Cracks in the Wall
The Arden Clinical Recovery Center did not look like a laboratory.
That was the point.
The building sat at the edge of the industrial belt, bracketed by warehouses and a half-abandoned logistics depot. The original factory bones were still there: long brick walls, high windows, a sawtooth roofline that caught gray light.
Arden's architects had softened it.
They'd painted the front in calm earth tones. Planted a few brave shrubs by the entrance. Hung a sign over the glass doors with a logo that suggested a rising sun and a path toward it.
Inside, everything was designed to say safe and controlled in the same breath.
Soft flooring. Rounded corners. Warm lighting that never dipped into shadow, never grew harsh enough to burn.
Mira Tran sat in the common room with a puzzle in front of her and a camera over her left shoulder.
The puzzle was a pastoral field with a river and a tree.
The camera was marked, discreetly, as a smoke detector.
"Not doing that right," said a voice behind her.
She didn't look up.
"That's the fun of it," she said. "There is no wrong way."
"Spoken like somebody who's never met Dr. Brant," the voice said.
That made her smile, despite herself.
Damian slid into the chair across from her. He was tall in the way that came with poor posture and stress, a body that had grown faster than his circumstances. He'd shaved his head after his second week at Arden, claiming it "felt cleaner."
Mira picked up a puzzle piece, turned it between her fingers.
"You're going to get flagged if you keep skipping the 'optional' sessions," she said.
"They're optional," he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
He sighed.
"They're 'optional,'" he corrected, fingers sketching quotation marks in the air. "Big difference."
Mira found the edge of the tree and slid the piece into place.
On the far wall, behind smoked glass, a screen flickered with their images and biometric readouts.
Dr. Isaac Brant watched the feed with professional disinterest and personal curiosity.
He liked puzzles.
Not the cardboard kind. The human kind.
On the screen, Mira's heart rate hovered in the mid-sixties. Damian's sat higher, faintly elevated as usual.
Brant tapped his pen against a tablet and glanced at the nurse beside him.
"Session log for Tran, Mira," he said. "Day seventy-one. Note: increased behavioral compliance in group environments. Subtle resistance markers remain in private sessions. Responds to peer interactions with mild relaxation. Recommend continued exposure to low-stress tasks with variable instruction ambiguity."
"Variable instruction ambiguity," the nurse repeated, tapping it into the system.
"It triggers decision anxiety in most of the 3B cluster," Brant said. "Tran pushes against it. I want to see how far."
"And Damian?" the nurse asked.
"Proctor, Damian," Brant corrected. "Use their full names in the logs. It matters later. Session log: Day thirty-nine. Continues to exhibit oppositional framing. Accepts group tasks, resists individual ones. Elevated baseline arousal. Responsive to authority when framed as peer protection rather than personal benefit. Flag for template matching against 'Protector' archetype in Phase II."
The nurse typed, lips moving silently as she kept pace with his words.
On the screen, Damian reached for a puzzle piece, then paused as Mira's hand got there first.
"You're hogging the corners," he said.
"Corners are life," she said. "Without them, it's just chaos."
Brant half-smiled at the phrasing.
"Schedule them for paired debrief later," he said. "I want to test environmental shift during co-regulation."
"Already on the calendar," the nurse said.
Brant leaned back.
He had the kind of face that people called "kind" until they noticed how carefully nothing in it moved without intention.
Behind the smoked glass, the camera's field panned, refocused, caught Mira's fingers tightening briefly on a piece before she forced them to relax.
"You're thinking too loud," Damian said.
"That's not a thing," she said.
"It is here," he said. "Walls hear it."
Mira glanced, just once, at the ceiling.
"You ever feel like we're on the wrong side of a mirror?" she asked softly.
Damian followed her gaze.
Then he looked straight at the section where the smoke detector sat.
His lips twitched.
"Every day," he said.
Brant's pen stopped.
"Rewind three seconds," he said.
The nurse dragged a finger on the tablet.
On the replay, Damian's glance toward the camera was unmistakable.
"You think he sees it?" the nurse asked.
"I think he suspects it," Brant said. "That's useful. Suspicion without confirmation increases stress but not rebellion. At least, not immediately."
"And if he gets confirmation?" the nurse asked.
