Part 5 – The PR Machine vs. the Storm
They taped the new sign up while I watched: NON-FAMILY STAYS ON LEVEL 1. Black letters on white laminate, the kind of official that doesn’t make room for please. A volunteer with kind eyes mouthed “sorry” at me as she finished pressing the corners flat. I nodded like my skin wasn’t too tight.
Down the hall, the TV ran a loop of the ceremony with captions that got the nouns right and the soul wrong. On the scrolling ticker below, a weather bar crawled red: SEVERE STORM WATCH UNTIL 3 A.M. Wind advisory. Flood risk. My phone buzzed with the same warning and then with another email from HR reminding me not to speak to media or “appear in further viral content.” They were not wrong about the content. They were wrong about the further.
Kiana wheeled an empty utility cart into the lobby and set a piece of construction paper in the basket like a flag: SUNFLOWER CART—KID-SAFE ITEMS ONLY. She’d drawn a sunflower so lopsided it made me love it more. Bear came in carrying two cases of individually wrapped sticker sheets and a bag of bubble wands he swore could be sanitized. Three other riders followed, one balancing a box of mini board books on his forearms like an offering.
“Individually wrapped,” Bear said, a little proud. “No fabric. No glitter unless it’s trapped like a bug in amber.”
“You listen,” Kiana said, impressed.
“Sometimes,” he said, side-eyeing me.
A woman in scrubs stopped long enough to drop a roll of kid-sized headphones into the basket, then went back to her shift. A dad with folded discharge papers tucked a brand-new pack of crayons alongside the books and whispered, “for the next kid.” A grandma added a mint-green lunchbox with a rocket sticker and slipped away before anyone could thank her.
Shay hovered to the side, phone up—but pointed at the sign, the cart, the hands. No faces. She whispered to me, “Piece will run as ‘How a hospital hallway became a supply line for courage.’ No comments. No blame. Just… this.”
“Just this is plenty,” I said.
Grant arrived with an administrator I didn’t know and a man in a navy blazer whose job title might as well have been Brand. He clocked the cart and the camera and the riders in under a second.
“Ms. Alvarez,” he said, in a tone that had a velvet rope in it. “A word.”
Kiana rolled the cart away like a mother pulling a child out of traffic. Shay lowered her phone and put both hands in her pockets, which I recognized as the journalist version of saying grace.
I followed Grant to a corner of the lobby where a sculpture of a stainless-steel tree made rainbows on the floor. Ava stood there too, arms crossed, eyes already wary.
“We are implementing a revised visitor protocol,” Grant said, clipped. “It is necessary and overdue. Your presence upstairs earlier is the kind of exception that becomes policy if it’s repeated. Policy made in crisis is bad policy.”
“I was in the vestibule,” I said. “I held up a dry-erase board. No one died of that.”
“Someone could,” the blazer man said, as if he collected worst-case scenarios like stamps.
“Someone will,” I said, “if we keep pretending that the only safe thing for a child is to be alone with beeps.”
Ava rubbed her forehead. “Dad.”
He didn’t look at her. “The hospital cannot be governed by sentiment.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But it can be guided by humanity.”
He stared. I could see the moment he decided I was young enough to be dismissed and stubborn enough to be dangerous. “There’s a hearing,” he said. “Wednesday.”
“I got the invite,” I said. “Conference B.”
He nodded, approval and warning in one gesture. “Come prepared.”
“I always do,” I said, and only a little of me shook.
A facilities manager jogged past us, phone at his ear, hard hat under his arm—the kind of person who carries a building like a beeper. He spoke low into the receiver. “No, the generator test passed last month. I’m talking about the secondary pump. I said the secondary pump.” He listened, swore softly, and took the stairwell two at a time.
The lights over the volunteer desk flickered, a faint dim-bright like a blink. Everyone looked up the way humans do when the room decides to remind them it’s alive. The lobby returned to normal. Heart rates did not.
“Storm,” Ava said, checking the alert on her phone. “It’s going to push through fast.”
“Then let’s be grateful our infrastructure is—” the blazer man started, and the facility manager reappeared, breathless enough to step on his line.
“Owen,” he said, shoving his hard hat on and addressing no one and everyone. “Facilities. Sorry. We’ve got a problem with the PICU air handler. One of the fan motors threw a bearing. We’re running on the primary only. If the storm knocks us onto generator and we lose chilled water pressure, she’s going to run hot.” He swallowed. “That’s… not good for vents. Or anyone on them.”
