I could put her on the ground and keep her there and never break a sweat, and the only reason I don’t is that a patient who fights like a trained thing stops being a patient and becomes a problem with very different paperwork.
So I dance badly on purpose. I make my evasions look like luck. I let the congregation think the pretty lunatic is simply too quick and too crazy to catch, which is a costume, like all my best ones, stitched to fit exactly what they expect.
Why me?
The timing is the part that nags hardest.
Three days ago I was the institute’s favorite ghost story and nothing more—watched, counted, left alone on my plinth.
Then Doc walked through the door with his fountain pen, and Riot got dragged up from the prison wing in his pretty black cuffs, and Silas drifted in smelling of funeral lilies, and all at once I’ve become the white-hot center of Blackthorn’s attention for every wrong reason on the menu.
Bodies. Suspicion.
A grieving giant’s fists.
Do I mind? Not especially. Attention has always been a currency I spend well. But the timing is a riddle, and riddles are the one thing in this building I can’t leave alone.
Cui bono. Who profits.
Not the lunatic in orange, who has nothing left to win and a deeper hole to lose. But a fortress with a body problem and a spotless public face profits enormously from a tidy, photogenic monster—a sealed file, a buried scandal, a press line with the word contained tucked neatly inside it.
The administration profits.
The CEO and his sacred reputation profit. And a scentless detective who arrived exactly as the corpses began to stack, wearing blockers so no one in a building that runs on scent canread a flicker of what she feels—I haven’t decided yet what she profits.
But I never trust the one person in the room who’s made certain I can’t smell her lying.
Here is what doesn’t add up, and I let myself fully stop to look at it, planting my feet, going still in the eye of all that noise:I do not benefit.
I am the prime suspect for a string of murders, and there is no version of the arithmetic where killing patients serves me. I gain nothing by being here, drugged and dim and rotting prettily in a manufactured fog.
So who profits from gilding me as the monster?
Who gets richer, safer, freer, with my name on every corpse? That’s the thread.
Pull the profit, and the puppeteer comes up with it?—
Three murders in a week, each one quieter and cleverer than this clumsy cafeteria theatre, each one painted to point at me.
And now a fourth attempt staged in front of the whole population, loud and public and witnessed, as if someone has grown impatient with subtlety and wants me removed from the board in plain sight.
The escalation itself is information. Patient killers don’t get loud unless something has spooked them. Something changed three days ago.
Something arrived that the composer didn’t plan for?—
The whole ring shrieks at once, and the sound yanks me out of my own head a half-beat too late.
Miscalculation.
My stall has handed her the opening, and she takes it like a freight train taking a fence. There’s no clean way to slip a tackle from a standstill, and even if there were, the cameras are rolling and the whole performance depends on my looking like exactlywhat they think I am—the wrong-place, wrong-time patient flailing to defend herself.
So I let my body go where it doesn’t want to go.
I throw up my arms in a convincing, useless brace, I let the fear flash real across my face for the lens, and I let her hit me.
It has been a long while since anyone put their full weight on me, and I had forgotten, in my comfortable years on the plinth, that a body twice my size landing square is not a thing the mind can fully edit out. We go down hard.
The tile rushes up. And when it meets my spine and skull, I cannot pretend, even to myself, that it doesn’t hurt.
