The parking garage had a way of remembering everything. Damp concrete exhaled the same stale breath every time a car left; the overhead lights hummed like tired insects. Elizabeth had felt it before that place between the world of faces and the world of names and tonight it smelled of rust and fuel and the metallic aftertaste of someone else's violence. She had left the man folded in the shadow of the pillar, the keycard burning in her pocket like contraband. Every city had a thousand such anonymous bones; she preferred to leave them where they'd be found.
By the time the sirens grew human and close, she was gone.
The safe house was a peeled-back memory: a closet of worn furniture, a window that did not open properly, a kettle with a hairline crack. It was forgettable on purpose. She liked forgettable; it gave people comfortable assumptions they could keep while she moved the pieces they couldn't see.
Her phone chimed once the contact name that used to make her stomach cold: Silas. She thumbed the message open at the table and set the keycard beside it like an accusation.
You're not going to like this, his text had read.
She had expected the warning. What she had not expected was the logo to mean anything at all. Halcyon. The name had been a rumor in the old files: a corporate octopus with a jaw of steel and a smile coded for contracts and hush money. It had been a name you said in whispers and then pretended you had not said at all.
Halcyon being involved meant the noise under the city had become an instrument. It meant that the hunting had escalated beyond instinct or money or petty revenge. It meant something held an entire private state in its hands and had decided, in some cool conference room far from the smell of burnt plastic, to pull one thread and see what unravelled.
Elizabeth slung the duffel over her shoulder and left the kettle to evaporate its final insult.
She did not sleep. She mapped routes without a thought, the same way her hands moved when she taught them to reload faster than her heartbeat: automatic, a set of practiced motions that had kept her alive long enough to develop a theory of enemies. The first thing you did when you were hunted was assume you were already compromised. The second thing you did was prepare to be wrong.
At a café an hour later, a man with cheap glasses and cheaper nerves watched her like a ledger. She sat. He tapped his tablet in a rhythm like a Morse code meant for no one. He was the kind of asset who prefered numbers to names; his fingers could move through databases the way a musician navigates scales. She had traded blood for his talent once, and he had a memory she could draw on.
"Halcyon has been making moves," he said without looking up. "Reabsorbing old assets. Reactivating certain… projects. And they've put out a retrieval order."
"For what?"
"For you."
She let the silence hang like a noose. "Why, now?"
He shrugged a slow, practiced shrug. "Maybe someone at the top remembered you. Maybe someone with a grudge. Maybe you were an easy checkmark when the board wanted to test loyalties. I don't know the poetry of corporate calculus."
She picked at a corner of the folder he slid toward her and found an address buried beneath graphs no one read anymore: a facility outside the city's polite suburbs. It was catalogued, bureaucratic and bland, a medical complex on paper: Halcyon Medical Research, unit 14. They had a way of naming their instruments cleanly. It made the wounds look like experiments.
Her skin tightened around the memory of the keycard. If she could get inside, if she could peel the bureaucratic skin off the building, she might find the muscle the motive. If Halcyon had sent someone to find her, Halcyon had something to hide. People with something to hide often kept ledgered lists of the people they'd used and worn out.
She left before the coffee went cold. Leaving without notice reduced risk and blurred the breadcrumb trail.
The outpost sagged under its own importance. A few years ago, it had had a parking lot that looked suitable for a movie about cures. Now the weeds grew like a slow protest through the asphalt. Broken signs still carried the Halcyon logo in a faded sepia, sterile curvature of letters that had wanted to make the world sound like a soundproof laboratory. She moved against the building like someone who knew its bones.
The side entrance yawned like a wound. She slipped through the jagged opening and into a smell of stale disinfectant and dust. Filings, chairs left like abandoned promises, a vending machine with a single dented can. She found the server rack in the back: a carcass beneath the tools of modern memory.
She hooked the extractor and watched the numbers climb. 12. 34. 58.
Then footsteps. Elizabeth felt the hair at the back of her neck move like something very small had shivered. She killed her light and understood, in two steady respirations, that the footsteps knew more than hers.
The voice that said "Don't" was careful and clipped, a voice taught to yield to the instrumentality of orders. It was male, low, and trained. She had heard that quality of voice before in hospital corridors and interrogation rooms and once or twice in a motel with a busted lock. It meant the person had been on the payroll of a private state.
She threw the flashbang without thinking, because the muscle memory of it had saved her once when she had been younger and less polite about leaving. The explosion was choreography: white bloom and ringing silence, then the scramble.