Grant straightened. “What do you need?”
“A 10-horse ECM for a Lennox AHU—model’s fourteen years old, which is a crime I didn’t commit,” Owen said. “Part number I can get you, but we don’t keep spares of that class because bean counters—” He bit that off when he realized which bean counter he was standing in front of. “Sorry. The vendor on Jefferson has one. Maybe two. They close at seven. Storm says the bridges might close before then. If we can’t get it, we’re praying the primary holds through the night.”
“How much time if it doesn’t?” Ava asked.
He did some math only facilities people do, staring at a point in space where ductwork lives. “Minutes turn into hours faster than anyone likes. We can throttle. We can prioritize. But it’s a tower of Jenga and someone just took a piece.”
Grant was already on his phone. “We’ll send a hospital courier.”
“Courier’s got three runs and the interstate’s a parking lot,” Owen said. “And no one’s thrilled about a hospital van doing eighty-five with thunderheads.”
Shay looked at me; I looked at Bear; Bear didn’t look at anyone. He was staring at the Up button on the elevator like it was a mountain he could push with his hands.
“Where on Jefferson?” Bear asked, his voice steady in the way I was learning meant he had already made a decision his words would catch up to later.
“HVAC supply house,” Owen said. “Big orange sign that says ‘We Move Air.’ Suite 104.” He nodded at the rider vest. “This isn’t a toy run. If you wipe out, I inherit more problems.”
“We don’t wipe out,” Bear said. “We route around.”
Grant’s gaze cut to me, sharp. “If any of you attempt to access restricted floors—”
“No one said floors,” Bear replied. “We said parts.”
Ava looked at her father. “If a part doesn’t get here, children get sicker.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose—the international signal for I can feel my humanity coming back and I don’t like how it rearranges my plans. “Liability,” he said, and made it sound like a prayer to the wrong god.
Owen held up his hands. “I don’t care how it gets here. I care that when the sky goes black we have a second motor sitting on the loading dock. We’ll swap it blindfolded if we have to. But if the vendor closes, we’re…” He didn’t finish. Facilities people don’t like saying the quiet part.
“Get the number,” Ava told him, already dialing. “I’ll keep them open with a credit card and terror.”
Shay lifted her phone. “Let me crowdsource a traffic map. There’s chatter about a downed tree on Riverside. If there’s a clean run on back streets, I can find it.”
“Absolutely not,” the blazer man said.
“Absolutely yes,” Ava said. “Dad, do not make me spend the next six hours explaining to donors why their name looks bad on a building where children got hot because we missed a twenty-minute errand.”
Grant’s mouth twitched like he’d been hit and deserved it. He glanced at me, at the cart, at the riders, at the storm bar crawling red across the TV. “If a motor arrives,” he said finally, “it arrives. No one needs to know how.”
Bear nodded once, the kind of nod men give each other when no one wants to call it a blessing. He turned to the other riders. “Gear up. Rain kits. Face shields. Pair off. Nobody rides alone.”
They moved. Not like a mob. Like a crew that has packed for nights like this because life keeps handing them nights like this. One disappeared to fetch the truck. Another texted furiously. A third adjusted a chin strap and said, “My aunt lives off Jefferson. She can stage us in her carport if the sky opens.” The plan built itself the way shelters do: beam by beam, because someone needed a roof.
Kiana pushed the Sunflower Cart closer to the family desk, where volunteers had started sorting donations into labeled bins: BOOKS, STICKERS, SILENT FIDGETS, HEADPHONES. She looked at me and I looked back and there was a question in between: Are we really doing this?
“We’re doing this,” I said.
A nurse ran through the lobby, breathless. “PICU says oxygen deliveries are delayed. Storm’s got the trucks stacked.”
“Facilities will handle backup,” Owen called after her, like he could bend the grid by yelling kindly. He checked his phone again. “Vendor answers on two rings if you say the word hospital. Bless them.”
My mother would be starting her overnight shift across town, filling a mop bucket, taping trash liners into cans, talking softly to floors so they behaved. I wanted to call her. I wanted to tell her that sometimes the world lets you be a person on purpose and sometimes you have to sneak past the sign that says no.
