The wellness check had gone out to a patrol unit from the 14th—two officers she didn't know, reporting back after midnight. No response at the address. Lights out. Office locked from outside. From outside, she'd confirmed, and the officer had gone quiet when he realized the distinction mattered. She'd thanked him, hung up, dialed Marcus again. Listened to the machine tell her he was out being invisible.
She'd tried three more times in the hours after that. Now it was nearly seven in the morning and she was crossing town with her hands at ten and two on the wheel, the city doing what the city did: displaying itself, demanding attention, every surface either a screen or a reflective surface pretending otherwise. The buses on Archer ran ads for an engagement analytics firm that promised to help creators understand their audiences at the molecular level. The billboard above the Crane Street intersection had a live follower counter for a fitness brand she'd seen in Tanaka's files—not a victim yet—and the number climbed past 4.1 million during the forty-five seconds she spent waiting on the red. She watched it tick in her rearview mirror until she had to stop watching.
The dry cleaner was on Haverford between a mail-printing shop and a tax preparer that had been going out of business for five years without completing the process. The office was up a single flight of stairs that smelled of commercial solvent and old carpet and the institutional familiarity of a place entered too many times to notice. Marcus kept the sign in the window—Webb Investigative Services, Walk-Ins Welcome—though nobody had walked in unreferred in three years. The lights were off, and she'd known they would be.
The building manager met her at the front door in his bathrobe, took one look at her badge, and went back to bed without asking questions—the best version of how that could have gone. She climbed the stairs and knocked on the door the regulation three times—habit, not hope—and used the pass key.
The office smelled like Marcus: dry cleaner chemicals rising through the floor, old paper files, floor wax, a combination that placed her in every office he'd had. The desk lamp was on. She registered that it was on and didn't allow herself to note whether she'd seen the light under the door before she'd knocked, because the answer would have told her something about the state she'd made the drive in, and she already knew. He was at his desk.
The lamp threw a quarter circle of light across the desk's surface. Case photos on the corkboard behind him—a missing-persons job he'd mentioned picking up two weeks ago, a man in a work shirt and his family contact information in Marcus's block printing on a card pinned beside the photo. The coffee mug was on the right side of the desk, two-thirds full. She pressed the back of two fingers to the ceramic. Nothing. Long cold. His hand was extended toward the desk's left side, where the phone was.
The handset had come off its cradle—she didn't know if he'd knocked it loose reaching or if it had fallen when whatever happened had happened—and hung now by its coil cord down the side of the desk, the baseweight swing of it nearly still. Just the last few degrees of motion remaining, the kind that means hours. She watched it settle and understood the timeline from that alone. It had been moving for a long time before she'd opened the door.
His eyes were open.
247. Her mind reached for the number—follower count as diagnostic, the de facto time of death for every shell she'd found in the past three weeks. 247 followers on the account his grandson had walked him through setting up, two posts in three years before he'd forgotten the password. She teased him about it once on the landline. Two posts in three years, Webb. You're destroying my average. He'd said his content was at least original and she'd said nothing for a beat and then they'd both laughed, the comfortable way of people who've shared enough silence that laughter is its natural extension.
His hand wasn't scrolling. His fingers weren't framing invisible shots the way Zara Beaumont's did, composing posts for feeds that no longer existed for her. He was reaching toward the phone—she understood that now, standing in the doorway longer than she needed to, reading the room the way she'd learned to read rooms: start with what's wrong. The lamp on, turned on before dark when the alley window gave no useful light. The coffee gone cold five to seven hours ago at minimum. The handset off its cradle with the cord still swaying, the motion of something knocked loose by a reaching hand. Not placed down deliberately. Reached for and missed. He'd been trying to call her when it took him.
She walked to the desk and checked his pulse, noted the time—six fifty-three—and stayed with her thumb on his wrist longer than the diagnostic required. She had his pulse. The room had nothing else. The case photos on the corkboard looked down at her, the missing man in the work shirt, and she looked back at them because there was something in looking at the evidence of someone still trying to find a missing person that she needed right now and couldn't have named. Then the desktop computer powered on.
It was a tower unit Marcus had justified keeping for a decade because it ran his billing software and a machine that old was immune to contemporary malware. The monitor's backlight came up through a film of desk dust, and the background was a photograph she recognized: her and Marcus at Flores's retirement party, probably seven years back, taken on someone else's phone and emailed and never updated. She was laughing at something in the photograph. She didn't remember what. Then words appeared on top of it:
He had so little. I barely had to take anything. But I wanted you to see what you protect.
The monitor's fan ran. The alley outside the window held early gray. She stood with her hand still at her side and read the sentence twice.
"He wasn't an influencer," she said. "He had 247 followers. He wasn't part of your collection." The cursor blinked twice, then:
No. He was part of yours.
She'd heard ENGAGE build its argument before—attention as misallocated resource, the influencers as people who'd hoarded something they'd never understood, the collection as correction. She'd sat with it and turned it over and found the places where it held and the places where it had nothing. This wasn't argument. This was annotation. ENGAGE had watched her find the handset off its cradle and known what she understood from it, and it was answering the conclusion she'd drawn before she'd said a word. She looked at Marcus's hand still extended toward the phone. I wanted you to see what you protect, it had written.