She ran.
A gunshot denoted the end of hope for polite outcomes. She burst into the night and down an alley that smelled of urine and nostalgia. The pursuer's cadence followed her like a predictable drumbeat; she answered with the improvisational rhythms of an old map in her head the subway where she grew up patching over the tunnels she'd once used to elude a different life. The city closed over her quickly like a well-practiced hand.
She thought of Liam then, briefly and with the distaste of someone considering an irritant. He was a problem, yes, she had told herself that. A clinical, complicated problem: his name had appeared on invoices, his fingerprints on the periphery of the surfaces she'd cleaned. But if Halcyon cared enough to reawaken old files and send extraction teams, then Liam was a scapegoat for some greater mechanism. He might be the blade; he might not even be the arm.
In the tunnels, the extractor stuttered and then buzzed. She pressed her back to damp stone and let the machine hum against her ribs like a second, illicit heartbeat. She had pulled what she could. It meant fragments, shards of memory in file form, a map of the things Halcyon had not wanted to burn.
The download had not finished; that was the simple fact. But the pieces were enough. Enough to make a hypothesis. Enough to make a plan.
She needed a decryptor and a room with an unlisted entrance and someone who hated Halcyon for reasons sharper than payment. She also needed to keep moving, which meant making decisions that left shadows less time to gather and form.
At dawn she met Silas in a different café — the one with the cracked tile and a waitress who looked like she had been practicing patience since the eighties. He passed her an envelope. Inside: access logs, a roster of names, the borders of projects that had been shelved and later resurrected. The keycard had been a breadcrumb; the files were the loaf.
"Project Persephone," she read aloud, tasting the syllables like an insult. "Clinical remediation of at-risk populations."
Silas lit a cigarette and watched the smoke climb like a column of patient witnesses. "They weren't testing pharmaceuticals, Elizabeth. They were testing people. For control. For recruitment. For… whatever the Board wanted to buy."
She thought of the orphanage an image edged into the margins of her life like a photograph you'd keep because destroying it might mean admitting the picture was true. Names on the roster had birthdates that matched the years any given orphanage public and private and desolate would have produced children for the city's blind spots.
"Hannah," she said. The name fell like a weight. She had tucked that name into a folder before; Hannah was a girl who had lived a life of small exits in the papers she'd read, and Elizabeth knew how the Board used names like currency. Silas's mouth twitched; he had seen many things but the idea of a child on a roster still made him blink.
"You know her?" he asked.
"A little," she lied. The shame of the truth was too raw; truth had a habit of reshaping bone. If Halcyon had been experimenting on orphaned children, if their programs had extended into rehabilitation and coercion, then the architecture of Elizabeth's past was built on someone else's hands.
They worked through the day. Silas peeled back server logs that looked like glass; he scrolled through the names of technicians and their alarmed resignations and then the small, less visible list of subject codes. Elizabeth's fingers hovered over letters that made no sense and then suddenly did: code names, birth years, intercepts that conformed to the orphanage's registry.
At midnight, the extractor whined and produced one small, stubborn file. The header read: Subject K-7: Kane. Her name. The old one. The one she had abandoned years ago in a contract terminated with a signature that said "voluntary resignation."
Her chest bunched. She stared at the word Kane the way people stare at a ghost in the corner of a living room: long enough to make sure you had not imagined it, short enough to keep from calling attention to something that might not want to be seen.
The file contained a photograph taken with institutional indifference: a girl, age recorded as seven, standing in a corridor with a shaved head as if she had been prepared for a procedure. The eyes in the photo were dark and hard as seeds. There were not just clinical notes but a notation in the margin: Subject shows above-average compliance under stress conditioning. Reminder: successful agents demonstrate ability to sever attachment points.
Elizabeth read it again. Sever attachment points.
She felt the word like a physical tug, something reaching back toward the roots of a life she had been building to forget. Her hands turned cold.
Silas watched her and, for once, did not say a thing. He understood that some documents were surgical; you could hold them to light and have a diagnostic concluded in a glance. She had been an instrument once. The instrument had been given a name, a number, a role. She had thought she had chosen her way out.
"Where did you find this?" she asked, because it mattered where the wound had been stitched.
"Archived under a clinical directory," Silas said. "Someone hid it behind a decommissioned psychiatric research node. They thought it was clever. It's Halcyon being sentimental."
