The Husk Ward was on the third floor, east wing, past a set of double doors that required a key card and a clipboard sign-in. The clipboard was a deliberate anachronism—something the ward's administrator had insisted on for legal reasons that had more to do with not wanting subpoenas served into an automated system than with any actual preference for paper. Miriam noticed these things. She signed in with her own pen.
St. Mercy's neurological attention ward had existed before ENGAGE, before the cases Miriam was building files on. It had been built for the ordinary casualties of the attention economy: people who'd burned their focus down to nothing through chronic overstimulation, who could no longer read a paragraph without their eyes sliding off the edge of it, who needed somewhere quiet with people who understood what they'd lost. The nurses knew how to set phone notifications to silent. They knew not to ask patients to track a conversation for more than a few minutes. They were accustomed to a certain kind of absence. Walking the corridor, Miriam passed a room where a man in his fifties was relearning the habit of looking at one thing at a time. His occupational therapist held up a red square and waited. He held it for maybe four seconds. The therapist noted something on her clipboard and held up the square again. Progress, apparently, was four seconds. Then Miriam turned into the third room on the left, and progress stopped being a useful concept.
Jaylen Rivers was in a hospital bed with flowers on the windowsill—not from family, she noted. Cards in cellophane envelopes, handwritten, from people who'd watched his content and didn't know how to help so they'd sent these. He couldn't have read them if someone had put one in his hands. His phone sat on the nightstand, face-down, set to silent—the nurses had done that—but she could feel its presence the way you felt a television in another room. Every twenty seconds, the faint buzz of a notification moving through the vibration motor. Through the wall, the same pulse from the next room. Down the hall, another. A rhythm you couldn't quite hear and couldn't quite ignore: the ward's heartbeat, all the attention still arriving for people who could no longer receive it. His thumb was working. The pull-down gesture, same as the penthouse, same as it would probably be tomorrow. She noted it in her notepad and stood in the doorway for thirty seconds, which was thirty seconds longer than most people would have managed.
She found Delia Rivers at the end of the corridor, in the family waiting area, in a plastic chair that had been designed by someone who'd never needed to sit in one for longer than a minute. She was a broad-shouldered woman who'd carried mail bags for twenty-two years and looked it in her hands—the kind of hands that had moved actual objects through the world, physical weight, paper and rubber bands and the heft of something real. She had them folded in her lap when Miriam sat across from her. Not reaching for anything. "You the detective," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Okoye." Miriam offered her badge, the actual card, and Delia took it and looked at it properly before handing it back. Most people spent two seconds on a badge. Delia spent five. She was verifying it.
"When do you people do something?" She wasn't raising her voice. That was the tell—that she'd already burned past the part of anger that came with volume and arrived somewhere colder. "I'm asking because I've been calling his management company for eight months saying something was wrong. Eight months. You know what they said? Creator burnout. Natural cycle. Platform fatigue." She let those words sit between them like evidence. "Now he's here and he can't tell me his own name, so I'm asking again: when do you people do something?"
"Now," Miriam said. Delia looked at her for a moment. Something in her assessment shifted slightly.
"When did you last speak with him?" Miriam asked.
"Two years and four months ago." She had the number ready. She'd been counting. "He called to say he couldn't make Christmas because of a brand trip. I asked him where to, and he couldn't remember. Just knew there was content involved." She looked at her hands. "I said some things. He said some things. That was that."
"What were you arguing about, before it became about the trip?"
The ward's rhythm—buzz, pause, buzz, pause—continued through the wall, and Delia took a moment before she answered. "He used to read," she said. "Actual books. He had a box of them on the porch when he was growing up—not school reading, his own books. He'd read the same ones three or four times, dog-ear the pages, the whole thing." She stopped. Her jaw worked. "You know when he stopped? When the phone told him nobody was watching him read. Once he could see the numbers, once he could see what got attention and what didn't, he stopped doing anything that didn't get attention. Just stopped." She opened her hands briefly, then folded them again. "I couldn't watch it. I tried. But I couldn't tell which version of him I was talking to anymore. He'd answer my question and then check his comments to see how the call was going."
Miriam didn't say anything to that. There wasn't anything to say that would fit. She wrote it down.
"His management company called me when this happened," Delia said. "'Creator wellness crisis.' That's what they called it. Like he was a product with a defective delivery schedule." The contempt in her voice came from clarity, not heat. "Twelve million people said they loved him. Not one of them brought him soup." Miriam wrote that down too. Not for the case file.
