Inhabited - chapter 14 (with images) (Patreon)

The salt from the water crackers leaves a dry, chalky film on the inside of her cheeks. She drinks tap water from a heavy glass to clear it, but the water tastes faintly of old pipes and metal.

Second morning. The nausea is no longer an ambush. It's an established geography. She knows where the drop-offs are now. Standing up too quickly from the mattress. Bending at the waist to pick up a dropped sock. The smell of the kimchi in the refrigerator. She avoids all of it, moving through the apartment with the careful, sliding steps of someone carrying a full cup of hot liquid.

Her bladder wakes her before the nausea does. She's already learning to account for this.

She stands at the butcher-block island. The kitchen is cold. The radiator in the corner clanks, spitting steam, but the heat hasn't reached the center of the room yet.

She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. Meg's body is redirecting everything it has to somewhere low and insistent inside her, and there's nothing left for anything else. Her heart thuds in her ears just from standing in the kitchen. Her breasts are swollen, heavy, the ache from the underwire still present along the sides from yesterday. She can feel her own pulse in them, which she couldn't before, and which still doesn't feel like a thing that should be possible.

She has a call she can't put off. Twenty minutes.

Jillian. An editor at a mid-tier digital outlet that publishes long-form cultural commentary and tech pieces.

The freelance fear lives in the jaw. She can feel where Meg holds it.

She pulls up the notes Meg made on the NovaSphere suppression story. The structure is loose. Meg was planning to pitch a piece about corporate culture, about how user complaints get systematically ignored by PR departments. A soft angle. A cultural critique of virtual spaces.

She reads the bullet points. It's completely inadequate.

The story isn't about PR. It's about a hardcoded override in a sync protocol that's trapping human consciousness in a transition state.

She drinks more ginger water. She can't pitch the code architecture. Meg is a food writer who occasionally writes about tech culture. Jillian would never buy a deep-dive forensic analysis of a server load-balancing failure from a woman whose last published piece was three thousand words on the revival of one French pastry in Brooklyn.

She has to bridge the gap. She has to use Meg's voice to sell a story Meg hadn't realized was that dangerous.

The phone buzzes on the wood counter. Jillian's name.

She clears her throat. The vocal cords feel tight.

"Hi, Jillian."

"Meg. Good morning." Jillian's voice is brisk, professional, already moving to the next thing. "I have ten minutes before a content meeting. Walk me through the tech accountability thing you emailed about last week. NovaSphere, right?"

"Yes." She paces away from the island, the phone pressed to her ear. The movement helps with the rolling sensation in her gut. "It's about the developer forums. The way NovaSphere is handling user reports of dissociation during extended sessions."

"People getting dizzy in VR." A dismissal.

"It isn't fatigue." She stops pacing. She looks out the window at the bare branches of a tree scratching against the brick of the building opposite. She drops Meg's cautious freelancer deference entirely. "It's a localized sync failure. The system traps them in the transition white-out. And they aren't just deleting the complaints. They're shadow-banning the users who report it."

Silence on the line for a three-count. The typing in the background stops.

"Shadow-banning."

"Yes. A coordinated removal." She leans back against the wall. The cold plaster feels good through the wool. "It's not an automated moderation filter catching keywords. It's a manual, directed suppression strategy coming straight from communications. They're actively burying a safety failure."

"Can you prove it's manual?"

"I have a source." The notes she'd read yesterday backed it up. The off-the-record conversation Meg logged. "Someone who can share inside information, get me to others with more direct knowledge."

"Who?"

"Off the record for now."

Jillian lets out a short breath. "Meg, you write about restaurants. You write about the intersection of food and memory. This is investigative tech reporting. If we go after NovaSphere with claims of a coordinated cover-up, their legal team will bury us in paper before noon. I can't assign this to a freelancer without a bulletproof paper trail."

The nausea surges, sharp acid. She swallows it down.

"The trail leads to the board." She doesn't have proof of this in Meg's files, but she has the decision memo she found as Diane. She knows Halston’s signature is on it. Board level. "If the comms department is executing a manual wipe of safety data, it requires sign-off from the executive level. They're hiding a systemic hardware flaw. I just need the green light to develop the source."

Another silence. Much longer.

"Two weeks," Jillian says finally. "You have two weeks to get the source on the record, or at least confirmed by a secondary point of contact. If you can't, I'm killing the piece. And Meg? Do not misrepresent yourself to NovaSphere PR. If they call me complaining you're harassing their engineers, we're done."

"Understood."

"Send me a revised outline." The line clicks dead.

She lowers the phone.

Her hand is shaking slightly. She committed Meg to something. She isn't sure Meg would have taken it this far.

She drinks the last of the cold ginger water.

The screen on her phone lights up. Melodic ringtone.

