Chapter 7 — No Safe Floors
504 Words
The night shift brought a false calm. ICU 312’s monitors hummed steady; the hallway outside was quiet enough to hear the faint hiss of oxygen through the vents.
Evelyn dozed in the chair beside her father’s bed, phone in her lap, the black card pressed between her fingers like a talisman she wanted to snap in half.
Blackwell’s voice broke the stillness. “We need to move him.”
She blinked awake. “What? He’s stable.”
“For now,” he said, pulling up the vitals. “But stability is the wrong metric. They’ve stopped playing steps. That means they’ll try a sweep.”
“A sweep of what?”
“Every machine in the room,” he said flatly. “They can kill him with a firmware update faster than any injection.”
Evelyn’s stomach dropped. “How do you even—”
He reached into his jacket and tossed her a small device, palm-sized, with a row of flickering LEDs. “Signal sniffer. It’s been chirping for five minutes. Something’s pinging the vent monitors and the IV pump.”
As if on cue, the oxygen flow shifted—so subtly she might not have noticed if not for the slight rise in her father’s chest.
Her phone buzzed. No number. No greeting. Just: Transfer denied. All floors are ours.
In the hallway, two orderlies approached with a gurney. No patient sheet, no chart.
Blackwell stepped into their path. “Who sent you?”
“Transport order,” the taller one said.
“I didn’t sign one,” Blackwell replied.
The shorter orderly didn’t answer. He just tapped the side of his badge, the way someone might tap a loaded weapon.
Evelyn joined Blackwell, blocking the doorway. “He’s not going anywhere.”
“Ma’am,” the tall one said, “it’s not optional.”
Blackwell’s phone buzzed in his pocket. A single word lit the screen: CINDRAL.
He stared at it for half a second, then to the orderlies. “You can tell your friends in Cindral they’re sloppy tonight.”
The taller man’s eyes flickered—recognition, just for a heartbeat. Enough to confirm the name had weight.
“Leave the gurney,” Blackwell said. His voice had that surgical edge again, the one that made people move. “Walk out.”
They hesitated, then backed off, wheels squealing against the tile.
When they were gone, Evelyn’s voice was tight. “What’s Cindral?”
“The people who own your card,” Blackwell said. “And a lot of people who wish they didn’t.”
“Who are they to you?”
His eyes were winter and closed doors. “The reason I stopped working for anyone but myself.”
Her phone buzzed again. Next move is ours. Sleep while you can.
She glanced at her father, then at Blackwell. “We don’t sleep.”
“No,” he said, already pulling a schematic of the hospital onto his tablet. “We build a floor they don’t own.”
- Writer