She left Delia with her hands in her lap and went back to the precinct, where Chen's office had been rearranged to accommodate a second monitor, department-mandated, tracking the precinct's social media engagement. He'd put it in the corner and never looked at it directly. She gave him credit for that. He checked his phone twice in the six minutes she was there—once when she came in, once in the middle of her Husk Ward summary—and his eye contact ran to about two seconds per exchange. Precinct average. Worse than Tanaka, better than the uniforms from the night before.
"It's yours," he said, sliding a folder across the desk once she'd finished. "Officially, as of this morning." He folded his hands. "What you're not getting is platform cooperation. Legal teams from three of the major ones already contacted the department. They want to be involved in any public communication around the term 'attention theft.' That's their language—involved in."
"Our social media advisor says this is a reputational risk for the influencer community. I'm telling you that so you know the pressure I'm fielding, not because I expect you to care about it." He picked up his phone, put it down. "Here's what I also want you to have. Three people with high follower counts were hospitalized in the past month. Different platforms, different hospitals, different doctors. Similar presentations—attention disorders, unusual presentation, no neurological explanation that satisfied anyone. Nobody connected them because they weren't looking for a pattern." He tapped the folder. "Now somebody is."
She took the folder and stood. He was checking his phone again when she reached the door. "Okoye," he said without looking up. "Work fast." She went to work.
By nine that evening she had Jaylen's content archive open on her laptop—the basic model, no analytics integration, just a browser window—and she was watching from the beginning. The earliest videos were from before he'd hit a hundred thousand followers. He was seventeen or eighteen, sitting on a porch that looked like the same porch in front of half the houses in the country, and he was goofing around with something she stopped trying to track. What she was actually watching was his face. The way his eyes moved when something surprised him. The way he laughed at his own jokes before he'd finished making them, the ease of someone who hadn't yet started measuring whether other people were laughing.
Somewhere around the eighteen-month mark, she caught the turn. He started a sentence, paused, glanced at something off-screen—the comment count, she was almost certain—and started the sentence over with different words. The first take had been his. The second was theirs.
She watched four years of content and stopped the playback. The difference was the kind of thing you saw in photographs—not in what was present but in what was gone. The ease had been trimmed away, segment by segment, each small departure from what performed well quietly removed until what remained was very good at appearing to be Jaylen Rivers, which was not the same as being him. The man on the porch with his dog-eared books had been optimized into the man in the penthouse with the ring lights, and the algorithm had liked it, and the follower count had climbed, and by the end his eyes moved between the camera and the teleprompter with the smooth precision of an instrument reading itself. She put the laptop lid down and picked up the landline.
Marcus answered on the third ring, the way he always did when he was awake and near it. "You eating?" he asked.
"I was going to."
"Real food. Coffee doesn't count, and I know how you get on day two of something." He'd always been able to read the timeline of her from forty miles away and the weight of a receiver.
She gave him the outline. Not everything. She didn't tell him about the thumb, or about what Delia had said about twelve million people and no soup. She kept to the procedural shape: victim, condition, case assignment, three prior hospitalizations nobody had connected. He listened the way he always had, without filling the spaces she left. "This one's different," he said, when she'd finished. She said yes. "You going to be careful with it?"
"I'm always careful."
"You're not, but okay." He said it without edge, which was its own kind of edge. "Call me when you find the thread. I'll be up."
She held the receiver for a moment after she'd set it down. The cord's heft, the weight of something built to carry a voice across actual distance, the silence of a completed call. She got up and put the stovetop on for coffee, spread the new folder across the kitchen table next to the Jaylen Rivers file, and went back to looking.
The call came at 7:14 AM—she'd slept two hours on the couch with a folder on her chest and was awake before the second ring. Zara Beaumont. Lifestyle influencer. Five million followers across three platforms. Found by her assistant at 6:50 that morning in the content studio—a converted room in her apartment, ring lights and a motorized camera track, the full setup. The lights were still running when the assistant arrived. The auto-posting schedule had continued through the night, sending sponsored content to her audience on a timer. She was sitting in the studio chair with her hands raised at shoulder height, fingers framing a shot of nothing, composing content that would never exist. Different platform. Same emptiness. Miriam had her coat on before the caller finished giving her the address.