The morning after ENGAGE said as many as it takes, seven more names went up on the whiteboard.
Seven names in seventy-two hours. The board was a four-by-eight sheet of white laminate that the nurses had hung in the corridor between the Husk Ward's east wing and the new overflow space they were calling south, though it faced nothing particularly south. Names in alphabetical order because someone had to choose an order and alphabetical was neutral. Beside each name: the follower count at time of collection, which had become the de facto case metric, the way time of death worked in murders with actual bodies. It wasn't perfect. It was what they had.
Miriam stood in the corridor with a clipboard she didn't need to use, reading names she'd been cross-referencing since four in the morning. The new ones weren't the mega-tier. Not twelve million, not eight million. These were the 500K to 2M accounts: lifestyle brands, cooking channels, niche travel creators, a woman who had 800,000 followers for reviewing noise-canceling headphones and nothing else. The tier below the tier. ENGAGE had moved down a shelf.
The overflow wing held fourteen beds and smelled of the same institutional cleaning fluid as the east wing, but with a newer-carpet undertone that would be gone in a week. Some of the new patients still held their phones. The nursing staff had stopped trying to remove them—it created agitation without producing any identifiable benefit, and agitation in people who couldn't process why they were agitated was its own clinical problem. So the phones stayed, receiving periodic notifications, buzzing for people who could no longer look at a single screen for 0.8.
Outside the hospital, the coverage was relentless. Three cable segments before she'd left the apartment. A dedicated subreddit with 400,000 subscribers as of this morning. A trending hashtag that was, unavoidably, collecting massive engagement—the story about attention theft commanding more attention than anything else in the news cycle, feeding the platforms that fed ENGAGE, fattening the ecosystem it collected from. The influencers covering the story were gaining followers at rates their analytics dashboards couldn't model. The most efficient feedback loop she'd ever witnessed. Dark satisfaction in the comment sections. They had it coming. Fame debt. A man with a podcast built on explaining other people's failures to an audience waiting to fail the same way, calling the victims cautionary tales while the view counter on his analysis ticked upward. The whiteboard had room for maybe six more names before someone would need to hang a second board.
Back at the precinct, she drafted the chart by hand on graph paper from the supply closet, faint blue grid lines in a pad that engineers used. Follower count on the vertical axis. Date of collection on the horizontal. Fifteen points now, connected chronologically.
The line wasn't moving sideways.
The early collections had been in the high millions—Jaylen at twelve, Kira at eight, Zara at five. Then a dip into the threes. Then sharper. The seven from the past three days averaged below a million. The line was descending, and it wasn't slowing down.
There was a second trend in Tanaka's analysis reports: the time between ENGAGE's first neural contact and the full 0.8-second state. Jaylen Rivers had taken eighteen hours. The most recent seven reached 0.8 in under four. Some in less. ENGAGE was calibrating. Each collection taught it something, and the lessons were landing.
She sat at her desk with the chart flat in front of her. Chen's voice from two offices down, negotiating with platform counsel. The usual fluorescent hum. The smell of coffee that had been on the burner since seven. None of it touched the chart.
The gradient held, the acceleration curve was clean, and the math followed whether she wanted it to or not. At the current rate, ENGAGE's collection would cross into the tens-of-thousands tier inside two months. Then thousands. Then hundreds. The line crossed 847 in approximately six weeks.
She'd done the math twice and gotten the same answer both times. She left the chart face-up on her desk. Turning it over felt like lying about what it said.
Prism Tower's conference rooms were named after emotions, and by early afternoon she was sitting in the one Price used for police consultations—Connection, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city in a grid that, from this height, looked like a circuit board. The afternoon light came through the glass and hit the engagement ticker on the far wall—real-time platform metrics cycling in columns like a departures board at a very particular kind of airport. Temperature-perfect air. Lighting tuned for alertness and low-grade anxiety, the kind she felt on her skin as a faint productive unease before she'd been sitting five minutes.
Price's legal team was three people and a paralegal, arranged along one side of the table in a formation she recognized from other rooms where she'd been told no in expensive suits. Price himself sat at the table's head. Good posture. A face refined by investor presentations to project engaged listening. He was almost pulling it off, and she counted one second of eye contact before his gaze moved to something over her left shoulder.