“Alvarez,” a voice snapped, and my preceptor was there—Ms. Morales, neat bun, sharp eyes, the moral geometry I learned to chart by. “HR sent an addendum. You are not to appear in any media or coordinate with outside parties on hospital matters.” She pushed her glasses up. “Also, I’m off in fifteen. Tell me where to stand.”
I laughed, a wet, broken thing. “By the cart. Kiana could use a sergeant.”
Her mouth did the smallest smile. “I can do sergeant.”
The automatic doors sighed open. Rain shouldered in sideways, bringing the smell of asphalt and sky. The riders rolled to the curb like an answer the building didn’t know it had asked for. Bear swung a leg over his bike, visor down, engine low like a cat crouched. He looked at me through the storm in the way only people who have understood each other without words do.
“Bring it back,” I said.
“Bring her breath back,” he said, and I understood he didn’t mean just Juni’s.
A tone sounded overhead, the hospital PA gone formal. “Attention all departments: Code Gray. Severe weather protocol is now in effect. Secure exterior doors. Move nonessential personnel away from windows.”
The lights flickered again and held. We breathed like we hadn’t been doing it all along.
Owen’s phone rang. He answered, listened, and then said the words that knocked the room a degree colder. “Vendor closes in twenty. Bridges close in thirty.”
He looked at Bear. Bear revved once. The doors whooshed open. Rain hit hot concrete and turned to steam.
“Go,” Ava said, not to her father or to me but to the part of the night that needed permission. “Go.”
They did.
I watched taillights disappear into weather with the yellow helmet warm against my side and the hearing notice heavy in my pocket and a hallway cart beginning to look like a small, stubborn miracle. Then the overhead lights blinked one long blink, the lobby murmured its collective prayer, and somewhere above us a fan that had been pretending to be immortal made a sound like metal remembering it is mortal after all.
Part 6 – The Loading-Dock Relay
The first drops hit the glass like fingers testing for a weak spot. Then the sky stopped asking.
Rain hammered the courtyard, a silver sheet cut by the sideways spray that storms save for nights when hospitals have too many secrets and not enough hands. The lobby lights breathed—bright, dim, bright—like they were trying to remember the rhythm we’d set for them. Somewhere above us, the air handler made a sound like a coin caught in a garbage disposal.
Owen had turned a corner of the lobby into a war room: laptop open to floor plans, walkie clipped to his belt, a yellow legal pad scrawled with duct runs and numbers that looked like prayers. He’d drawn two rectangles for the AHU units and an arrow where the new motor would slot in, his handwriting fat and urgent. A facilities tech named Marisol stood next to him with a toolbox and a braid like a rope you could climb down out of a burning building.
“Vendor’s holding,” Ava said into her phone, pacing. “Name’s Ted. He says if we wire payment he’ll sleep on the counter, but he cannot—repeat cannot—deliver. He’s one guy, and his truck is from the Reagan administration.”
Shay’s fingers flew over her screen. “Riverside is toast. Too much water. Easton has a downed limb at 12th, but there’s a cut-through on Linden if you can hop the curb at the church lot. People on the neighborhood app are offering carports like motels.”
Grant stood with his hands in his pockets, the exact posture of a man who paid for too many elevators in his life to be impressed by stairs. He watched the storm and worked his jaw and said nothing, which in his language meant he was trying not to be the worst version of himself.
My phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number. A photo bloomed on the screen: a blur of rain and leather and the red tail-threads of four bikes cutting through standing water like needles through cloth. The caption: We’re five minutes out from the vendor. —J. Another: Pair two already staged at Elm to take the handoff. —M. The message bubbles looked like coordinates in a battle I wasn’t allowed to fight from the front.
“Sunflower Cart’s stocked to bursting,” Kiana said, sliding up beside me, damp curls beading water. “If we get through tonight, tomorrow will be a parade.”
I glanced at the bins: books, headphones, sticker sheets, fidgets that didn’t squeak. The mint-green lunchboxes made a neat row that looked like hope lined up for roll call.
The lobby lights flickered again and lingered in the dim a half second longer. The PA crackled. “Attention all departments: Switch to generator possible. Secure life-safety equipment. Prepare manual backups.”
In PICU, “manual backup” means things that wake up muscles you forgot you had. It means ambu-bags and hands that squeeze in a rhythm you wish the world didn’t have to learn.