Brant smiled faintly.
"Then we move him to Phase II," he said. "Or out of the study, if he proves too brittle."
"Out," the nurse repeated.
They both knew what that usually meant.
Brant turned away from the screen.
"Speaking of brittleness," he said. "What's our status on oversight?"
"Quarterly review in three weeks," the nurse said. "Ethics committee remote visit scheduled. Audit form pre-filled by the partner liaison. No red flags expected."
"Good," Brant said. "The last thing we need is someone asking why our 'recovery center' has more cameras than couches."
He checked his watch.
"Prep Tran and Proctor for afternoon," he said. "I want them both mildly unsettled before we introduce the new script."
"New script?" the nurse asked.
Brant's smile widened just enough to reach his eyes.
"Controlled panic," he said. "Let's see what they cling to when we pull the floor away."
---
In a windowless room three districts away, Elena Morrow clung to a pen.
The pen wasn't special. Plastic body, disposable refill.
She held it like a weapon anyway.
On the table in front of her, a projected spreadsheet glowed faintly. Noor's work, mostly. Kieran's notes in a different color. Annotations from two regional liaisons who had never set foot in a Forge facility but liked to talk like they had.
At the top of the sheet: ARDEN – SUBJECT PRIORIZATION MODEL (TEMPORARY).
Below that, columns.
ID codes. Age. Legal status. Intake source. Psych profile. Risk of harm if left in place. Risk of harm if removed suddenly. Likelihood of later whistleblowing. Strategic value.
It was the ugliest kind of triage.
Elena rubbed at her temple with the heel of her hand.
Noor's face hovered on the screen hanging above the table, projected from a secure feed in another building.
She looked tired in a way that suggested math, not fear.
"Top third," Noor said. "If we can relocate or reclassify the top third before Kovács publishes, we reduce both immediate harm and long-term exposure risk by roughly forty percent."
"Forty percent of a nightmare is still a nightmare," Elena said.
"Welcome to our lives," Noor said.
Kieran sat at the far end of the table.
He had his chair pushed back slightly, one boot braced against the table leg, arms folded.
He had been silent for the last five minutes while Elena and Noor argued about one subject entry flagged "high volatility / low salvage."
"I want Tran on the list," he said suddenly.
Elena glanced down.
"Mira," she said. "Twenty-four. Community college dropout, chronic depression, referred for 'resistant behavioral therapy' after multiple suicide attempts and noncompliance with meds. High cognitive flexibility, high emotional attunement, moderate defiance."
Noor's cursor highlighted the row.
"She's already in the top third," Noor said. "I marked her as 'priority removal' if possible. Not because she's useful, but because she's likely to see through the program and talk about it later if she survives."
"So we move her," Kieran said.
"If we can," Noor said. "We don't own Arden, remember. We influence it through partner agreements. To reclassify a subject as 'nonviable candidate' and have her transferred to a less harmful facility, we need signed off paperwork from three people and a plausible justification."
"Make one," he said.
"Working on it," Noor said. "But every shell we use to launder that move is one we can't use for someone else."
"Damian?" he asked.
Noor scrolled.
"Proctor, Damian," she said. "Twenty-two. Juvenile record, petty crime escalating to assault. Court-mandated 'treatment' in lieu of longer sentence. High aggression, high loyalty to perceived in-group, extremely sensitive to betrayal. Template match to several older conditioning models."
"And?" Kieran said.
"And Arden's staff love him," Noor said. "People like him are very educational. For them."
"Put him in the top tier too," he said.
Noor's cursor hovered.
"He's flagged 'high risk if removed,'" she said. "If we yank him fast without a believable legal path, he's likely to implode. Or explode. Possibly literally. That's not a trivial consideration."
"So we leave him?" Kieran asked.
"We consider him separately," Noor said. "My recommendation is to focus first on those we can extract quietly, with minimal fuss. Tran, two or three others in her cluster, a handful in the older cohort who can be shifted to community-based programs under new labels."
"And the rest?" he asked.
"Stay," Noor said. "For now. Under scrutiny."
He stared at the spreadsheet.
Elena watched his jaw tighten.
"This is what you signed up for," she said softly.
"I signed up to reduce the damage," he said.