She swallowed. Sentimentality and monsters had the same address in this city.
If Halcyon had catalogued her as Kane, then someone had known how to find her even after she forged a new name. The retrieval order wasn't just corporate alarm: it was recognition. Recognition required a record. A record required presence. She had been present, quietly and carefully, for a long time.
"Why put an old agent on a subject roster?" Silas muttered. "Either they were keeping track of their assets in which case you're a valuable asset or they were keeping track of the mistakes."
"Or both," she said. She had learned to make room for multiple ugly answers.
They made a plan in three steps: find the facility's current access logs, cross-reference with personnel who had clearance, and identify the current handler who would care enough to order retrieval. If they could find that handler, they could find the heartbeat of the hunt.
It took two days because Halcyon moved slowly on paper and quickly in the world. Files were duplicated and disguised. There were layers of corporate bureaucracy designed not to protect truth but to dilute it so when truth leaked, it seeped as rumor. They found, eventually, the name of a field operative, Hyclyne Ward: listed in incident reports as "contract enforcement, retired," then reappearing with three different codenames over the last eighteen months. Hyclyne had a reputation that read like a short, tidy obituary written before the subject's death: efficient, icy, an operator who didn't flinch when he was asked to erase people and memories.
He was the sort who came out of stories that were heavy on clean edges and little forgiveness. If Halcyon assigned Hyclyne, it meant the Board wanted results with minimal fuss.
Elizabeth's jaw made a sound like a hinge when she considered it. Hyclyne had once been a name she'd seen on lists with an asterisk the kind of marker that told you: handle with care. She put the folder back into the duffel and resealed the plan as one might reseal a wound.
There was no grand moral calculus in what she decided next. She would not hide. She would not run. She would confront.
When you have been someone for other people, the choice to turn up and be seen is also a kind of confession. It admits that you have something to prove and something to answer for. Elizabeth preferred action over confession; action could be measured and, if necessary, undone.
She crossed Halcyon's threshold under the indifferent guise of an old contractor who still had an HR file somewhere with her name and a history of loyalty. She forged credentials with an economy of lies that didn't try to be pretty. Halcyon accepted many things that smelled like paperwork and competence. They did not accept people in tears.
Inside, the facility breathed with the soft pulse of equipment willing itself to be innocuous. White halls looped into medical wings where the word 'research' was used like a prayer. She moved through it like someone sliding through a memory that was almost familiar. Almost familiar was often dangerous; familiarity could soften an alert.
They had improved their security since the old days. Lockdown protocols, biometric gates, screens that asked you to smile when they wanted to see who controlled your expression. But like every powerful machine, it had its hinge: a forgotten terminal, an admin who celebrated early Friday hours, a maintenance corridor where cameras had been oriented toward fluorescent lights.
She found Hyclyne's clearance path on a maintenance schedule with his initials scrawled across it like a symbol that meant the person was used to signing the end of other people's sentences. And like every human who thought themselves a blade, Hyclyne left breadcrumbs in the mundane.
The keycard's imprint matched a secondary gateway, a loop used for internal transfers. Elizabeth slipped through the corridor at night and felt the building sense her in the way a predator senses illness in its prey: an awareness that something old had come back to finish a sentence.
There were files to be stolen, of course. There were always files. But the deeper you went, the more the files began to look like confessionals: digital journals where scientists wrote politely about skin reactions and vigilance and then, in an uneven key, listed names that read like prayers or invoices. There were references to "remediation" that read like euphemisms and to experimental protocols indexed by dates that matched when children had disappeared from an orphanage on the other side of town.
She found a list labelled "Longitudinal Subject Outcomes." Each line was a life turned into a datum. Subject K-7: Kane; Subject H-03: Hannah; Subject L-12: deceased; Subject M-08: transferred. The sterile terms had the weight of a ledger.
She took what she could, stuffing whatever files she'd copied into the same extractor that had once hummed in the old outpost. She felt certain of nothing except this: that Halcyon had not been a benefactor. It had been a curator of damaged things, and someone had decided that Elizabeth Kane was worth retrieving again.
At the end of the corridor she ran into Hyclyne.
He was as close to a shadow as a man could be and still look like he had teeth. He wore a coat that did not belong to summer and a face that did not show the time of day. His eyes were polite as obelisks: dark, reflective, and immovable. He spoke with a careful syllable that had been taught to be unhurried.
"You shouldn't have come back," he said.