I looked at the east hallway. Kiana followed my look. “They’ll buzz if it gets hairy,” she said, soothing like a lullaby and honest like a prognosis.
“Copy,” Owen said into his walkie, then to us: “Vendor says two motors. We’ll take both. One for now, one for the next time the sky decides we deserve a test.”
“The next time?” Grant muttered.
Marisol arched an eyebrow. “Buildings don’t keep score, sir. Weather does.”
Wind shouldered the automatic doors; the seals held with a sigh like an old man getting up from a chair. The riders’ group thread lit up my phone again.
—At vendor. Power tried to blink. We’re in. —J
A heartbeat later a photo: Ted, the vendor, bald and heroic, standing behind a counter with two boxes big enough to qualify as furniture, each stenciled with numbers that made Owen exhale like oxygen had a price per character.
—Payment sent. Tell him we love him. —Ava, three heart emojis she would deny sending.
—Bear says split the load. Two bikes with boxes, one truck swings behind as blocker. East route. —M
Grant, against his will, leaned toward my screen. “They can’t carry that on a motorcycle.”
“People carry more than you think, when there’s a kid at the other end of the road,” I said.
“Strap it low,” Owen said into Shay’s phone before catching himself. “Not that I’m condoning—whatever. Just gravity’s a friend if you act like it.”
“Copy,” came Bear’s reply, and I could hear the smile he allowed only when he was looking at a thing he could fix. “We’ll ride like we’re carrying sleeping cats.”
They launched. Shay kept the map moving under her thumb, calling turns quietly, like narrating a bedtime story about getting home. “Elm’s clear… take Linden around the flooding… okay, watch the dip at the church lot, it’ll throw you if you don’t expect it… now Pine to 9th—no, skip 9th, that guy says a branch took down a line—okay, back to 10th, one block over.”
The PA crackled again. “Facilities to PICU. STAT.” The kind of STAT that isn’t yelling, because if you yell the fear gets ideas.
Owen snapped his laptop shut. “We’ve got hot air trending. We’ll limp it with dampers for five. Ten, if we insult physics.”
I pictured blue rooms turning a degree warmer at a time, vents sighing, kids stirring under blankets that weren’t allowed to touch their skin. I pictured Juni’s cheeks, pale peaches, gaining a pink not earned.
My phone buzzed: a new image, shaky and wet—a box lashed like an altar to the back of a bike, straps webbed, the rider’s dark visor like a confession they didn’t have time to make. The second photo: Bear, visor up for a beat, rain tattooing his face, two fingers tapping the side of his helmet in a promise. “This is going to work,” I said, to no one, to everything.
“Copy,” Owen said to the air. “We stage at the loading dock. You do not come past the yellow stripe. If anyone crosses my line without a hard hat, I will personally sit them in time-out.”
“Copy,” Bear said in the thread. “We like time-out less than you do.”
Grant started, “Security will stop them,” and Martinez, who had been quietly orbiting us like a minor moon, cleared his throat.
“We can make the dock the line,” he said. “I can be a door.”
Grant looked at him, at me, at Ava. He nodded, the gesture small as a concession and large as a surrender. “The dock is the line.”
We moved as if we were a single animal with too many legs. Owen and Marisol grabbed tools; Kiana tossed a roll of caution tape over her shoulder; Martinez keyed his radio and spoke in a tone that made people on the other end want to help. Ava and Shay flanked me like twin conscience—one with a checkbook and a stubborn streak, the other with a camera and a vow.
The loading dock smelled like wet cardboard and diesel and the particular metallic hope of places where things come in, not out. Rain came at us sideways; a stack of shrink-wrapped gloves trembled in their plastic like they wanted to run.
Headlights split the curtain. The truck hit the dock first, brake lights burning, then the bikes slid into the shelter of the overhang like fish returning to the shadow of a pier. Bear killed his engine, boots down, a body that looked like it had been built for nights exactly like this and was still surprised to be lucky enough to use itself this way.
Martinez stepped forward, palms up. “Right here,” he said. “Line’s the line.”
Bear swung a leg over, rolled his shoulders, and with the careful strength of a person who knows that some boxes contain more than parts, he and another rider unlashed the motor. Ted’s orange invoice was taped to the top like a flag of truce.
