The System Can’t See Me

Beck stopped the cart just inside the workshop.

For a moment Kai thought the way was blocked. Then Beck stepped around him and kicked a wooden offcut from beneath the front wheel. It skidded under a workbench. He bent to check the caster before moving again.

Kai had begun bracing for things that had not happened yet. He made himself loosen his jaw.

The workshop smelled of old machine oil. Drawers stood open along one wall, and a half-dismantled motor rested on a bench beneath a lamp. Beyond it, the floor rose into the freight ramp Beck had described. The ramp turned left around a brick wall and continued upward toward daylight.

"Where are we going?" Kai asked.

"Maintenance mess, at the top," Inez said. She had stopped Nia's sheet beside the cart. "We put the injured there when the yard got hit. Ruth should still be with them. She worked on an ambulance before all this."

Kai looked toward the light. "Is there a barrier?"

"A shutter. Two people taking turns on watch."

He could work with an answer that told him what was actually there.

Beck set the wheel brakes and went up the ramp alone. His footsteps continued beyond the turn. A door opened, and Kai heard an argument too distant to make out, followed by running feet.

Nia stared at the brickwork above her.

"You knew there was someone who could help?"

"I knew she was here when we went down to check the water," Inez said. "I wanted Beck to look before I promised you a bed."

She crouched to ease the edge of the canvas away from Nia's scraped ankle. Nia watched her do it without apologizing again for being unable to walk.

Beck returned with a broad-shouldered man in a fluorescent vest. Between them they carried a stretcher with scuffed aluminum poles.

"She's there," Beck said. "She told us to stop dragging people across her floor."

Inez let out a breath and stood.

They laid the stretcher flat beside Nia's sheet. Beck steadied it while Inez and the man in the vest used the sheet to slide her across, supporting her head and injured leg. The two men carried her up first. Inez stayed with Kai, her boot against a cart wheel even with the brake set.

Above the workshop door, a blue arrow pointed back toward the service hall.

[Witness transfer route active.]

Inez saw him looking.

"Does that change where you want to go?"

"No. It changes what I need to tell Ruth."

When the men returned, all three took the cart up the incline. Beck stayed behind it, Inez steadied the side, and the man in the vest pulled from the front. They paused at the turn to straighten the wheels. Kai's wrist pulled sideways beneath the blanket; he warned Beck, and they waited while he tucked it close again.

By the time they reached the top, Beck was breathing hard behind the cart.

The ramp opened into a repair bay beside a shutter raised to knee height. Kai saw a strip of wet yard, the tires of a yellow forklift, and sunlight on broken glass. A woman with a spear watched through the gap. She looked at his cart, then at the door below the ramp, and shifted so she could see both.

Inez spoke to her before they went farther. Kai caught the words *dark coat* and *don't open it*.

The mess was through a door on the opposite side of the bay. Someone had pushed the tables against a wall and laid mattresses between them. Two people slept beneath work coats. A third sat with his leg raised on a chair, laboriously peeling an orange one-handed.

Nia was on a mattress nearest the door.

Kai searched for a blue boundary, a counter, someone waiting to decide that he did not belong. The only sign over the beds was an old notice about washing your own cups.

A woman with gray roots and a bloodstained apron pointed to the space beside Nia.

"Bring him here. Don't lift yet."

Ruth checked the height of the cart and had Beck bring folded blankets from a cupboard. Only when the landing surface was ready did she direct the others to lift Kai by the sheet.

The mattress stayed still as they lowered him onto it.

He had to close his eyes.

"Kai?"

He opened them. Ruth was kneeling beside his head.

"That's what your friend called you. Is it right?"

"Kai Chen."

"I'm Ruth. I'm going to ask you some questions while I look at you. If you need a pause, say so."

He told her about the band first.

He kept the account short: Nia's ankle, the light he had touched, the pull afterward. A figure in the loading passage had asked for Nia. They had refused. Kai did not know whether another person could take the mark from him, or what would happen if someone tried to cut it.

Ruth listened with her hands resting on her knees.

"Anything else following you?"

"Something in the crawlspace. We put a plate between us and it."

"Inez told me about that. I meant the light."

"That's what we know."

She looked across at Nia, who nodded.

Ruth asked the man in the vest to tell the watch exactly what Kai had said. Then she returned to the injuries.

Her questions were different from Inez's. She wanted to know where sensation changed, whether he remembered striking his head, and how long the bleeding had continued. When Kai could not tell her how much time had passed, she wrote a question mark on a scrap of cardboard beside the mattress.

She did not make him choose a number.

Inez held his right arm in its supported position while Ruth worked around it, keeping both their hands clear of the mark. The dressings at his side needed more than another layer laid over them. Ruth took time there, and Kai lost track of her questions until she stopped and waited for him to answer.

Across the gap, Nia said his name.

"Still here," he managed.

Ruth glanced between them. "Keep talking to him. It helps me tell when he's drifting."

Nia thought for a moment.

"You still owe me an explanation for that box."

Kai almost laughed, which would have hurt.

"Pick something shorter."

"All right. Was it yours before everything happened?"

"No."

"Good. I'd hate to think you packed lunch that badly on purpose."

She sounded close to crying again. He kept looking at her until Ruth finished at his side.

There was no green light. Ruth did not try to straighten his shoulder or ask him to stand. She checked what she could, cleaned and dressed the wounds within her means, and padded the ankle. Nia's crushed fingers remained supported as Inez had left them until Ruth could examine that hand properly.

"You both need care I can't give you here," she said afterward. "For now, the bleeding is slower and you're off the floor. I want you lying down while we find out what else is available."