"This is that," she said. "Reduced damage, not removed damage. We don't have enough leverage to pull them all out without breaking the whole façade, and if we break the façade now, we lose any chance at touching Forge proper. You know this, Holt."
He hated when she used his last name like that.
It put distance where there didn't need to be any.
"Arden could be shut down completely," he said.
"It will be disrupted," Noor said. "Publicly. Lawsuits, investigations, funding reviews. But structures like this don't die. They molt. If we rush it, the people who built it will take their favorite tools and build something worse somewhere else, faster than we can track."
"Slow is better," Elena said. "For once."
He leaned back, exhaled.
"You sound like Krell," he said.
"Insult," she said. "But accurate in this context."
Noor's mouth twitched.
"For what it's worth," Noor said, "I've weighted the model heavily toward people like Tran. People who didn't choose this in any meaningful way. Court-order victims. Family-dumped collateral. The ones who still think this is their fault."
"And the ones who did choose it?" he asked. "The ones like me?"
"They go in a different column," Noor said.
He didn't ask what the header of that column was.
He already knew.
---
Amelia's editor stared at the folder like it might bite him.
It probably would, eventually.
"Arden Clinical," he said slowly. "You realize how this looks, right?"
"Like a scandal that's been laundering itself through ethics committees," Amelia said.
They sat in a glass-walled conference room, the kind that made everything feel like a pitch even when it wasn't. Outside, the newsroom hummed: phones, keyboards, the quiet desperation of too little time and too many words left to file.
Her editor, Raj, had been doing this longer than she had. His hair was going gray in ways he pretended not to notice.
He flipped through the printed pages.
"So," he said. "We have an allegedly 'experimental' clinic. A lot of stamped approvals. A vague but deeply unsettling reference to 'compliance optimization' in a Phase II protocol. Payment trails that go through two holding companies and end up at Aegis. And a source you cannot name who 'shot the machine first.'"
"You could phrase that differently," Amelia said.
"Can I?" he asked. "Because that's what this reads like, Amelia. Shadow source. Off-the-record connection to another story where a guy ended up dead in an alley and you didn't."
"He saved my life," she said, before she could swallow the words.
Raj looked up.
"Doesn't make him holy," he said.
"I never said it did," she said. "I said he's the only one giving us something we can hit without killing more people on the way."
Raj leaned back.
"You believe him," he said.
"I don't trust him," she said. "That's different. But I believe the data. I've cross-checked the exempted ethics approvals. I've confirmed the shell companies. I've talked to two former Arden staff who thought they were signing up for progressive therapy and left because they felt 'watched.'"
"And patients?" he asked.
She hesitated.
"No direct interviews yet," she said. "Arden's families are either complicit, ashamed, or scared. We're not ready to knock on those doors cold."
"So we're doing the institutional side first," he said.
"Yes," she said. "We start with what we can prove on paper: a facility that has more cameras than any other clinic in its category, bizarrely high security for a 'recovery' center, and a money trail that links it to Aegis in a way they'll struggle to spin."
He drummed his fingers on the table.
"Legal is going to have a stroke," he said.
"Legal always has a stroke," she said. "That's their job."
He huffed.
"You know Aegis will come down on us hard," he said. "Injunctions. 'Defamation.' The usual. They'll call it a smear campaign against 'innovative therapy.'"
"Let them," she said. "We're not saying they're torturing puppies in the basement. We're saying there's enough smoke to justify a public fire drill."
"Catchy," he said. "Use that in the subhead."
He looked at the folder again.
"You said there's more," he said. "Stuff you're not bringing me yet."
She met his gaze.
"Yes," she said.
"Forge," he said quietly.
The word sounded wrong in the bright, glass room.
"You know," she said.
"I know enough to know you're walking on landmines," he said. "You told me about the datacenter fire. The shredded logs. The North River mess. I put two and two together and got 'thing my reporter is not ready to print without becoming collateral.'"
She exhaled.
"Arden is part of that," she said. "Just not the core."
"So we treat this as chapter one," he said. "We hit the clinic. We establish the pattern: security company money funding ethically dubious behavior programs. We build a track record of being right. When we get to the deeper stuff, people will already know we don't swing wild."
"Exactly," she said.