Marisol knelt, slit the straps clean as a sentence, and peeked inside. “It’s the right one,” she breathed, and patted the box like a dog. She looked at Owen. “Blessed be the parts store.”
“Blessed be the parts store,” Owen agreed, pious.
A gust pushed rain under the overhang; water sheeted over steel and found the back of my neck with unerring accuracy. I shook like a dog and laughed without meaning to. Seconds passed like beads clicking on a string.
Then the building made a sound I’ve only heard twice: once in a drill and once in a story my preceptor told that made her stare at the middle distance for a full minute. The hum of the grid stumbled. The lights dropped to a brown dim and then snapped off, leaving only exit signs and the deep animal thrum of generators catching a breath before they took one for us.
The hallway to PICU went the color of a bruise. Somewhere up there, monitors changed pitch and pumps told the truth about how much they hated batteries. A nurse yelled—not panic, command. The air felt thicker. My throat did the thing throats do when they decide they’re responsible for a whole building’s oxygen.
“Go,” Owen said to Marisol, grabbing one end of the box. “Up.”
“Elevators?” Marisol asked.
“Down,” Owen said. “We hoof it. Two flights to the mezzanine, service stairs to the penthouse. Ten-minute install if the gods are bored.” He looked at Martinez. “We’re crossing your line.”
“On my head,” Martinez said, and keyed open a door that said AUTHORIZED in a font that never met a hurricane.
Grant put a hand on the box and stopped himself. “Bring it back,” he said, and heard his own prayer dressed up as an instruction.
Bear started to follow. Martinez blocked him with a kind of apology you feel in your ribs. “Line’s the line, brother.”
Bear’s jaw flexed, then set. He put his palm against the cinderblock like he could push luck through it. He looked at me. “Sing if the lights flicker,” he said, and I realized the instruction wasn’t for me.
We waited.
Shay’s feed lit again, neighborhood angels reporting puddles like battle updates. Ava pressed her phone to her ear and hissed, “Transfer whatever they ask, just keep the other motor overnight, I don’t care about restocking fees, I care about breathing.”
Kiana’s hands sorted the cart again as if order at one end of the building could steady chaos at the other. She lined up the sticker sheets—stars, planets, a rocket that leaned—as if some kid would need a choice in the exact moment a machine made up its mind.
Minutes, then the elevator’s battery ding came apologetic and anemic. The stairwell door slammed on a gust. Owen’s voice came through the walkie, smaller and farther and somehow bigger because of it: “Motor in position. Kill switch engaged. Marisol—torque.”
“Torque,” Marisol’s voice affirmed. You could hear the grin, even in emergency.
Grant’s shoulders were up near his ears. Ava touched his arm and for once he didn’t shake her off. Martinez stood so still I realized he was holding tension the way other men hold doors.
“Hold,” Owen said over the radio, and we all did, a lobby, a dock, a city, a sky. “Power cycling in three… two…”
The lights blinked hard—off, then a strobe of almost, then nothing. For a heartbeat that felt rude, the building forgot we were inside it. Somewhere above us, a child made a sound I could feel in my teeth more than I heard it.
“…one,” Owen said.
And then—
The first drops hit the glass like fingers testing for a weak spot. Then the sky stopped asking.
Rain hammered the courtyard, a silver sheet cut by the sideways spray that storms save for nights when hospitals have too many secrets and not enough hands. The lobby lights breathed—bright, dim, bright—like they were trying to remember the rhythm we’d set for them. Somewhere above us, the air handler made a sound like a coin caught in a garbage disposal.
Owen had turned a corner of the lobby into a war room: laptop open to floor plans, walkie clipped to his belt, a yellow legal pad scrawled with duct runs and numbers that looked like prayers. He’d drawn two rectangles for the AHU units and an arrow where the new motor would slot in, his handwriting fat and urgent. A facilities tech named Marisol stood next to him with a toolbox and a braid like a rope you could climb down out of a burning building.
“Vendor’s holding,” Ava said into her phone, pacing. “Name’s Ted. He says if we wire payment he’ll sleep on the counter, but he cannot—repeat cannot—deliver. He’s one guy, and his truck is from the Reagan administration.”
Shay’s fingers flew over her screen. “Riverside is toast. Too much water. Easton has a downed limb at 12th, but there’s a cut-through on Linden if you can hop the curb at the church lot. People on the neighborhood app are offering carports like motels.”