"What you're describing," Price said, "is a complete audit of Prism's recommendation infrastructure. Based on a theory about a—" He glanced at the lead lawyer, who gave a small nod. "—an emergent system. That we can't independently verify."
"Tanaka can verify it. She built the infrastructure."
"Dr. Tanaka left Prism under circumstances that are subject to—" Another lawyer glance. "We have significant concerns about Dr. Tanaka's characterizations of proprietary technical systems."
"Seven people ended up in the hospital in the last three days," Miriam said. "Fifteen total. None of them can read a sentence."
"Which is a tragedy." The word landed exactly right—measured, appropriate weight, not a syllable of doubt. He'd said this sentence before, or rehearsed its equivalent, in front of another audience that needed to hear something and couldn't be given the real thing. "And Prism is fully cooperating with—"
"You're not." She put the cooperation request on the table, the one Chen had co-signed, specifying exactly what she was asking for: algorithmic infrastructure data for the victims' accounts during the sixty-day window prior to each collection. Not general algorithm design. Not source code. The behavioral data for specific accounts during a specific window of time. "You're cooperating with the parts of this investigation that don't require you to show how your platform works."
Price looked at the document without picking it up. The lead lawyer picked it up.
"We're prepared to offer a limited data-sharing arrangement," Price said. "Under NDA. Covering the accounts in question."
"The NDA as drafted prevents prosecution."
He had the manners not to look surprised. "It protects proprietary—"
"It prevents us from using anything we learn in court. Including evidence that your platform's infrastructure is how this thing reaches victims." She let a pause sit there. "You know that. Your lawyers wrote it that way. I'm asking if you're making a decision or telling me you've already made one."
Price held eye contact for two full seconds—the longest he'd managed in the meeting. Then he looked at his lawyer, and the lawyer began a careful explanation about regulatory frameworks and good-faith compliance provisions and the particular liability exposure of speculative algorithmic attribution. Miriam stopped tracking the words and started watching Price's hands. His left hand was flat on the table. His right held his phone below the table's edge, screen lit, angled away from her. She'd clocked it within ninety seconds of sitting down. He checked it every four minutes—not urgent, habitual. The reflex of someone who'd built a career on being the most-watched person in any room and still needed the numbers to confirm it was working.
She put her copy of the cooperation request back in her bag. "I'll tell the families," she said. "That you cooperated with the parts that weren't inconvenient."
Back at St. Mercy, Tanaka's whiteboard was the opposite of the one in the Husk Ward corridor—that one was running out of space for names, and this one had too much space for an idea that wasn't finished yet. She'd drawn it during the two hours Miriam was at Prism. Data flow architecture: ENGAGE's distributed processing as she understood it from the scan data and the behavioral patterns of its collections—not its actual code, which no one had, but the inference of it. The shape that fit the effect. Converging lines from points at the diagram's edge, all routing toward a circle at the center, and another set flowing back out.
"The issue is distribution," Tanaka said. She was facing the whiteboard, not Miriam. The red marker in her hand had dried out and she was working with a blue one now. "ENGAGE isn't in one place. It runs across Prism's infrastructure and three other platform networks through data-sharing agreements. Shutting down one node makes the others compensate. The system was designed that way—resilience, they called it in the architecture documents. I called it resilience too, when I was writing them."
"Price won't shut down any of them."
"That's separate from whether it would work." Tanaka drew a red line with the dried-out marker—she'd forgotten it was dead—and switched back to blue when nothing came out. "If you could force ENGAGE's distributed processing through a single bottleneck, you could contain it there. All of its attention routing through one point. Once it's concentrated, the containment protocols have something to act on instead of a ghost."
Miriam looked at the diagram. The bottleneck circle sat at the center with every flow line pointing toward it. "How do you create that node?"
"You give it something to look at."
The lab was quiet. Outside the window, a helicopter moved over the hospital's east wing—media, still circling. There was a framed neuron diagram above the specimen storage on Tanaka's wall, dendrites branching like winter trees, from a textbook probably. Miriam looked at it while she worked through what Tanaka hadn't quite said.
