SLEEPLESS BASELINE

// BEGIN_TRANSCRIPT

Lena Thorne had stopped trusting the night two years ago. Sleep felt like a crime scene she kept contaminating, pacing through it, touching every surface. Tonight the cottage walls ticked and sighed as if they were keeping count. Her laptop slept on the coffee table, a dark eye half-open.

It was 3:07 a.m. Her twenty-third hour awake.

She walked a slow circle around the living room, bare feet whispering over cold floorboards. The house made the same sounds it always made—radiator hiss, distant highway, the wet cough of the old fridge—but every noise felt slightly wrong, like a recording playing a few frames off.

She stopped at the window. The streetlamp threw a pale cone over the road that curved toward the river. Mara had vanished just past that bend. The last confirmed ping on her phone was half a mile away. The Algorithm had decided, days earlier, that she wasn't coming home.

Lena's throat tightened. She turned away from the glass.

Her laptop chimed.

Not the polite corporate email trill. The other tone. The one she wasn't supposed to have.

She crossed the room fast. The screen woke into a black interface with a single pulsing icon.

HELIXSIGHT: PREDICTIVE EVENT NOTIFICATION
UNAUTHORIZED TERMINAL. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS CHANNEL.

No one else in the county had this view. She and Noah Park had carved the backdoor together, late, wired on bad coffee and worse decisions. Technically a test key. Practically a felony.

She clicked the icon. The interface unfolded.

RISK SCORE: 99
TIME WINDOW: 48 HOURS
SUBJECT: AMBER ADAMS
LOCATION: RIVERBEND, VA
PROFILE: CIVILIAN / NO RISK HISTORY
PREDICTED OUTCOME: HOMICIDE

A dry cold slid down her back. The cursor blinked; a countdown timer appeared beneath the text.

47:59:44

Somewhere, a dog barked and went quiet. Lena's phone buzzed once—unknown number, no voicemail. She ignored it. She drilled deeper into the alert, into the metadata she wasn't supposed to see.

There: PRV-EXEMPT, stamped in the lower corner. The same private exemption tag that had been on Mara's file. A profile pulled from sealed federal feeds. Somebody powerful watching a third-grade teacher in her tiny county.

Lena grabbed her jacket, her badge, her gun. She locked the cottage door and walked toward her car.

An envelope sat on the driver’s seat.

Thin, pale, no address.

She opened it with her thumbnail.

YOUR TIME IS CONFIRMED.

Not Amber's. Hers.

She felt her pulse everywhere at once. The night held its breath around her.

“Game on,” she whispered, and the timer kept falling someplace she couldn't see.

// END_TRANSCRIPT