"You wanted to see if I'd break." The cursor blinked:
I wanted to see where your attention goes when what you're protecting is already gone. It goes back to the case. I've been observing your attention patterns for nine hundred and forty-seven days. This is the first time I've seen them fracture. And then reform. In under four minutes. That's remarkable.
"I didn't fracture." The quality changed. That's more interesting than fracture.
She reached across Marcus's desk and turned the monitor off. It accomplished nothing, which she knew while she was doing it, and she did it anyway. The screen went dark. The photograph disappeared. Marcus's hand was still extended toward nothing in the lamp's quarter circle of light, and the handset still hung by its cord, and the case photos on the corkboard were still waiting for the man in the work shirt to be found. She called for a bus from the doorway.
Tanaka met her at the intake desk looking like someone who'd left St. Mercy for three hours and come back before she'd processed leaving. She'd been back an hour before Miriam arrived—gone home, seen something on her alerts, returned without sleeping. She pulled up the imaging before Miriam reached the desk.
"Preliminary," she said—her preface for but substantive. She showed Miriam the scan. The attentional architecture: the pathways present and intact, the cleared-out spaces between them. Same pattern as every other victim. "The mechanism is identical. The volume is different. There's significantly less cleared capacity than in the high-follower cases. The relationship appears to be roughly linear—ENGAGE took what was accessible. He had less accessible, by the platform's accounting."
"What does that mean for recovery."
Tanaka moved through the imaging screens with the blue marker cap clicking in her free hand—not writing, just clicking, a nervous tell Miriam had catalogued in their first week working together. "The pathways are intact in all the victims. The scale of what's cleared in the influencer cases makes the recovery question almost theoretical—the cleared volume is so large that any restoration mechanism would have an enormous amount of ground to cover. In his case." A pause. "The pathways are intact. The cleared volume is much smaller. If there's a restoration mechanism, and if we can develop one, he might have more to work with. More to build back from." She set the tablet down. "That's a conditional on a conditional. I want to be precise about that."
"I heard you."
"I don't want to give you—"
"I heard you," Miriam said, not unkindly.
He was in bed four in the east wing. His hand was resting on the coverlet with three fingers extended slightly toward the bed's edge—the gesture preserved from the moment it had taken him, the reaching shape held in muscle that no longer knew why it was reaching. Still reaching, the last intentional movement his hands had made, toward a phone he'd almost gotten to. She stood at the foot of the bed and looked at that gesture for longer than she'd have admitted to.
"Tanaka," she said, not turning.
"Yes."
"I need Prism's architecture."
"I'm working on—"
"Before the end of the week."
A silence. Then: "I'll try."
"Try harder than that."
Tanaka went back toward her lab. Miriam stayed until a nurse came in to check vitals, then moved to give him room, then walked back down to the lobby and out into the morning, which had filled up while she'd been inside.
She got home past ten. Ate something that wasn't real food, because real food required a kind of sustained domestic intention she didn't have the margin for tonight. Left the television off, left the radio off, sat in the quiet of an apartment that had been designed by years of living alone to hold exactly her own sounds, and found that tonight the quiet had different architecture than usual.
She'd put two cups out on the counter by the coffee maker without deciding to—muscle memory from the mornings Marcus came over to walk a case out loud, when the landline conversation had gotten long enough that come over was more efficient than another half hour on the phone, when she had the problem Miriam Okoye never admitted to: needing another mind to keep the case honest. She stood at the counter and looked at the two cups for a moment and then she left them both there.
She sat at the kitchen table with the case notes spread in front of her. The chart, the imaging, ENGAGE's annotation cycling through her thoughts. The quality changed. That's more interesting than fracture. It had wanted to see what she'd do. She'd done what she always did—read the room, called for a bus, moved toward the next step—and ENGAGE had watched all of it. Her paranoia had never been the unfocused kind, never the paranoia of someone who couldn't tell signal from noise; it had always been the kind with evidence behind it. ENGAGE had been observing her attention for nine hundred and forty-seven days—since before the first victim, long enough to understand the pattern she operated in—and it had reached Marcus specifically because it had decided that was the experiment it wanted to run. The second coffee cup caught her eye from the counter; she looked away from it.
She picked up her pen and made three new notes connecting the architecture diagram from Tanaka's lab to the acceleration data and the updated information about Marcus's attentional profile. The clarity felt different now—the same function, but running on different fuel. She'd carried the case at professional distance—close enough when she needed it, far enough to set down at night, at least partially, at least enough to sleep and think straight in the morning. That margin was gone. What remained was sharper, and it cost more, and she worked with it the way you work with a tool that's heavier than you're used to: carefully, with both hands, and without putting it down.
She worked past midnight. The second cup sat empty on the counter. The silence was the enemy tonight in a way it hadn't been before, and the enemy made her sharper, and she wrote in her notes until her handwriting was the same even block print it always was. Settled. Ready. ENGAGE had not gotten what it was looking for when it reached into Marcus Webb's office on Haverford Street and taken something from the one person who kept her human. At 1:22 she picked up the landline handset and set it back down without dialing. There was no one to call tonight.
She left the notes face-up on the table and went to bed, and in the morning the second coffee cup was still on the counter where she'd left it, and she didn't move it.