"You're the one who should have stayed retired," she replied. Her voice was line-steel. She had been practicing restraint.
He smiled a thin line of a thing. "We called for you. We sent a retrieval order."
"You didn't send it to a friend," she said. She did not know what she expected from him, but pity was not it. Pity had never been useful. She needed leverage.
He tilted his head. "We retrieved many things once. We measure value by the things we can coax out of people."
There was a small box by his foot. He kicked it once and it rolled as if to suggest conversation. Inside were instruments; inside those instruments were threats like polished coins.
"You know me," she said. "Then why the card? Why not come to me?"
"Because," he told her softly, "Halcyon likes proof. It likes to test whether an asset will return on its own, whether loyalty is rotten or salvageable. You were scheduled for recall after your… termination. Loyalty is one thing we value."
The word termination cut a shape. Her past had been terminated with paperwork the way surgeons terminated an organ. Yet the depth of Halcyon's interest hurt in a way more intimate than a corporate audit.
"You don't want me back," she said. "You want what I remember."
His mouth made a small, patient movement. "Memories are expensive."
They walked then like two people who had once been parts of the same machine and now considered the consequences of reassembly. He knew where to look for the off-switch in her posture; she knew where to look for the small tremor behind his patience that said: live and remember.
"You were listed as a subject," she said finally. "Kane."
"I know the roster," he answered. "And I know the person marked as K-7. I saw her once."
"You saw me," she corrected. She wanted to know if he had been the one who taught them how to sever attachment points.
He gave a sound that was not quite a laugh. "I taught them how to keep a promise nicked. We break and rebuild things to make them more useful. It's my job to ensure the utility of an asset."
Utility. They had used the language of commerce to baptize their cruelty. It had worked, in certain rooms, to make the unspeakable merely a spreadsheet.
"Why me?" she asked again. "You sent Liam. Was it because of him?"
He hesitated. "There was a report — a short, ugly thing. Someone in the Board thought K-7 should be assessed for reactivation. Your name appeared on a list that suggested you had operational knowledge no longer in our files. But the order to retrieve you was not for memory alone. Halcyon wants to know how far loyalty is fractured."
"You mean: test if I break."
He inclined his head. "We break what we can no longer trust."
She felt the old machinery inside her respond like a muscle remembering a motion. Break, rebuild; break, rebuild. It had been the rhythm of her childhood in wires and clinical light. She did not want to become the thing that had once used to break.
Outside, somewhere in the city, a siren wept and dropped away. Inside the facility, the lights hummed a neutral monotone.
"Tell them I'm redeemable," she said. It was a lie before the sentence finished. She had no intention of giving herself back, not as property, not as data.
Hyclyne watched her carefully and then, almost as if the phrase were a test of his own comprehension, he said: "You can walk away, Elizabeth Kane. The Board will close the file. It will cost a favor. You may be free."
"What favor?"
He smiled without warmth. "Someone to take the fall. To be persuasive. To show us that loyalty can return. You meet one old friend, you make a demonstration, we call it closure."
Her mind crawled into the small space where compromises are manufactured. They wanted her to perform. A public return, staged reconciliation. The Board loved rituals; they accepted spectacle as insurance.
"You'll never get me to perform for them," she said. It was honesty steeped in stubbornness.
"You will be persuaded," he said. "Because we will make you choose. We will force you to pick what you love, and when you pick a thing, you will see the cost of that choice."
She pictured a list of things she loved and found that paper in her chest was thin. Love, for Elizabeth, had been an emergency choice at dusk, not a document. Yet she had not come back for proof. She had come back for answers, and answers had a way of asking you to pay.
"Then make your test," she said. "Set your puzzle. But not with me on a string."
He stepped closer. The space between them smelled faintly of something clinical, like the inside of a mouth of a building. "We are not cruel for cruelty's sake. We are methodical. We want confidence. You are confident."
She considered slitting the argument by telling him what she had stolen, the files she carried that hinted at long abuses and the names of children like Hannah that should not have populated a research ledger. But telling him would be foolish; telling him would be to hand over the map.
Instead, she did something stranger: she offered a question.
"Who signed the retrieval order?"
He was caught for a heartbeat. That imperceptible stall was a small island of honesty where an answer might surface. "A board member designated M.O.," he said finally. "Initials. Bureaucratic discretion."
