June woke Mara by saying her name instead of pulling the bell.
She said it only once. Mara came out of sleep with the sound still inside the dream she’d been having, a customer asking why his key no longer fit. Across Eleven, the girl’s blanket lay folded over her knees.
The amber indicator under the cot was steady.
“Something wrong?”
“I want to hold your hand.”
Mara sat up. Her own hand had already moved off the bed toward the gap between them. She put it on the mattress instead.
Outside the open inner door, Bea lifted her head. Omar stood behind her chair, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. Their waking handoff had been interrupted before Bea left. Both were still there.
June had noticed Mara’s movement.
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
“You told me.”
The girl nodded, then shook her head, then pulled the blanket higher. “It keeps getting worse when I try not to think anything.”
Mara checked the ordinary latch and the cot light before sitting in the chair. The floor felt cold beneath her socks. Nobody else had touched June in the night. Luis had written that the fading did not recur while the cradle stayed connected, but stable fingers did not make every feeling inside a person bearable.
“What are you trying not to think?”
“The blue place. The song. All the people.”
“They’re thoughts.”
“What if they aren’t mine?”
Mara looked at Bea, who quietly offered to wake Luis. She nodded.
June watched that exchange. “Don’t get everybody.”
“Just Luis.”
“Not the man with the bus.”
“No.”
She eased her knees down an inch. Mara could see how carefully she was watching her own hands.
Luis came upstairs wearing his jacket inside out. He corrected it in the passage, where June could see him make the small, foolish error. Mara was grateful he didn’t arrive looking as though he had known the right answer in his sleep.
He asked whether she wanted the song. She shook her head.
“Something else?”
“I don’t want to be in there.”
“Where?”
Her gaze shifted from his face to the dark phone on the bedside table. “When I remember. There’s a door, and if I don’t stop before it opens I won’t know which side I’m on.”
Mara wrote that down later. For now she let the notebook remain shut.
Luis placed a wooden chair beside hers. “Can we stay here with you while it passes?”
June studied the space between the chairs and the cot.
“Yes.”
They sat until morning without trying to supply the missing hand.
***
The first argument came over the kitchen stove.
Tessa was warming her stiff fingers beside it when Dragan asked how much reserve the girl used. Mara answered because the number belonged to everybody’s shared shortage. Two extra units for the crude cradle, beyond the room’s normal ward.
Dragan set his empty cup on the counter.
“Every night?”
“While it needs this fitting.”
“How long?”
“We don’t know yet.”
He looked toward Tariq, who had been calculating the van’s return route on a torn road atlas. Their agreed stop would be due for review that afternoon. Staying alive here had not canceled every other person they wanted to find.
“Then why did you sell four gallons yesterday?”
Mara started to explain the medicine. Ruth interrupted her from the table.
“For me.”
Dragan’s mouth opened, then closed.
Ruth held his gaze. She wasn’t asking him to be ashamed of a question. “We can talk about whether that was worth it. But talk about me while I’m here.”
The argument changed shape. It became a list of actual trips, actual patients, the fuel in cans instead of the general feeling that Mara was spending everybody’s future. Tessa put the measured remainder beside the generator schedule. Noah said the broken upstairs landing could be braced without running a power saw. Gideon said lunch would be late if people kept using the stove as a council table.
Mara moved her chair out of his way.
No one made a grand bargain. Dragan agreed to delay an engine test until after Ruth’s next refrigerator check. Ruth agreed to have her chosen care needs included in the ordinary stock review instead of leaving Mara to guess privately. Tariq took the atlas back to Ten.
The coffee was mostly hot water. They drank it anyway.
From the stair, June watched the cups pass from hand to hand. Luis stood far enough away to give her space and near enough that no one could honestly call her unsupervised.
She asked Mara whether there was work she could do without touching anyone’s things.
“People’s things aren’t all dangerous.”
“My things might be.”
Mara found a stack of clean towels from the upper shelf and put them on an empty chair. June folded them alone while Omar moved each finished pile after she stepped away. It was cumbersome. It produced towels folded with a fierce little crease down the middle.
Emmett pointed at one and said it looked like a boat.
June made the next one into an actual boat. He laughed without coming closer.
***
Luis’s phone would need charging before another recording could be used. Tessa gave it a short place on the generator schedule, then brought down Arlo’s small handheld recorder from the van supplies. Its batteries were weak but usable; it had been intended for his school interviews, not to keep a person anchored in the world.
Arlo did not surrender it automatically.
“Can you leave the first file?”
“Is it important?” Mara asked.
“My grandmother.”
She returned the recorder to him. He moved the file to the van’s old laptop while the generator was running, checked that it played there, then brought the recorder back with an empty section marked on a piece of masking tape.
Mara thought that exchange mattered more than a generous offer made without knowing its cost.
They invited short recordings rather than calling for memories. People could read a recipe, describe the room, say what day they believed it was. They did not have to name a loved person or disclose a loss. There was no promise that June would improve. Nobody would touch her during playback, and nobody’s signoff would be used as permission for something they had not understood.
Nia refused.
