Elena’s POV
Day twelve, and I can tell time by the machines better than by the clock.
The beep cycles every 1.2 seconds — I counted with the stopwatch on my phone during hour six of day.
I haven't needed to count since because the rhythm lives in my body now the way Danny's colic rhythm lived in my body when he was three months old. He was screaming at 2 AM and the only thing that worked was walking the hallway counting the seconds between cries. Same principle. Different machines.
Sandra works Monday through Thursday nights. Marcus takes Friday through Sunday.
Sandra hums while she checks vitals — something without a melody, more vibration than music, the unconscious habit of a woman who has been keeping herself company in quiet rooms for years.
Marcus doesn't hum. Marcus talks to Danny like he can hear, which the doctors say he probably can't but which I've stopped correcting because a man who talks to my sleeping son like he's a person and not a patient has earned the right to his own theory.
"Morning, Danny," Marcus says on his rounds, adjusting the IV with hands that are gentle in the way that large hands sometimes are — careful, aware of their own capacity to break things. "Mets lost again last night. Thought you should know."
Danny doesn't respond. Danny hasn't responded in twelve days.
But Marcus tells him the score every morning, and I let him, because the alternative is silence and silence in this room sounds like the thing I'm afraid of.
"Mrs. Vega." Raf is in the doorway. He looks worse than yesterday, which is an achievement given that yesterday he looked like a man who had been running on caffeine and guilt for eleven consecutive days.
The circles under his eyes have circles. His laptop bag hangs from his shoulder like it's grown into the joint.
"Sit down before you fall down," I tell him.
"I'm fine."
"You're gray. Sit."
He sits in the visitor chair across from mine — the bad one, without the cushion, because he's never here long enough to need the good one and because I need the good one and we both understand this hierarchy without discussing it.
"Updates?" I ask, the way I've asked every day since day three, which is when Raf started coming with his laptop and his explanations of things I don't fully understand — neural architecture, kill codes, biometric locks, feedback loops.
He explains patiently and I nod at the parts I follow and hold steady through the parts I don't, because understanding the technology isn't my job. My job is asking the only question that matters.
"Are you closer?"
Every day for nine days the answer has been a variation of working on it, which I hear as no but translate as not yet because not yet leaves a door open and no shuts it.
Today Raf opens his laptop instead of answering. Turns the screen toward me. The display shows lines of code that look like a language I'll never speak, with sections highlighted in yellow and red annotations in a margin I can't read.
"I found something," he says, and the way he says it — careful, measured, the voice of a man who has been wrong enough times to be cautious about being right — makes me put down the blanket I was adjusting and give him my full attention.
"A code signature. Inside the neural lock architecture — the thing holding them in." He points to a highlighted section that means nothing to me visually but everything to him.
"Every programmer writes code the way you write a letter. Handwriting. Personal style. The way they name things, the way they organize their logic. This person has a very specific style."
"So you know who built it?"
"I know what their work looks like. I'm running the style against every developer who ever touched Echo's source code — contractors, engineers, interns, anyone with access." He pauses. "But here's the thing. The trap wasn't built from scratch."
"What does that mean?"
"It means someone took the surveillance system we destroyed — the Echo Link code, the stuff from the hearing — and rebuilt it. Not copied. Rebuilt. Like someone who studied a building, watched it burn down, and then constructed a new one from memory using the same architectural principles."
He closes the laptop halfway. "Whoever did this knew the original system intimately. Not just how it worked — how it thought. The design philosophy. The logic underneath the logic."
"That sounds like someone who helped build it."
"Or someone who studied it obsessively." He rubs his eyes with both hands, the gesture of a man who has been staring at screens for twelve days and whose eyes have started filing complaints.
"I'm cross-referencing the code style with academic publications — anyone who published research on Echo's biometric protocols. It's proprietary architecture, which means anyone writing about it either had inside access or reverse-engineered the system on their own. Either way, the pool is small."
"How small?"
"Small enough that I should have a shortlist by the end of the week."
The end of the week. Five more days of machines and blankets and Marcus telling Danny baseball scores and Sandra humming her melody-less song and the hallway going quiet at 11 PM when the shift changes and I can hear my son breathe.
"And then what?" I ask. "You find the name. Then what?"
"Then we find the person. And we get the kill code. The thing that releases the neural lock from the inside."
"And if they don't give it to you?"
Raf looks at me. His eyes are bloodshot and his jaw is tight and behind the exhaustion there's something I recognize — the same thing I saw in Danny's face the night he told me about the surveillance, the night he decided to burn down a system that was hurting people and accepted that it might burn him too.
The Vega stubbornness. It's not genetic — Raf isn't blood. But it's contagious, and this boy caught it years ago.
"They'll give it to me," he says, and the certainty in his voice isn't bravado. It's the quiet, load-bearing kind — the kind that holds up buildings.
He leaves. I listen to his footsteps down the hallway, the sound getting fainter until the machines reclaim the room.
I reach across the bedside table and adjust Danny's blanket. Pull it higher, tuck the edge under his chin the way I did when he was small and the blanket was the only barrier I could put between my son and the world.
The gesture serves no medical purpose. The gesture serves every other one.
"He's going to find them, mijo," I tell Danny's quiet face. "And when he does, whoever built this cage is going to wish they'd chosen a different family to lock inside it."
The machines beep. The blanket holds. And I wait, because waiting is the thing I'm best at and worst at and the only thing the world is asking of me right now, and I will do it for as long as the machines keep drawing their little green mountains across the screen.