought working within the Institute made her part of the solution, and pulled out instead the stack of printed policy drafts she'd authored over the years, every compromise and carefully worded recommendation now reading like a confession she wanted someone to find after she was gone, proof that she'd seen what was wrong and had spent eight years trying to fix it with language that only made the machine run smoother.
She tucked the policy drafts under her arm—pages thick enough to feel like a weapon, light enough to carry out without the escorts having grounds to stop her—and straightened to find Calvert had emerged from his office, standing at a careful distance with his hands in his pockets and an expression that was trying for solemn but landing closer to relieved, like a man watching a problem solve itself on schedule. Their eyes met across the open plan and she saw him start to say something, maybe an apology or a justification or just her name shaped into one last attempt at managerial warmth, but she cut him off with a shake of her head that said *don't*, that said *we both know what this is*, and watched his mouth close around whatever lie he'd been preparing to offer as comfort or cover. The moment stretched thin between them, all eight years of her employment compressing into this single point of understanding that he had always been exactly what the Institute needed him to be—a man who could look someone in the eye seventeen hours before they died and call it administrative leave, who could override their final acts of resistance and file it under operational continuity—and as she turned toward the elevators with the escorts falling into step behind her like pallbearers, she felt the building itself exhale in relief that the disruption was finally, mercifully being contained.
The elevator doors opened with a soft chime that sounded obscenely cheerful, and Maya stepped inside with the escorts flanking her like she might bolt, though where they thought she'd run to with seventeen hours and fifty-one minutes left she couldn't imagine—maybe that was the point, that the system had taught everyone to treat the marked as flight risks even when there was nowhere left to flee to. The descent was silent except for the mechanical hum and her own breathing, which sounded too loud in the small space, and she watched the floor numbers tick downward—7, 6, 5—each one a small countdown parallel to the larger one still burning in her pocket, and found herself thinking about all the people who'd ridden this same elevator on their own last days, whether any of them had also refused to guess, whether the Institute kept statistics on that kind of defiance or if it fell outside the metrics they cared to track. When the doors opened onto the lobby, she saw Jonah already there, having taken the stairs or maybe just moved faster than bureaucracy, his badge still crooked on his lanyard and his expression set in a way that told her he'd made some decision in the minute she'd been descending, and as the gray-haired woman gestured toward the exit with practiced efficiency, Maya caught his eye and saw him mouth two words—*not alone*—which landed somewhere between promise and threat, though whether to her or to whoever was watching, she couldn't tell.
She walked through the lobby's expanse of polished marble and corporate aspiration—the wall of donor plaques, the mission statement etched in steel, the security turnstiles that had admitted her every weekday for eight years now standing open like a mouth waiting to expel her—and felt Jonah fall into step beside her despite the escorts' presence, his defiance of their implicit command to stay back so casual it almost looked accidental. The gray-haired woman made a small noise of protest, but Maya was already pushing through the glass doors into the late afternoon glare, the autumn air hitting her face with a coldness that felt like waking up, and she heard Jonah behind her saying something to the escorts about public sidewalks and off-duty hours, his voice carrying that particular edge of someone who'd decided which side of the line he was standing on and didn't care anymore who saw him choose it. The street outside was indifferent to her exit—pedestrians streaming past, a bus hissing to a stop, someone's radio bleeding tinny music into the exhaust-thick air—and Maya stood there on the Institute's granite steps with her stack of policy drafts pressed against her ribs and the thumb drive burning in her pocket like a coal, thinking that if she had seventeen hours and forty-nine minutes left to be alive, she wasn't going to spend them anywhere near the building that had just made clear she'd only ever been useful to them as long as she stayed quietly dying off-camera.
