Page 94 of Thorne
He pulls out the chair across from me, laptop already open. He looks at the screen. At the architecture laid out in full: every clinic, every routing code, every patient name surfaced and documented. The complete map of what I built and who it hurt.
"Jesus." He breathes the word, his eyes scanning the screen. "This is all of it?"
"Yes. It's everything."
He's quiet for a long moment. Then he pulls his laptop closer and begins typing.
"Walk me through the St. Catherine's routing."
"The Chicago site?"
"The Chicago site."
I pull up the disbursement architecture for St. Catherine's Memorial. "Primary funding routed through MedVance Holdings. MedVance is a subsidiary of Stratton Financial, which made it invisible to external audit. Secondary disbursement through a charitable foundation, the St. Catherine's Pediatric Research Fund."
"Which you controlled."
"Which I controlled."
His fingers move over his keyboard. He's building a tracking system, something that will let Guardian HRS cross-reference patient names against clinic records, insurance databases, and current addresses. My work unlocks the names. His work will find them.
"The mortality rate at St. Catherine's?"
"Sixty percent in the first eighteen months. The deaths were attributed to underlying conditions."
"Were they?"
"No."
He doesn't react. Just types. I appreciate that about him. The lack of performance. He's not here to judge me. He's here to build something that will help the people I hurt.
Footsteps in the hallway. Talia appears in the doorway, a stack of blank maps under her arm. She's been waiting. Waiting for me to finish so she can begin. She crosses to the table and looks at my screen. Her expression doesn't change, but I see her jaw tighten.
"Can you export the addresses?"
"Already done." I pull up the file. "Every patient in the distribution architecture. Sorted by state, then by clinic affiliation."
She takes the tablet from my hands. Starts scrolling. The red dots will come now, over four thousand of them, spreading across her maps like a disease.
"I'll start plotting immediately." She doesn't look at me. "Geographic clustering first. Then follow-up clinic locations, current status, and where we can find them."
"Halo's tracking system is ready to receive the data."
"I know." She's already spreading her maps across the far end of the table, her pen moving in quick, precise strokes. "This is good work."
She doesn't say thank you. I don't expect her to. The work isn't something to be thanked for. It's something to be survived.
Lily appearsafter lunch with Theodore and a new piece of paper.
"I figured something out." She climbs onto the chair beside me, ignoring the laptops, maps, and the general atmosphere of grim concentration. "All by myself. Without you telling me."
I turn from my screen. The bruise on my shoulder blade pulls when I move, but I keep my face neutral.
"Show me."
She spreads the paper on the table. Numbers in crayon, slightly crooked, but the logic is clear.
"Okay, so." She points to a column of figures. "When you add up all the numbers from 1 to 10, you get 55. Right? 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 all the way to 10."
