The northern hills clinic looked less like a hospital than a place money built to keep guilt comfortable.
White halls behind smoked glass. Soft lighting in the entry. A garden sealed under climate panes so no patient had to smell traffic, rain, or the city that had decided they were easier to store than save.
Caleb stood in the visitors' lot with his broken arm tight in the sling and thought that Marek Voss had spent two years dying somewhere clean enough to make disappearance look merciful.
"She's off shift in ten minutes," Iris said. She checked the road, then the clinic door, then the road again. "The Hacker told her a family advocate wanted a word and that nobody upstairs needed to know. She agreed too fast. People do that when the thing they're carrying has started carrying them back."