He tapped the folder.
"Okay," he said. "You get two weeks."
"Two weeks?" she repeated. "They'll start shredding the moment we email for comment."
"I didn't say we wait two weeks to contact them," he said. "I said you have two weeks to build the piece. We send the first list of questions in three days. Give them just enough rope, not enough warning."
She nodded slowly.
"Three days," she said.
"That gives you time to expand your sourcing," he said. "Talk to more ex-staff. Find one family willing to go on background. Find someone who walked out of Arden with more questions than answers and is ready to talk if we protect their name."
"Those people are scared," she said.
"So are we," he said. "That's how you know it matters."
He closed the folder and pushed it back toward her.
"Work with legal from the start," he said. "No surprises. And, Amelia?"
"Yeah?" she said.
"Keep the other stuff off our servers," he said. "Whatever this Forge is, I don't want it on any system we can't physically throw in a river."
She managed a thin smile.
"Already ahead of you," she said.
"Good," he said. "Go make some powerful people nervous."
She stood, folder in hand, and left the glass box.
Outside, the newsroom noise swallowed her.
Three days, she thought.
That was both more and less time than anyone deserved.
---
Lena's old contact met her in a laundromat that smelled like detergent and despair.
The machines were half full, their rumble a constant undercurrent. A television in the corner played a game show with the sound off.
Lena sat on a plastic chair, her basket of neatly folded nothing beside her, and watched the door.
The woman who came in looked like she'd taken three buses and a fight to get there.
Short hair, dyed an exhausted black. Lines around her mouth that hadn't been there the last time Lena saw her. A jacket that tried to be respectable and failed.
She stopped when she saw Lena.
For a second, neither of them moved.
Then the woman snorted.
"You look terrible," she said.
"You look worse," Lena said.
The woman laughed, sharp and sudden.
"Yeah," she said. "Life's been a delight."
She dropped into the chair opposite.
Up close, Lena could see the small tremor in her hands.
"Maris," Lena said.
"Don't say my name like it's supposed to be a ghost story," Maris said. "I get enough of that from the mirror."
"You were supposed to be in another country," Lena said.
"I was supposed to be a lot of things," Maris said. "Turns out 'supposed to' doesn't pay rent."
They had grown up together in the Holcomb home.
Same schedule. Same punishments. Different responses.
Lena had run.
Maris had stayed.
"So," Maris said, leaning back. "You call me out of whatever mess I'm in now, speak the old place out loud, and you don't even bring coffee. Rude."
"I didn't know if you'd come," Lena said.
Maris shrugged.
"I thought about not," she said. "But curiosity is a disease, and I've always been sick."
She looked Lena over again, slower.
"You own the bar now?" she asked.
"Yeah," Lena said. "Bought it off a man who drank himself into a comfortable grave."
"Fitting," Maris said. "You live upstairs, like you used to?"
Lena nodded.
"Funny," Maris said. "They never could get us to stay in assigned beds. And now you choose to sleep over the same floor."
"I didn't know when I moved in," Lena said.
"And now?" Maris asked.
"Now I can't tell if I'm staying to prove they don't own it or because I don't know how to leave," Lena said.
Maris's mouth twitched.
"Both," she said. "It's always both."
They sat in the hum of dryers for a moment.
"You said someone told you," Maris said. "About Forge. About the…layers under the home."
"Yeah," Lena said. "Man who rents from me now."
"Quiet type?" Maris asked. "Walks like he's counting exits?"
"You've seen him," Lena said.
"Once or twice," Maris said. "Thought he was either a cop or something worse. Glad to see my instincts haven't decayed completely."
"He says there's still a program," Lena said. "Different buildings. Same bones. Kids in one place. Older people in another. Testing how far you can push people before they break."
Maris looked away, jaw working.
"You needed him to tell you that?" she asked.
"I needed him to tell me it had a name," Lena said.
Maris barked a humorless laugh.
"What difference does a name make?" she said.
"It lets me point," Lena said. "Even if I can't hit yet."
Maris studied her.
"So why drag me into it?" she asked. "Holcomb already stole enough of my time. I got out. Sort of. In my own crooked way. Why stir it?"