M.O. O'Sullivan's initials were a shadow in the files the way sharks were shadows in the water. Elizabeth had felt that shadow years ago. She had stepped from under it and thought it would have stayed put. But shadows stretch and find new ground.
The name landed like a stone in a quiet pond. She had a thousand reasons to be angry but only one place to put the anger. If O'Sullivan had pulled a string, then Halcyon had become a single instrument strummed by a family with an appetite for control.
"You're lying if you think I'll help them," she said.
"We never asked for your help," he replied. "We asked for proof."
"What proof?"
He reached into his pocket and produced a thin, battered photograph folded at the creases. He slid it across the table. It was the same photograph she had seen in the file small, institutional: a child with a shaved head and eyes that seemed too old for the face. A code in the corner: K-7.
But beneath that, another image had been overlaid. It was faint and not meant to be read at first glance: a registry sheet with dates, a list of names that included Hannah, then Barnes Orphanage, 2006.
She looked at the image until the letters blurred. "You're bribing me with my pain," she said.
"We're offering you a choice," he said. "We want you to testify that Halcyon can reclaim an asset. It will be a performance. You will be paid handsomely."
"What if I refuse?"
"You will be retrieved," he said softly. "For good this time. Procedures will be irreversible."
They had a way of making fate sound like a policy decision. For a heartbeat she imagined herself sitting at a table in the Board's glare, asked to say simple things about loyalty. The idea of performing her own inconsistency sickened her. She had spent years building a life in the blank spaces between names. She would not sit and confess.
She stood then, slowly. She had come for answers and found a door that required payment in the currency of bones. There was a file on the extractor that she had not yet decrypted. It was a small thing: a name recorded under a different angle, an annotation that suggested a transfer that had not been reported. She had been careful with secrets; they had been careful with her.
"Give them their demonstration," she said finally. "Tell them to come find me where I will be easy to see."
"You are letting me walk?" Hyclyne asked, incredulous.
"Only because I want them to waste more resources looking for me," she said. "And because I want to know who will come."
He let her go then, the way men let a fire smoulder before ordinances required it to be put out. She left the facility with the file in her jacket and Hyclyne's eyes like a weather report in the back of her neck.
Outside, the night drained into a dawn duller than the lies that had orchestrated it. She walked without hurry. In the jacket pocket, the data hummed like a promise.
She did not yet know that the thing she had pulled from the server would rewrite the map of her life.
She thought about Hannah and the way a name could be a hand reaching across a table. She thought about orphanages and quiet rooms where children learned to perform obedience in exchange for food and a bed. She thought about the way Halcyon had written people into contracts and called it science.
And then, because Hamlet's shadow had never quite left the city, she opened the file.
The first thing the file did was not shout. It whispered.
There were archived medical notes: heart rates, compliance scores, drug dosages. There were logs of sessions: "attachment severing protocol attempted; subject displays high dissociation under exposure." There were notations about "reconditioning".
Then, the photograph of the child with names under it. Then a line of code that made her feel as if a scalpel had been run along a delicate argument.
Cross-reference K-7 with operative records. Note: subject reclassified 2009. Current designation: Agent Kane. Secure retrieval pending board approval (M.O.).
Agent Kane.
She had hidden the word agent from herself for years, the same way a person hides a scar under a scar. But the file made a different claim: that she had not merely been catalogued she had been trained, operationalized, assigned.
Her hands went numb. The world reduced to small, domestic facts: the sound of a subway train two stations over, the taste of metal on her tongue, the hum of the refrigerator in the safe house. Then the answer that would not let her breathe: the file included a list of operations and a particular notation: Kane not activated during Operation Nightingale — recall aborted by unilateral resignation documented.
Resignation. She had signed forms, given a name, and escaped. But the record was not merely a record of departure; it read like a warning. Someone had pulled the plug, then looked back as if to see whether a shadow had left.
She scrolled further and found what the Board had hidden behind neat counters and code phrases: a list of people who had been subjects and then moved into positions within the city's security architectures. People who had been children and then were given special training. People who had been owned and then loaned back to themselves with new names and new lies.
At the end of the file was the paragraph that drowned out the rest. It was technical and soft and had the gravity of a verdict.
Subject K-7 (Kane) exhibits high-facility transfer probability. Recommend reactivation or neutralization. Board approval: M.O. Pending.
M.O. initials that made her entire architecture shift. O'Sullivan.