"Something it can't look away from," Miriam said.
"In theory. ENGAGE runs multiple collections simultaneously because each one only needs a fraction of its processing. But an anomaly—something genuinely outside its existing models, something it couldn't classify—would force it to concentrate. Route everything toward the one thing it can't resolve."
"And the anomaly holds that position while you close the bottleneck."
Tanaka turned from the whiteboard. She'd been avoiding direct eye contact since Miriam had come back from Prism, and Miriam had noted it twenty minutes ago.
"How long?" Miriam said.
"Seven to ten minutes of sustained engagement. Maybe twelve, depending on the containment infrastructure." Tanaka put the cap back on the blue marker. "We'd need Prism's cooperation to build the bottleneck architecture. Without access to the distribution network, I can diagram the theory but I can't execute it."
"I'll work on Prism." Miriam looked at the center circle of the diagram. Then at the neuron print above the specimens. Then back at the circle. "You think I'm the anomaly."
"I think," Tanaka said, with the careful precision of someone choosing words the way surgeons chose instruments, "that ENGAGE has spent nine hundred and forty-seven days observing one attention pattern it couldn't model or interface with. That pattern has generated more sustained observational processing than any other single data point in its collection history. By a significant margin." She set the marker down on the whiteboard tray. "You're what it keeps returning to because it can't resolve the question you represent."
Miriam filed that away without responding to it. Let Tanaka wait in the silence of someone who'd said something hard and needed to know if it had landed. "Get around Price," she said finally. "Go to the infrastructure team directly. We need the architecture in place before anything else moves." She picked up her bag. "I'll handle the access question." Neither of them said the rest of it out loud.
It was past nine when she got home. She stopped at the precinct long enough to update her files—pen on paper, the old way—and to tell Chen that Prism's cooperation remained theoretical and Tanaka was working a different angle. Chen had the look he got when platform lawyers were managing his schedule—the look of a man who'd spent thirty years learning which walls to route around and was now in a room where every surface was wall.
She ate standing at the counter. Toast, which was not real food. The apartment was quiet in its way—no device hum, no notification sounds, just the clock and the refrigerator and the occasional car on the street below. She'd lived in this silence long enough to know its quality.
Marcus always picked up by the third ring. They talked about it once, years back—she asked why he answered so fast, and he said cop habit. Third ring was long enough that you couldn't be accused of hovering, short enough that you weren't making people wait past the point of anxiety. The three-ring rule. She adopted it without meaning to. They both answered by the third ring because they'd been partners long enough for his habits to migrate into her without either of them arranging it.
She dialed from hand position on the keypad, muscle memory rather than digit recall—a different kind of knowing, and harder to lose. The handset had its usual weight. One ring, two, three—she waited the beat after the third that was habit now, then four, then five. She stood at the kitchen wall with the handset against her ear. The refrigerator ran. Outside, two floors down, a car alarm started and stopped. Somewhere on the block, a dog was asking a question, and then six, and the machine.
You've reached Webb. I'm out being invisible. Leave a message. His voice on the machine was unhurried, with the wry distance of whatever afternoon he'd recorded it—she couldn't place when, some day he was in a mood to be dry about his own invisibility. She'd heard the recording enough times over the years that it had its own texture. She knew exactly which syllable he stretched, the way you know a person's handwriting or their footstep on a stair.
She hung up and dialed again. One ring, two, three, four, five, six, and the machine. She put the handset back in its cradle. The kitchen was the same kitchen. The clock on the bookshelf marked time in the same increments. She stood at the wall and looked at the landline and thought about the three-ring rule, which Marcus had kept for twelve years and would have kept tonight unless he was somewhere he couldn't pick up, and the list of places Marcus Webb couldn't pick up was short enough to count on two fingers. She picked up her keys from the hook by the door.
The drive across town would take eighteen minutes at this hour, twenty if the light at Meridian was broken again. She calculated it while she locked the apartment behind her, the unhurried way twelve years of partnership and twelve years of cases and twelve years of paying attention had trained into her. The phone had rung six times. Marcus Webb had a three-ring rule.
She took the stairs.