"Because they haven't stopped," Lena said. "And because people are circling the old ground. Journalists. Internal people. Whatever he is. If the floor opens, I'm not letting it swallow me alone."
"So you want…what?" Maris asked. "Reunion? Support group? Trauma karaoke?"
Lena held her gaze.
"I want to know if there were others," she said. "Kids who left. Kids who were moved. Names you heard after I climbed out the window."
Maris's shoulders dropped.
"There were always others," she said. "Just not where we could see them. Basement programs. Annexes. They'd talk about 'the Orchard' sometimes. Kids who were 'ripe' getting picked. Never saw them again."
"The Orchard," Lena repeated.
"Stupid name," Maris said. "They liked metaphors. Easier to swallow than 'we're sorting children into tool and trash.'"
"Do you know where it was?" Lena asked.
Maris shook her head.
"Just that it wasn't in Holcomb," she said. "They'd come through sometimes. Take a few. Move them. The ones who followed rules best. Or the ones who fought hardest. That part never made sense."
Lena's fingers curled against the plastic seat.
"What happened to you after I left?" she asked.
Maris gave her a look.
"You want the short version?" she asked.
"I want the true one," Lena said.
"True is long," Maris said. "But fine. They kept me. For a while. Tried to make me into one of the 'big kids' who enforced rules. Didn't stick. I liked breaking them more. Eventually they transferred me. Another home. Another program. Less talk about 'family,' more talk about 'performance metrics.' After I aged out, they 'helped' me find work."
"In what?" Lena asked, even though she already knew.
"Security," Maris said. "Driving. Watching. Standing in corners while men with better coats made decisions."
"Forge," Lena said.
"Didn't call it that," Maris said. "But the smell was the same."
"How'd you get out?" Lena asked.
Maris's eyes darkened.
"I didn't," she said. "They just stopped paying attention. Programs ended. New ones began. Nobody remembered the girl from Holcomb who still knew how to sleep with her shoes on."
She rubbed her hands on her jeans.
"You're stirring ghosts, Lena," she said. "Theirs and ours. That's not safe work."
"Nothing about our lives has been safe," Lena said. "At least this way, if something falls, maybe it hits them too."
"You sound like the ones who stayed," Maris said.
"I didn't stay," Lena said.
"You stayed enough," Maris said. "We all did."
A machine dinged.
Someone across the laundromat got up to empty it.
Maris watched the man pull out a tangle of clothes and thought about files, names, lives.
"You said there are journalists," Maris said. "You planning to talk to them?"
"Not yet," Lena said. "Right now, I'm trying not to get turned into leverage. My tenant's already using me for that."
"The quiet one?" Maris asked.
"Yeah," Lena said.
"You trust him?" Maris asked.
"No," Lena said. "But I trust that he hates the people who built this more than he likes following orders."
Maris tilted her head.
"That's something," she said.
"Not enough," Lena said. "But it's a start."
Maris picked at a loose thread on her sleeve.
"If the floor opens," she said slowly, "and Holcomb comes spilling out into daylight… you call me. I'm not going to watch that from the sidelines."
"You sure?" Lena asked. "You sounded pretty committed to ignoring it."
"I was," Maris said. "Then you called. And now I'm remembering the Orchard. And the way they used to say some kids were 'too valuable to waste on ordinary lives.'"
She spat the last three words like they hurt.
Lena nodded.
"I'll call," she said.
Maris stood.
"Don't get dead before I get my chance to yell at them," she said.
"No promises," Lena said.
Maris smiled without humor.
"Good," she said. "Promises never meant much in that place anyway."
She left, the door chiming behind her.
Lena sat a few moments longer, listening to the spin cycles.
Then she picked up her empty basket and went back to her bar.
---
The email hit Aegis's general counsel's inbox at 4:12 p.m.
SUBJECT: Media Inquiry – Arden Clinical Recovery Center / Ethics Exemptions / Funding Sources.
The body was polite in the way of people who planned to gut someone with their own reply.
Raj had signed it with the outlet's name, attaching a list of carefully worded questions.
By 4:19 p.m., the email had been forwarded to three other addresses.
By 4:23 p.m., someone in Aegis's internal risk team had flagged a short phrase and attached a different name to the chain.
Forge handled a lot of things quietly.
Media inquiries were not usually one of them.