Grant stood with his hands in his pockets, the exact posture of a man who paid for too many elevators in his life to be impressed by stairs. He watched the storm and worked his jaw and said nothing, which in his language meant he was trying not to be the worst version of himself.
My phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number. A photo bloomed on the screen: a blur of rain and leather and the red tail-threads of four bikes cutting through standing water like needles through cloth. The caption: We’re five minutes out from the vendor. —J. Another: Pair two already staged at Elm to take the handoff. —M. The message bubbles looked like coordinates in a battle I wasn’t allowed to fight from the front.
“Sunflower Cart’s stocked to bursting,” Kiana said, sliding up beside me, damp curls beading water. “If we get through tonight, tomorrow will be a parade.”
I glanced at the bins: books, headphones, sticker sheets, fidgets that didn’t squeak. The mint-green lunchboxes made a neat row that looked like hope lined up for roll call.
The lobby lights flickered again and lingered in the dim a half second longer. The PA crackled. “Attention all departments: Switch to generator possible. Secure life-safety equipment. Prepare manual backups.”
In PICU, “manual backup” means things that wake up muscles you forgot you had. It means ambu-bags and hands that squeeze in a rhythm you wish the world didn’t have to learn.
I looked at the east hallway. Kiana followed my look. “They’ll buzz if it gets hairy,” she said, soothing like a lullaby and honest like a prognosis.
“Copy,” Owen said into his walkie, then to us: “Vendor says two motors. We’ll take both. One for now, one for the next time the sky decides we deserve a test.”
“The next time?” Grant muttered.
Marisol arched an eyebrow. “Buildings don’t keep score, sir. Weather does.”
Wind shouldered the automatic doors; the seals held with a sigh like an old man getting up from a chair. The riders’ group thread lit up my phone again.
—At vendor. Power tried to blink. We’re in. —J
A heartbeat later a photo: Ted, the vendor, bald and heroic, standing behind a counter with two boxes big enough to qualify as furniture, each stenciled with numbers that made Owen exhale like oxygen had a price per character.
—Payment sent. Tell him we love him. —Ava, three heart emojis she would deny sending.
—Bear says split the load. Two bikes with boxes, one truck swings behind as blocker. East route. —M
Grant, against his will, leaned toward my screen. “They can’t carry that on a motorcycle.”
“People carry more than you think, when there’s a kid at the other end of the road,” I said.
“Strap it low,” Owen said into Shay’s phone before catching himself. “Not that I’m condoning—whatever. Just gravity’s a friend if you act like it.”
“Copy,” came Bear’s reply, and I could hear the smile he allowed only when he was looking at a thing he could fix. “We’ll ride like we’re carrying sleeping cats.”
They launched. Shay kept the map moving under her thumb, calling turns quietly, like narrating a bedtime story about getting home. “Elm’s clear… take Linden around the flooding… okay, watch the dip at the church lot, it’ll throw you if you don’t expect it… now Pine to 9th—no, skip 9th, that guy says a branch took down a line—okay, back to 10th, one block over.”
The PA crackled again. “Facilities to PICU. STAT.” The kind of STAT that isn’t yelling, because if you yell the fear gets ideas.
Owen snapped his laptop shut. “We’ve got hot air trending. We’ll limp it with dampers for five. Ten, if we insult physics.”
I pictured blue rooms turning a degree warmer at a time, vents sighing, kids stirring under blankets that weren’t allowed to touch their skin. I pictured Juni’s cheeks, pale peaches, gaining a pink not earned.
My phone buzzed: a new image, shaky and wet—a box lashed like an altar to the back of a bike, straps webbed, the rider’s dark visor like a confession they didn’t have time to make. The second photo: Bear, visor up for a beat, rain tattooing his face, two fingers tapping the side of his helmet in a promise. “This is going to work,” I said, to no one, to everything.
“Copy,” Owen said to the air. “We stage at the loading dock. You do not come past the yellow stripe. If anyone crosses my line without a hard hat, I will personally sit them in time-out.”
“Copy,” Bear said in the thread. “We like time-out less than you do.”
Grant started, “Security will stop them,” and Martinez, who had been quietly orbiting us like a minor moon, cleared his throat.
“We can make the dock the line,” he said. “I can be a door.”