Dom.

The shape of him arrives. Tall, architectural salvage, a laugh that starts in his chest, hands always a little chalky from the work, never fully clean. And the other thing. The dense, unmovable fact sitting in the center of her lower abdomen.

He is the father.

The relationship ended. That's the only other piece she gets. A clean break, but recent. There's no lingering warmth attached to the memory of him, but no visceral hatred either. Just absence. A space where a person used to be.

She stares at the name.

She doesn't have the emotional history.

She answers.

"Meg."

His voice is deep, rough at the edges. The sound of a man standing in a loud room. A saw whines somewhere behind him and cuts off.

"Hi."

A heavy, static-filled pause. He wasn't expecting her to pick up.

"How are you?" The tone is guarded, tired, laced with an exhaustion that implies they've had versions of this conversation before.

"I need to tell you something."

She realizes, entirely too late, that she's walked into a minefield without a map. Meg had set a boundary. Meg was protecting herself from exactly this tone of voice. And she just breached it.

But she's already here. She can't just hang up.

"I'm pregnant."

The silence that hits the line is absolute.

The background noise of the salvage yard seems to vanish. She can hear him inhale, a sharp, ragged pull of air.

"What?" The word is barely a whisper.

"Six weeks." She delivers the number flatly. She doesn't know how to soften it. She doesn't know what Meg would sound like saying this.

"Are you…" He stops. He clears his throat. The flatness is gone, replaced by a hollow shock. "Is it mine?"

"Yes."

"Jesus." The sound of a heavy boot scraping concrete. He's pacing. "Meg. Why didn't you. When did you find out?"

"Recently."

"And you're just telling me now? Like this?" The anger flares back up, sharp and defensive.

"I thought you should know."

"You thought I should know." He repeats it, bitter. "That's it? You thought I should know? What are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet." The truth. Meg doesn't know. She is in a holding pattern.

"You don't know." He lets out a harsh, humorless laugh. "Right. Because we don't talk anymore. Because you decided we were done talking."

A small fragment surfaces, late. She ended it. Meg was the one who walked away.

Her stomach drops. She just told a man whose heart Meg broke that Meg is pregnant with his child, and offered him nothing. No cushion, no grief, nothing.

"I have to go."

"Meg, wait, don't-"

She hangs up.

She drops the phone onto the butcher block. It clatters loud against the wood.

She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes until sparks bloom in the darkness. Her heart is hammering against the heavy wool. She's breathing fast, shallow.

Her hands are shaking. Both of them. She hadn't noticed she was clenching them.

She grabs the laptop and shoves it into the canvas tote. She pulls on the scuffed leather boots, fighting the laces. She gets the first one knotted and sits there with the second one in her hands and finds she has completely lost track of what she was doing. The lace is in her fingers. She stares at it. She knows what a boot is. She knows her own intention from thirty seconds ago. The information just isn't connecting to anything. She ties the lace. She sits on the floor of the hallway for another moment after the boot is on, not because she needs to, but because getting up requires a decision and the decision isn't quite there.

She gets up. She walks out onto the street.

The cold air is a relief. She walks without a destination for twenty minutes, letting the rhythm of her boots on the pavement bleed off the excess adrenaline. The Park Slope sidewalks are uneven, pushed up by tree roots. She navigates them automatically. The body knows where the cracks are.

She finds a small, dimly lit coffee shop on Fifth Avenue.

It's mostly empty. A few people hunched over glowing screens. She orders a peppermint tea and takes it to a small wooden table in the back, facing the wall.

She pulls the laptop out. She has to move the investigation forward.

She opens the secure messaging app.

She pulls up the notes from Meg's files. The tech press source. The one who'd confirmed the forum suppression was coordinated.

She types out a message. I'm pushing forward on the NovaSphere piece. My editor is asking for on-the-record confirmation of the manual wipe strategy. You mentioned another comms employee who left on bad terms. I need a name. She hits send.

She wraps her hands around the hot paper cup. The peppermint is sharp, cutting through the lingering nausea.

She waits. Ten minutes pass.

A reply.

You're poking a hornet's nest. I told you they have a dedicated team scrubbing the developer forums. It's not automated policy. Direct order from the top.

From the top meaning what.

Meaning the room with windows. It doesn't get that aggressive without sign-off two levels above comms.

She reads it twice. Board-level. She has it now, on a line, even if it isn't a quote. Halston sits in her head. The name from the memo.

She types back. I need the person who was in the room.

If I give you this name, you leave me out of it. Completely. My name doesn't even exist in your notes.

Agreed.

A minute passes. The typing indicator flashes, stops, flashes again.