But when a journalist asked about "compliance programming," and when that phrase matched internal tags that were supposed to live behind firewalls, it triggered a subroutine.
Sebastian Krell read the forwarded message at 4:27 p.m.
He smiled.
"Accelerated timeline," he said.
Regan, seated across from him in the conference room, frowned.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Kovács," he said, sliding the tablet toward her. "She's knocked on Arden's door."
Regan scanned the email.
"She's more specific than we expected," Regan said. "Someone fed her terminology."
Krell steepled his fingers.
"That would be our dear Holt," he said. "And Morrow. They've chosen their sacrificial limb."
Regan's lips tightened.
"Can we block publication?" she asked. "Injunction, at least. Temporary gag."
"We can try," Krell said. "But doing so too aggressively will only convince her she's found something worth bleeding for."
"So we let it run?" Regan asked.
"We shape what it hits," Krell said. "Arden was always going to be a loss, sooner or later. This way, we can use the disruption to cover other moves."
"Such as?" she asked.
"Such as moving certain high-risk subjects," he said. "And closing a few intermediate nodes that outlived their usefulness."
Regan's gaze sharpened.
"Burning files," she said.
"Consolidating," he said.
She looked back at the email.
"And Holt?" she asked. "His game?"
"Still interesting," Krell said. "He's chosen erosion, as Morrow hoped. The question now is whether he can maintain that choice when the pressure increases."
Regan's mouth curved slightly.
"And if he can't?" she asked.
"Then we recalibrate," Krell said. "We always do."
He tapped the table lightly.
"Inform Morrow and Noor that our window has shrunk," he said. "They have three days at most before public scrutiny lands on Arden. I want their triage list finalized by tonight. And tell Holt…"
He paused.
"…tell Holt the test just got harder," he finished.
Regan nodded.
She stood, smoothed her jacket, and left.
Krell looked back at the email.
He admired Kovács's economy.
She had asked the right questions.
Now he just had to make sure the answers went where he wanted them to.
---
Kieran's phone buzzed as he stepped out of Holcomb's tram stop.
Elena's name flashed.
He took the call.
"They sent the questions," she said without preamble. "Aegis. Official inquiry on Arden. She didn't waste time."
"How long?" he asked.
"Three days, maximum, before they publish something," Elena said. "Maybe less if Aegis tries to stall or stonewall too obviously."
"I thought Raj said two weeks," he said.
"I told you not to rely on optimistic editors," she said. "The second they sent that email, our clock started bleeding."
He looked down the street.
Len's sign was visible at the end, slightly crooked.
"I'll go back to Arden tonight," he said.
"No," she said.
"Yes," he said. "They'll start sanitizing. We need eyes inside before they repaint the walls."
"You're not on the Arden clearance list," she said. "You'll stick out."
"I always stick out," he said. "That's never stopped me."
"We can move some subjects with paper alone," she said. "We don't need you walking through their halls like a walking audit."
"You need someone to see who they don't want to move," he said.
There was a pause.
"I hate when you're right," she said.
"It's rare enough," he said.
"Fine," she said. "No direct confrontation. You go in as an Aegis security consultant. Short-notice inspection of perimeter protocols. Noor will feed you a temporary credential. You look at their faces. You tell me which names need to be bumped up the list, even if Noor's model says otherwise."
"And if they smell the lie?" he asked.
"Then you'll be among your own kind," she said. "You can improvise."
He ended the call and started walking.
The underpass didn't smell like old rain anymore.
It smelled like concrete dust and fresh tension.
The walls were starting to crack.
He had chosen erosion.
The question was how long he could keep the building from falling on the people he'd decided to protect.
He reached the bar and pushed the door open.
Lena looked up from polishing a glass.
"You look like you got bad news," she said.
"I got a deadline," he said.
"Those are worse," she said.
He almost smiled.
"Tell me about the Orchard," he said.
Her fingers stilled.
"How do you know that name?" she asked.
"You're not the only one who talks to ghosts," he said.
She set the glass down slowly.
"Close the door," she said. "If we're going to dig that deep, I don't want the street listening."
He did as she asked.
Outside, Holcomb went on pretending nothing under its feet had changed.
Inside, the cracks widened.