Jonah's hand landed on her shoulder, solid and real, and she turned to find him already shrugging out of his security blazer like he was shedding a uniform he'd never wanted to wear, his face set with a recklessness she'd only seen before when he was three drinks deep and arguing about hypotheticals that had just become devastatingly concrete. "Where are we going?" he asked, not *are you okay* or *what's your plan*, just the assumption that the next seventeen hours and forty-eight minutes were plural, that he'd appointed himself witness or accomplice or whatever role she needed him to fill, and Maya felt something crack in her chest that wasn't quite gratitude but was close enough to make her voice rough when she answered, "Somewhere they can't smooth over what happens next," pulling out her phone to check not the countdown—17:48:33, :32, always there, always ticking—but the address she'd never thought she'd actually use, the one attached to the name R. Tremaine in the Institute's directory, because if the machine wanted her last hours documented, she'd give them documentation, she'd show up on the doorstep of the person who'd ordered her and make them look at what they'd done while it was still breathing.
Jonah went very still beside her, his hand sliding off her shoulder as he leaned in to see the address on her screen, and when he straightened his face had gone pale in a way that made her wonder what he knew about Tremaine that she didn't, what stories circulated in the security office about the people whose names never appeared on org charts but whose access logs told a different truth. "Maya, that's—" he started, then stopped, seeming to recalibrate what argument might actually land with someone who had seventeen hours and forty-seven minutes left and had already decided that quiet compliance was a luxury she could no longer afford. "That's not going to change anything," he finished, but his voice had lost its conviction halfway through, and she watched him glance back at the Institute's glass facade where the escorts were still visible in the lobby, phones out, undoubtedly reporting her destination the moment she'd pulled it up on a device they'd been monitoring all along, and she realized with a cold clarity that showing Tremaine the address had just turned her final act from private confrontation into something the machine would have to respond to, that somewhere in that building or another just like it, people were already running scenarios about what happened when the subject of a kill order showed up at the orderer's door while the countdown was still live.
She started walking before Jonah could talk her out of it, her feet finding the rhythm of someone who'd already committed to a trajectory that couldn't be argued with, only followed or abandoned, and after three steps she heard him swear under his breath and catch up, his presence at her elbow both comfort and liability because now whatever happened next would implicate him too, would drag him into the record she was building of exactly how far the system's architects would go to protect their invisibility. The address was across town, a forty-minute subway ride that would eat precious minutes off her countdown, and as they descended into the station's fluorescent throat she felt her phone buzz once, twice, three times in quick succession—notifications she didn't need to check to know were warnings, escalations, someone in Strategic Initiatives or Legal or whatever shadow department managed problems like her realizing that she'd just turned her own execution into a very public test of whether the machine's designers were willing to let themselves be seen. She swiped her card through the turnstile with hands that had steadied into something past fear, past anger, into a cold focus that felt like the only honest thing she'd felt in years, and as the train pulled in with its hydraulic scream, she thought that if Tremaine or whoever had typed her name into that field sixteen hours ago had wanted her to die quietly, they'd made a fundamental miscalculation about what kind of person spends eight years trying to reform a system from within—because that kind of person doesn't stop documenting just because the camera finally turns on them.
The subway car was half-empty, the afternoon lull between lunch rush and evening commute, and Maya chose a seat facing the direction of travel as if orientation mattered, as if she could steer herself toward confrontation through sheer forward momentum. Jonah dropped into the seat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched when the train lurched into motion, and for a long moment neither of them spoke, just watched the tunnel walls blur past in rhythmic darkness punctuated by station lights that came and went like breaths. Her phone sat dark in her lap now, the buzzing finally stopped, and she imagined the flurry of messages piling up unread—Calvert's careful damage control, maybe Lena calling again, certainly someone from Legal crafting language about trespassing or harassment that would give them grounds to intercept her before she reached Tremaine's door—but she'd already decided that reading their panic would only dilute her own clarity, would invite doubt into the clean simplicity of what she was about to do. "Seventeen hours and forty-three minutes," Jonah said quietly, not looking at his own phone but clearly tracking the countdown in his head the way she was, and she nodded once, thinking that every minute on this train was a minute she was choosing to spend in motion rather than paralysis, in confrontation rather than waiting, and that if the machine wanted to stop her it would have to do it visibly, messily, in front of witnesses who hadn't yet learned to look away.