"A healer tried before," Kai said. "Her skill couldn't find me."

"Was she any use without it?"

He remembered Mara holding his shoulder in the break room, with black blood running over her fingers.

"Yes."

"Then give me her name. Beck has been taking messages to the other posts."

He told her. Beck, standing in the doorway with the counter still in his pocket, took a pencil from behind the orange-peeling man's ear.

"Mara," he repeated.

Kai supplied the building name and the conference hall above the south loading bay. Beck wrote both on the back of a delivery slip.

Nia turned her face toward the wall.

Kai noticed, but Ruth was asking whether the dressing beneath his elbow pinched. By the time she had adjusted it, Beck had gone into the repair bay to find someone who knew the streets around that building.

Inez stayed long enough to tell them where she was going.

"I'll be at the top of the ramp. Ruth knows where to find me."

Nia caught her attention before she left.

"Thank you for coming back for him."

Inez glanced at Kai, then down at her scraped knuckles.

"Next time, knock before you get that far under a pipe."

She said it gently. Nia gave a small, shaky nod.

Afterward there was room for sounds that had nothing to do with the pursuit: a kettle lid, the scrape of orange peel into a bin, Ruth asking the sleeping man by the cupboard to move his foot so she could pass.

Kai waited for Nia to look at him again.

"We're asking for Mara because she can help us move," he said. "I haven't forgotten Elise."

Her eyes stayed on the wall.

"I know why you're asking."

"Then tell me what I missed."

She took a long breath. "I keep thinking about the box lying back there. I know we had to leave it. I know I couldn't carry it. But now we've got a bed, and my sister still hasn't got anybody coming for her."

Kai looked down at the covered hand resting against her chest.

"You came for her."

"And I ended up here."

He could not argue with that. He remembered the lost pages beneath the pipe and all the scraps they had tried to keep dry.

"We still know her name," he said. "Her age. Where you last saw her. Some of the places the records sent us. Beck can write that down too, and ask people. We don't have to get it all from a screen."

Nia finally looked at him.

"Most of those people won't know anything."

"Probably. We start with the ones who were moving children."

She was quiet for a while. Then she asked him to call Beck when he came back.

Ruth pulled a chair between the mattresses while she checked Nia's bandages. The chair blocked part of Kai's view, and he was grateful for the privacy it gave her.

He looked at his left hand instead.

The thumb rested above the padding, a short distance from the side of his forefinger. He remembered the single movement beside the supply cabinet. He had slowed his breathing then, but he couldn't remember whether he had been breathing in or out when the thumb moved. This time he wanted to notice that before trying again.

Kai let the air out without moving the thumb.

The warmth in his palm faded as he exhaled. Beneath it, along the inner forearm, he felt a faint continuation of the old path. He waited through another ordinary breath to make sure he was not simply following his pulse.

The two sensations did not arrive together.

He knew the meridian reached his chest. He had felt it tear open there. But knowing where a path went was different from forcing something through it, and his shoulder was swollen enough already.

He kept his attention below the elbow.

On the next exhalation, he tried to follow the warmth from the palm toward his wrist without tightening his fingers. It moved a short way and dispersed. His hand stayed still.

He rested through several breaths. Then he tried the same thing again, keeping the breath small.

This time the warmth remained distinct at the wrist until he inhaled.

Ruth noticed his attention.

"What are you doing?"

"Something I tried with Mara. Before my arm got hurt again."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not like moving it."

She waited. He understood what she wanted.

"No new pain," he said. "The rest hasn't stopped."

Ruth checked that he was not pressing the hand into the mattress. "Don't make a fist to prove anything. I've seen the palm."

He nodded.

With her watching, he let another quiet breath leave him. The warmth gathered near the wrist again, weaker than before but in the same place. He tried moving the thumb only after his chest had relaxed.

It drew inward until it touched the padding beside his forefinger.

Kai stared at it.

"Could you do that earlier?" Ruth asked.

"Once. It hurt enough that I stopped."

"And now?"

"Less."

His other fingers had not moved. The hand was still too damaged to hold anything. He could not tell Ruth that he had repaired a nerve or learned how to heal it, and she had no instrument that could test what he felt beneath the skin.

He had felt the warmth near his wrist on two exhalations without any new pain in his shoulder. He wanted to see whether it would happen again after resting.

"That's enough for now," Ruth said.

Kai wanted another attempt. The want was sharp enough to surprise him. He had spent so long trying not to lose more that a movement toward something he chose felt difficult to leave alone.

Then he noticed how tired his chest felt after those few breaths.

He let the hand rest.

Beck returned carrying the delivery slip and a second, larger sheet of paper.

"There's a runner going east with a water crew when the yard watch changes," he said. "One of them knows your building. They'll ask at the loading bay if they can get through. No promise about finding Mara."

"Give them my name," Kai said.

Beck glanced toward the right wrist.

"On the paper," Kai added. "For her. Nothing on the counter."

Beck wrote it beneath hers.

Then Nia asked for another message. She spoke carefully, giving Elise's age and describing her sister herself, before telling him what the records had claimed. When Beck wrote *Center Intake* beside the description, she stopped him.

"I didn't see her there. Put that separately."

He crossed out the line and began again farther down the page.

Kai listened until the names stopped blurring together. Ruth was still within reach. Through the open door he could see Inez standing at the head of the ramp, talking to the woman with the spear.

The blue band tugged beneath his blanket. He settled the marked wrist back into the hollow beside his stomach and told Ruth which way it was pulling.

She adjusted the support without touching the light.

"I'll wake you if it moves," she said.

Nia was still correcting Beck's notes when Kai closed his eyes.

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