Her name is Sarah Lin. Mid-level coordinator in Platform Communications. She pushed back against the shadow-banning directive three months ago. They managed her out two weeks later. She's currently working freelance PR for a startup in Dumbo.

She stares at the screen. Sarah Lin. A name attached to a real person, a real location. A direct link to the interior of the communications department Halston had weaponized.

Does she have documentation?

I don't know what she took with her. But she knows where the bodies are buried. Good luck. Don't contact me about this again.

The chat window closes. The user goes offline.

She sits back in the wooden chair.

She has a vector. A specific, actionable target. Sarah Lin.

The mental machinery begins to turn, stripping away the PR context and framing the problem as a network infiltration. If Sarah Lin was managed out, her credentials would have been revoked. But if she'd pushed back against the shadow-banning, she might have logged the internal directives. She might know which server hosted the suppression algorithms.

She stares at the blank wall of the coffee shop, tracing the architecture of the NovaSphere intranet in her mind. The load-balancing failure that traps the user. The override protocol that ignores the biological feedback loop. The communications directive that scrubs the evidence. She can almost see the whole shape.

A barista drops a tray. The clatter snaps her out of it. The clock on the laptop says she's been here forty minutes. Her tea is ice cold.

She closes the laptop.

The walk back to the apartment takes much longer than it should. The weight in her thighs is absolute now. The heavy wool sweater feels like wet cement dragging at her shoulders. The swollen, bruised ache in her breasts throbs in time with her boots hitting the pavement.

She unlocks the door. Steps into the kitchen. The light is different now. Golden afternoon shadows stretch long and thin across the knife scars in the butcher block.

The phone sits exactly where she left it.

She picks it up. Three missed calls. Two from Dom. One unknown.

A voicemail icon. She doesn't listen to it. She doesn't have any more capacity for Dom today. She sets the phone back down on the wood.

She walks into the bedroom. The bed is unmade, sheets in a pale knot.

She pulls the heavy sweater over her head and drops it on the floorboards. She reaches behind her back, fingers finding the metal hooks of the bra by feel, and undoes the clasp.

The clasp comes open and the relief is immediate. Red lines across her ribs where the wire sat. Her breasts settle heavily against her chest, weight she hadn't quite registered as weight until it stopped being held. The marks on her skin are slow to fade.

She stands there. She doesn't reach for the sleep shirt.

The air in the room is cool against her bare skin and her nipples respond before she notices the air. They tighten and keep tightening past the point she expects, past what the temperature alone would do. The signal runs down through her in a clean direct line. She puts a hand flat against her own sternum, just below the collarbone. Skin warm under her palm. She moves the hand slowly down, across the soft curve of one breast, fingers spread wide. The touch pulls the nipple tighter. A low, answering warmth moves from there down to her pelvis, dense and unhurried. It has been building all day under the wool, under the wire.

She isn't trying to do anything with it yet. It is just what the body is doing, this body, today, a constant rerouted heat that turns out to have a direction after all.

She slides a hand down the front of her waistband.

She's wetter than she remembers from any of the others. Thicker, heavier. Her fingers slip easily, find the shape of her clit, settle there. She presses, steady, mechanical. Not trying to feel it. Trying to work it.

Her body responds. Swells, warms. The heat is immediate. She closes her eyes, drops her pants, brings her chin toward her chest. Pushes her focus down, trying to chase whatever this is into the place that ends the day. She moves her fingers in a fast, tight circle.

The nausea rolls. A hot, sour surge of acid climbs the back of her throat.

She swallows it, clenches her jaw, moves her hand faster. But her head won't stay put. Brigid's face across the table. The sound of Dom's breath going out of him. You thought I should know. And underneath those, something more disorienting, a body-memory she has no claim to: she can almost feel what his hands felt like.

She presses harder.

The heat hollows out. The friction is just friction now, numb and irritating. The nausea comes back sharper. A punishing twist under her ribs.

She stops moving her hand.

She stands in the quiet bedroom, her chest heaving, the sour taste of old ginger and bile coating the back of her tongue. The attempt is dead.

She pulls her hand out and wipes her fingers on the edge of the tangled top sheet. She picks up the cotton sleep shirt from the chair and pulls it over her head. The soft fabric settles against her skin.

She climbs into the bed.

The nausea hums, a low vibration in the background. She lies on her side, knees pulled up slightly toward her chest to ease the cramping in her stomach.

She thinks about Meg. The woman whose skin she's wearing. A woman who was trying to hold her life together in the dark, who had built a fragile, precarious shelter out of silence, and who is going to return to a reality completely upended by a stranger who didn't bother to learn the rules.

She presses a hand flat against her lower belly. The flesh is soft, warm.

The silence in the apartment is heavy. She closes her eyes, waiting for the nausea to crest and fall, trapped in the biology of a life she is actively destroying.