The train shuddered through a curve and Maya's stack of policy drafts slipped from her lap, pages scattering across the gritty floor in a spread of her own careful language—"harm reduction framework," "stakeholder engagement," "responsible utilization"—and as she knelt to gather them she saw the words with the clarity of someone reading her own autopsy report, every euphemism suddenly transparent as the mechanism it had been designed to obscure. A woman across the aisle leaned down to help, retrieving a page that had slid near her feet, and when their eyes met Maya saw the flicker of recognition, that specific look of someone who'd clocked the government-blue glow bleeding through her pocket and understood exactly what it meant, and the woman's hand trembled slightly as she passed back the paper, her voice barely a whisper: "I hope you guess right," the platitude so automatic and so obscene that Maya almost laughed, because the woman had no idea that the most radical thing she could do with her last seventeen hours and forty-one minutes was refuse to guess at all, to let the machine choke on its own unanswered question while she went looking for the person who'd thought her life was worth spending their one irreversible choice on.
She gathered the pages back into an uneven stack, creasing one corner where her thumb pressed too hard, and thanked the woman with a nod that felt like closing a door on the world of people who still believed the system's logic made sense, who thought guessing right was the point rather than the trap. The train pulled into the next station and the woman got off quickly, glancing back once with an expression caught between pity and relief that it wasn't her phone glowing blue, wasn't her countdown, wasn't her problem to solve, and Maya watched her disappear into the platform crowd thinking that this was what the Right had perfected: turning everyone into bystanders to each other's executions, teaching them to offer sympathy in the same breath they stepped away from the blast radius. Jonah's hand found hers in the space between their seats, his grip brief and awkward and utterly without expectation of reciprocation, just the simple fact of contact from someone who'd chosen not to step away, and as the doors slid shut and the train lurched forward again she felt the weight of the thumb drive in her pocket shift against her hip, a small reminder that whatever happened in the next seventeen hours and thirty-nine minutes, she'd already made sure some version of the truth would outlive the machine's attempt to smooth her into a statistic.
The address resolved itself from abstraction into geography as the train climbed aboveground into a neighborhood she'd only ever seen in donor files—brownstones with restored cornices, trees still clinging to their last bronze leaves, the kind of quiet wealth that didn't advertise itself because it didn't need to—and Maya felt her pulse kick up as Jonah pulled out his phone and muttered, "Two more stops," his voice tight with the understanding that they were crossing from documentation into action, from building a record to forcing someone to answer for it. She pressed her forehead against the cool window and watched the streets slide past, each block bringing her closer to a confrontation she hadn't fully planned beyond the raw fact of showing up, of making Tremaine see her face while her heart was still beating, and the not-knowing what would happen when she knocked on that door felt less like uncertainty than like the first honest variable she'd encountered all day, something the machine hadn't scripted or anticipated or built a protocol to contain. The train began to slow and she stood before it fully stopped, pages clutched against her chest like armor, and when Jonah rose beside her she saw in his face the same reckless clarity she felt in her own—that seventeen hours and thirty-seven minutes was still enough time to make someone who'd ordered death from behind a screen remember that the people they killed had names, and voices, and the inconvenient habit of refusing to disappear on schedule.
The doors hissed open onto a platform that felt aggressively normal—a teenage couple arguing over directions, a man in paint-spattered coveralls eating a sandwich, a pigeon pecking at the tile with the mechanical focus of something that had never considered its own mortality—and Maya stepped out into it with Jonah a half-step behind, their footfalls echoing in the concrete shell as they climbed toward street level. The autumn light hit differently up here, softer and more golden than the Institute's glass-filtered glare, and she had the surreal thought that this was what the world looked like to people who weren't counting down their last seventeen hours and thirty-five minutes: just an ordinary Thursday afternoon, the sun angling toward evening, someone's wind chimes singing from a fire escape above. She pulled out her phone and opened the map, watching the blue dot that represented her current position pulse two blocks away from the red pin marking Tremaine's address, and felt Jonah lean over her shoulder to study the route, his breath visible in the cooling air as he said, "Last chance to reconsider," not because he wanted her to stop but because he needed to know she'd thought past the moment of knocking, past the satisfaction of confrontation, to what came after when there were still sixteen hours left to fill and nowhere left to run.
