Page 38 of Thorne
So that's his real name. I file that under things I don't know what to do with.
Lily doesn't look at her grandmother. She stares at me with frank curiosity.
"Hi, pretty lady." Lily beams at me, grinning as if we've been friends for years.
My instinct is to smile back, to wave, but Thorne's warning rings loud:Do not look at her. My daughter does not exist in your world.So I drop my gaze and focus on the page. On the numbers that feel like lead weights pressed into my lungs. I don't meet Lily's eyes. I don't let my face change.
"Come on, love." Her grandmother hooks an arm around Lily's waist, guiding her back. "These two have very important work to do. They can't play right now."
"But why can't the pretty lady come play with me?" Lily twists in her grandmother's grip, looking back at us.
The question spears straight through me. Thorne's arms tighten around his daughter for half a second before he lets go. "Because she's helping me, Lily-bug." Thorne's tone is even, but the cold warning in his eyes is directed entirely at me. "And we don't interrupt people when they're working hard."
Lily pouts but accepts the answer with a solemn nod.
"Say goodbye, Lily." Her grandmother gently ushers her toward the hallway. There's a pause. Half a heartbeat when Lily'sstare burns into my skin. My peripheral vision registers her little hand lifting, just like last time.
I stare at my pen until the page sways. I feel Thorne's eyes burning into the side of my face, watching, waiting to see if I'll break his rule.
"Okay." She points her dinosaur at me one last time. "Bye, Daddy! Bye, pretty lady!"
I keep my focus on the ink until the door closes. Only then do I allow myself to breathe. The softness in Thorne's gaze leaves immediately. The warmth he had for his daughter hangs in the air like a memory, cooling the air around us as the room settles back into its brutal purpose.
The cinder block walls reclaim the space. Thorne's jaw locks again. The father melts away. The sentinel returns.
His gaze drops to my mouth like he's deciding whether the most efficient form of punishment would be violence or something far more complicated.
I lower my gaze from his, turn the page, and start a fresh diagram of the regional distribution nodes. The paper is heavy stock, slightly rough under the edge of my palm. The ink flows black and absolute.
What I'm attempting isn't simple, and it won't be quick.
I came into this bunker with nothing but the clothes on my back and whatever pieces of the system survived in my memory. No terminals. No servers. No architecture diagrams. The network I built spans layers of encrypted financial pathways, redundant shell organizations, and verification systems designed to prevent anyone from reconstructing it from the outside.
Including me.
Memory isn't a perfect archive. It's a compression algorithm. It keeps the structure, the rules that generated the system, but the details blur unless I rebuild them from the ground up.
That's what I do now.
It's not recall.
It's creation.
The funding pathways alone were built across dozens of accounts designed to look unrelated unless you understood the rules that connected them. Each node generated the next layer of distribution through eligibility filters, algorithmic approvals, and manual overrides that only existed because I designed them to.
I have to rebuild the entire structure in my head, then translate it into something Halo can use to track transactions in the real world.
Which means every step has to be right.
If I misremember the authorization sequence, Halo will chase the wrong data trail. If I miss a node in the distribution tree, an entire branch of patients disappears from the map. If I reconstruct the encryption seed incorrectly, the key that unlocks the transaction history won't exist.
The margin for error is essentially zero.
And my recall is not perfect.
Pieces of the system surface clearly. Others arrive in fragmented, half-formed patterns that only make sense when I run the mathematics that generated them. I have to rebuild the logic behind every decision I made when I designed the network.
Why this fund instead of that one? Why this routing algorithm changed after the third distribution cycle. Why the secondary verification board existed at all.