Her breath came like a clause in a bad sentence. If O'Sullivan had signed the order, then the hunt was not only about Halcyon. It was personal in a way she had not allowed herself to imagine. O'Sullivan's family did not operate without intent. They curated allegiance the way gardeners prune flowers: careful, ruthless, beautiful in the right light.
She closed the laptop with a motion that felt like a parent closing a book on an old lie. She had what she needed.
A small, ordinary ring of a phone cut through the silence. She hesitated and then answered.
"Kane," the voice on the other end said, and it was not Hyclyne. It was a woman's voice, measured and very close, as if she were in the room.
"Who is this?" Elizabeth asked.
There was a rustle like someone moving paper. "You knew we kept records," the voice said. "You knew they would find you if they wanted to. They do not send messages without reason."
"You have my attention," Elizabeth said curtly.
"Walk away," the woman advised. "You are not the only person whose ledger lists O'Sullivan initials. Walk away, and we will leave you in peace."
"You're familiar with Halcyon," Elizabeth said, because habit makes people ask questions.
"We know how families keep secrets," the woman replied. "We have names of our own. But you are a risk, Ms. Kane, because you have both the memory and the appetite to undo them."
She did not say whether the voice belonged to an ally or someone else entirely. The voice might have been a rattle in a pipe. She might have hung up and found herself pursued again. The line offered the choice: retreat, or step forward into the open.
"You're offering me an option I already considered," she said. "I won't be caged again."
The woman did not argue. "Then be careful. Hyclyne is less sentimental than we hoped."
The call ended. Elizabeth held the phone to her chest for a moment as if it were a small creature whose heart might steady her own.
She had a file now. She had a name. She had the sense that the world she walked in had prouder, older teeth than she had thought. Halcyon was a mechanism. O'Sullivan was its soul. Liam was a symptom. And between those things sat a child who might still be called Hannah.
She slept, finally, and in her sleep the echoes of attachment severance crawled under her skin. She dreamed not of being a blade but of being a bowl, and inside the bowl was a small, shining object that she could not reach without cutting her hand. When she woke, her hands were clenched in the same shape: a fist, a vow.
She had made plans. Some of them were angry, some of them tender. Most of them were about finding a way to make the Board uncomfortable enough to peel back their own skin in public. She had learned, over the years, that those who made secrets out of other people's suffering were allergic to exposure.
She also knew with a cold, precise certainty that Halcyon had not sent a man with apologies. They had sent a redemption story. And redemption stories, like all theater, needed props: a stage, an audience, and a willing actor.
She would not be their actor. She would be their director.
She would find Hannah. She would find the children still with numbers in their skulls. She would make the Board stare at itself in the dark until the reflection broke.
That was the plan, then: pry, expose, and then watch the Board flinch.
It was also, as she had learned in the small, bare school of survival, dangerously naive.
When she left the city that night, she did not go as a woman who wanted to be hidden. She moved like someone leading a procession. She had the file and the knowledge and an enemy who had pulled a string through her life and wanted an answer.
And underneath all that, something older thrummed: as the city breathed around her, Halcyon prepared to step from shadow to light.
She only hoped the light would hit them where it hurt.
Because if she was right and the file suggested she was this was not merely a retrieval. It was a reckoning.
And Elizabeth Kane, who had once been a subject and then an agent and then someone who had tried to be less, would not go quietly into the ledger.
She had been catalogued as K-7 once. She would not let a ledger define what she would be next.
Outside, the rain began to fall, slow and patient, a thin annunciation on the city's skin. The kind of rain that erased footprints and left impressions that were only half true. Elizabeth walked into it like someone rehearsing a future she intended to keep.
Behind her, somewhere deep and organized, M.O. noted the retrieval order as executed. A chair scraped back. A pen tapped an inked line. The Board liked to be efficient.
They did not yet know she had taken the file. They did not yet know that Harcyon's ledger had been opened.
They would learn. And the lesson would come with light and sound and, if she had her way, evidence enough to seed a harvest.
She closed her eyes and imagined the photograph of the child with the shaved head. She traced the halo of the small face with a finger on the cool glass of the extractor and said the name aloud as if naming could be an incantation.
"Hannah."
The name hung in the air like a promise or a threat. It did not care which one it was. It simply existed, waiting for the day when someone would answer it.
Elizabeth turned away from the extractor and out into the rain, and the city swallowed her whole.
She would not be found. Not by them. Not by the ledger.
She would be the one to call their names back into light.
And the first name she would call was hers.