Grant looked at him, at me, at Ava. He nodded, the gesture small as a concession and large as a surrender. “The dock is the line.”
We moved as if we were a single animal with too many legs. Owen and Marisol grabbed tools; Kiana tossed a roll of caution tape over her shoulder; Martinez keyed his radio and spoke in a tone that made people on the other end want to help. Ava and Shay flanked me like twin conscience—one with a checkbook and a stubborn streak, the other with a camera and a vow.
The loading dock smelled like wet cardboard and diesel and the particular metallic hope of places where things come in, not out. Rain came at us sideways; a stack of shrink-wrapped gloves trembled in their plastic like they wanted to run.
Headlights split the curtain. The truck hit the dock first, brake lights burning, then the bikes slid into the shelter of the overhang like fish returning to the shadow of a pier. Bear killed his engine, boots down, a body that looked like it had been built for nights exactly like this and was still surprised to be lucky enough to use itself this way.
Martinez stepped forward, palms up. “Right here,” he said. “Line’s the line.”
Bear swung a leg over, rolled his shoulders, and with the careful strength of a person who knows that some boxes contain more than parts, he and another rider unlashed the motor. Ted’s orange invoice was taped to the top like a flag of truce.
Marisol knelt, slit the straps clean as a sentence, and peeked inside. “It’s the right one,” she breathed, and patted the box like a dog. She looked at Owen. “Blessed be the parts store.”
“Blessed be the parts store,” Owen agreed, pious.
A gust pushed rain under the overhang; water sheeted over steel and found the back of my neck with unerring accuracy. I shook like a dog and laughed without meaning to. Seconds passed like beads clicking on a string.
Then the building made a sound I’ve only heard twice: once in a drill and once in a story my preceptor told that made her stare at the middle distance for a full minute. The hum of the grid stumbled. The lights dropped to a brown dim and then snapped off, leaving only exit signs and the deep animal thrum of generators catching a breath before they took one for us.
The hallway to PICU went the color of a bruise. Somewhere up there, monitors changed pitch and pumps told the truth about how much they hated batteries. A nurse yelled—not panic, command. The air felt thicker. My throat did the thing throats do when they decide they’re responsible for a whole building’s oxygen.
“Go,” Owen said to Marisol, grabbing one end of the box. “Up.”
“Elevators?” Marisol asked.
“Down,” Owen said. “We hoof it. Two flights to the mezzanine, service stairs to the penthouse. Ten-minute install if the gods are bored.” He looked at Martinez. “We’re crossing your line.”
“On my head,” Martinez said, and keyed open a door that said AUTHORIZED in a font that never met a hurricane.
Grant put a hand on the box and stopped himself. “Bring it back,” he said, and heard his own prayer dressed up as an instruction.
Bear started to follow. Martinez blocked him with a kind of apology you feel in your ribs. “Line’s the line, brother.”
Bear’s jaw flexed, then set. He put his palm against the cinderblock like he could push luck through it. He looked at me. “Sing if the lights flicker,” he said, and I realized the instruction wasn’t for me.
We waited.
Shay’s feed lit again, neighborhood angels reporting puddles like battle updates. Ava pressed her phone to her ear and hissed, “Transfer whatever they ask, just keep the other motor overnight, I don’t care about restocking fees, I care about breathing.”
Kiana’s hands sorted the cart again as if order at one end of the building could steady chaos at the other. She lined up the sticker sheets—stars, planets, a rocket that leaned—as if some kid would need a choice in the exact moment a machine made up its mind.
Minutes, then the elevator’s battery ding came apologetic and anemic. The stairwell door slammed on a gust. Owen’s voice came through the walkie, smaller and farther and somehow bigger because of it: “Motor in position. Kill switch engaged. Marisol—torque.”
“Torque,” Marisol’s voice affirmed. You could hear the grin, even in emergency.
Grant’s shoulders were up near his ears. Ava touched his arm and for once he didn’t shake her off. Martinez stood so still I realized he was holding tension the way other men hold doors.
“Hold,” Owen said over the radio, and we all did, a lobby, a dock, a city, a sky. “Power cycling in three… two…”
The lights blinked hard—off, then a strobe of almost, then nothing. For a heartbeat that felt rude, the building forgot we were inside it. Somewhere above us, a child made a sound I could feel in my teeth more than I heard it.
“…one,” Owen said.
And then—