She said it sharply, with her photograph already in her hand, though nobody had asked for the photograph. Mara told her she didn’t have to explain. Nia left the kitchen, then came back a minute later to put two folded towels on the shelf.
Tessa recorded the room numbers in the order she walked past them. Sofia read the first page of a battered children’s book without performing the voices. Dennis described repairing a leaking tap and spent thirty seconds arguing with Ruth in the background about which tap it had been.
June listened to that one twice.
“It sounds like here,” she said.
Luis declined to make a new recording of the song himself. June asked whether he didn’t like it anymore.
“I don’t know what I like about it,” he said. “That’s part of what’s missing.”
She put the recorder down.
“I’m sorry.”
He watched her for a moment before answering. “I know you are.”
He didn’t tell her it was all right. Mara had wanted somebody to say that so badly that she felt the wanting like a bruise. Instead Luis sat beside the empty chair, took out his little notebook, and wrote the name of the woman whose kitchen he could no longer recognize.
Luis noted the difference between appearing calmer and the cot’s actual work. Once, during a brief supervised check off the cradle, her fingertips thinned again despite the recorder still playing. They stopped the check promptly. The amber fitting supplied something the voices didn’t.
The voices helped her choose where to look while it happened.
When she lay back on the cot, she asked for Dennis and Ruth again.
Mara wondered what Ruth would think of discovering that an ordinary disagreement about plumbing had become somebody else’s favorite story. She hoped it would not make Ruth speak more carefully. June needed some of them to remain ordinary.
***
In the afternoon, the cradle clicked.
Tessa was in the laundry passage with Noah. Luis sat outside Eleven while Mara changed the pillowcase on the spare bed. June had one finger lifted in time with Sofia’s recorded page when the amber light flickered out.
She stopped moving.
Mara put the pillow down. “Stay sitting. I’ll get Tessa.”
The girl looked at Luis, then at Mara. Her breathing quickened. It was not long enough for the room to lose its charge; the threshold indicator remained green. The failed device was beneath the cot, not around the door.
June brought both hands against her own chest.
“I want—”
“I hear you.”
Mara didn’t move toward her.
She called through the doorway. Omar relayed the call down the stairs. Luis kept his chair in view rather than running to help, and the fact of his staying seemed to help June hold still.
Tessa arrived with a screwdriver behind her ear. She checked the room’s ward first, then took the coupling lever down before touching the fitting. A displaced slat had pushed one repaired lead against its retaining clip. The temporary stop had prevented further current through that lead.
“We move the frame before switching it back,” she said.
June rose by herself and crossed to the opposite bed. Mara watched the girl’s outline without trying to make her body into an instrument. There was fear, and there was a pale edge at one wrist. She could see both.
Noah came upstairs with two broad wedges. They secured the frame against lateral movement and fastened the retaining clip farther from the mattress load. Tessa tugged the cable gently, checked it with the cot empty, then let June decide whether to return.
The allocated charge had not been replenished by the repair. There was enough of that night’s delivery still in the cradle’s buffer to resume it; the readout fell again as June sat down.
She began crying only after the light steadied.
“I didn’t touch him.”
Luis leaned forward in his chair. “I saw.”
“I wanted to.”
“You told us.”
Mara gave her the clean cloth by placing it on the blanket. They let her cry into it without making that another symptom to solve.
***
By late afternoon June could say what she wanted from the next night.
“Sleep without touching somebody,” she told Mara. “And when I wake up, someone who isn’t a recording.”
Luis asked whether someone in the doorway would do. She considered it and said yes, provided they told her their name when she woke. She didn’t want to decide from a voice alone.
They carried the request downstairs in her words. The paired waking handoffs would continue, with adults identifying themselves in sight of the girl. The same crude support required another two units for the coming night. Mara allocated them to the cradle, leaving twenty-seven unspent before the ten-unit ordinary and reception renewal due at dusk.
Nobody earned a new service mark from repeating the care. Yesterday’s light had not made today’s need different merely by turning off once.
Gideon offered a watch shift after kitchen cleanup. Luis told him they’d pair him with Bea. He accepted it without looking pleased.
June came to the office stair with Mara and Luis while the afternoon review of household plans was finishing. Dragan stopped speaking when he saw her. She looked frightened enough to go back up, but she stayed where she had chosen to stand.
“There was another girl,” she said.
Mara set down her pen.
“Where?”
“Behind wire. In the blue place. She looked like the photograph.”
“The missing notice?”
June nodded. “I thought she was me. But I could see her.”
No one rushed to tell her what that proved.
“She had something red tied on her wrist,” June said. “She was asking about her mother.”
Mara wrote the detail exactly. It could be a memory, an imprint, something carried between people by a machine none of them understood. It was not a person recovered simply because the girl could describe her.
“Did the bus man show you?” Gideon asked.
“No.”
“When did you see it?”
June shook her head. She could not place it in their nights or days.
Mara asked if she wanted to stop. The girl said yes.
They went back upstairs before anyone demanded a clearer answer. The cot waited where Noah had fixed it securely. Beside it lay the boat-shaped towel Emmett had insisted they keep.
June unfolded its bow and smoothed it over her knee.
Downstairs, Mara’s notes now held two girls and only one name.