The Celestial Engineer

Chapter 7: Second Visit

Alex went back to St. Jude's on the second night, still in his work clothes because a man in a hi-vis vest carrying a toolbox raised fewer questions than one without. He'd thought about it most of the day, running the problem the way he used to run a site plan before breaking ground. Getting into the Imperial Suite once had been easy because nobody was looking for anyone. Getting in twice, less than forty-eight hours after a billionaire's father had nearly died there, was different. People remembered near misses. People started asking who'd been in the building.

He borrowed Jackson's old maintenance badge, the one that still worked on half the job sites in town because nobody had ever bothered deactivating it, and walked in through the service entrance behind the hospital's loading dock. Nobody stopped him. A man with a toolbox and a badge that looked official enough was invisible in a building this size, more invisible than Alex had been sneaking through the dark two nights ago. The VIP wing had more security than before. Two guards at the elevator instead of one, and a new camera mounted at the corner where the corridor bent toward the Sterling suite, angled to cover the blind spot the old one had missed. Alex clocked it without looking directly at it and kept walking like he had a work order to fill.

He found an access panel three doors down from Patterson's room, exactly where he'd expected one to be, and knelt to open it like he'd been sent to check the wiring after the blackout two nights before. Nobody questioned a maintenance call after an actual power failure. It was the most natural excuse in the building. While he worked the panel open with real tools, for the benefit of anyone glancing over, he let his focus drift toward the suite. Patterson Sterling was awake, propped up in bed, a nurse checking a monitor. Through the wall, Alex watched the old man's lymphatic system the way he had two nights ago. The fluid was back, thin threads of it gathering again near the same duct, exactly on schedule. Not urgent yet. Not the crisis it would become on the fourth day, but close enough that Alex felt no room to wait. He needed contact, and this time there was no blackout to hide behind. He thought about the panel in his hands and an idea came to him whole, the way information kept arriving lately, uninvited but complete.

He didn't need the room dark. He needed a reason to be in it. Alex closed the panel, badge in full view, and walked to the door of the suite like a man with a clipboard and a job to do. A guard stepped in front of him before he reached it. "Can I help you."

"Maintenance," Alex said, holding up the badge. "Got a call about a flickering line in this wing. Same circuit that tripped during the blackout Tuesday. Building wants it checked before it happens again in a room this important." The guard glanced at the badge, then at Alex's tool belt, then knocked on the door and murmured something to whoever answered. A moment later a nurse opened it, distracted, already turning back toward the monitors. "Fine, just be quick, Mr. Sterling doesn't like noise." Alex stepped inside like he'd done it a hundred times.

He went straight to the wall socket near the head of the bed, the one plugged into a bank of monitoring equipment, and knelt beside it with his back to the room. From here his hand rested near enough to the bed frame that a brush of his fingers against the metal rail looked like nothing at all. He let the same vibration flow that he'd used two nights ago, quieter this time, more controlled, aimed only at the gathering fluid instead of at the whole system. It took longer working through metal and a mattress instead of directly through skin, and he had maybe ninety seconds before the nurse would wonder what was taking so long with an outlet.

The threads of fluid thinned, retreated, dispersed back into the tissue the way they had before. Patterson shifted in his sleep, a small sound of relief he probably wouldn't remember in the morning. Alex closed the outlet cover, stood, and gave the nurse a short nod. "Loose ground wire. Fixed for now, but I'll flag it for a proper rewire next week."

"Thank you," she said, already looking back at the monitor, not really seeing him at all. He walked out past the guard, down the corridor, past the new camera at the bend, and didn't let himself hurry until he was three floors down and out through the loading dock into the cool night air. It wasn't until he was back in his truck, badge returned to his pocket, that the unease caught up with him. He'd been in that room for less than two minutes. He'd touched nothing but a socket cover and a bed rail. And still, walking out, he'd felt the weight of that new camera on the back of his neck the whole way down the hall, the kind of feeling he used to get on site when a foreman was watching him work and he didn't know why.

He told himself it was nothing. Just nerves catching up to a body that didn't get nervous the way it used to. Two days later, a maintenance supervisor at St. Jude's would spend an hour of unpaid overtime trying to explain to hospital security why the corridor camera outside the Sterling suite had recorded eleven seconds of visual static at almost exactly the same time a badge from a company that hadn't worked hospital contracts in three years had scanned in at the loading dock. He'd file it as equipment failure and move on, because that was easier than the alternative, and because nobody yet had a reason to look twice. Alex drove home that night with no idea any of that had happened at all.