She didn't answer him, just started walking toward the red pin with a certainty that had nothing to do with courage and everything to do with the simple arithmetic that standing still wouldn't stop the clock, wouldn't change what was coming, would only mean she'd spent her last hours paralyzed by the weight of decisions she'd already made. The neighborhood closed around them as they walked—neat stoops, window boxes gone dormant for winter, a corner bodega with hand-lettered signs advertising coffee and lottery tickets, the ordinary infrastructure of lives being lived without the government seal burning blue in anyone's pocket—and she felt the disconnect between her internal countdown and the external world's indifference sharpen into something almost hallucinatory, like she was walking through a film set of normalcy while backstage the crew prepared her exit. Jonah kept pace beside her, his hand hovering near his phone like he was ready to call someone or document something or maybe just needed the comfort of a device that connected him to a world where the next seventeen hours and thirty-three minutes weren't predetermined, and when they turned onto Tremaine's block—a tree-lined stretch of identical brownstones distinguished only by their door colors and the varying states of their ironwork—Maya felt her stride falter for just a second before her momentum carried her forward, because somewhere behind one of those pristine facades was the person who'd decided her name was worth their single, irreversible choice, and in less than a minute she'd find out whether they'd be home to answer for it.
The address resolved into a specific brownstone halfway down the block—number 447, its door painted a deep charcoal that looked black in the fading light, brass numbers polished to a shine that spoke of either meticulous care or a cleaning service paid to maintain appearances—and Maya stopped on the sidewalk opposite, her breath catching not from exertion but from the sudden, visceral reality that she was about to cross a threshold the system had never intended her to reach, that somewhere in the calculus of ordering someone's death was the unspoken assumption that the condemned would never show up at your door while their heart was still beating. She watched the windows for movement, for any sign that Tremaine was home or aware or already calling whoever you called when your carefully anonymous kill order developed the inconvenient complication of a face, and beside her Jonah had gone very still, his phone now out and recording, the red dot in the corner of his screen a small act of insurance or evidence or maybe just the instinct of someone who understood that what happened in the next few minutes would need to be documented because the machine would absolutely try to erase it. The street was quiet except for distant traffic and the rustle of leaves, and as Maya stepped off the curb toward the charcoal door, the countdown in her pocket burning toward seventeen hours and thirty-one minutes, she felt the weight of every choice that had led her here compress into the simple, terrifying act of climbing three stone steps and raising her fist to knock.
She knocked three times, sharp and deliberate, the sound echoing in the narrow space between brownstones with a finality that made her stomach clench, and then she waited, every second stretching as her ears strained for footsteps or voices or any indication that someone inside was deciding whether to answer or pretend the building was empty. Beside her, Jonah had angled his phone to capture both the door and her profile, his free hand gripping the iron railing like he needed to anchor himself to something solid, and she could feel the question hanging between them—what if no one's home, what if Tremaine is in some office tower across town watching this on a security feed, what if the confrontation she'd spent her last precious hours engineering dissolved into nothing but her standing on a stranger's stoop while the countdown ticked relentlessly toward zero—but before the doubt could fully crystallize, she heard it: the muffled sound of a lock turning, then another, the mechanical sequence of someone who'd installed more security than the neighborhood required, and the door opened six inches to reveal a slice of a face she'd never seen before but somehow recognized anyway, a woman in her fifties with steel-gray hair pulled back and eyes that went wide with something that looked less like surprise and more like the specific horror of a hypothesis proven catastrophically correct.