I.

The shuttle pulled out at 5:15 AM, same as every morning. Elara pressed her forehead against the window, felt the glass vibrate with the engine’s rumble, cold even through the humidity. The strip mall slid past—the grocery with its flickering sign casting blue-white pulses across the empty parking lot, the clinic with the EXIM logo glowing steady red, the bar already dark, its neon shrimp dead and gray. The causeway stretched ahead, a straight line of concrete over black water that seemed to go on forever, and beyond it the terminal rose against the pre-dawn sky, flare stacks burning orange in the dark, the flames so bright they left afterimages when she blinked.

The air in the shuttle was thick with the smell of bodies—sweat and coffee and the particular staleness of people who’d been awake too long or not long enough. The seats were worn vinyl that stuck to the backs of her thighs, and every bump sent a little jolt up her spine.

She’d signed the papers three months ago in a credit union office in McAllen. The air conditioning had been too cold, raising goosebumps on her arms, making her aware of how much she was sweating underneath. The woman behind the desk had worn a blazer with shoulder pads and a smile that showed too many teeth, too white. “Future-proof,” she’d said, tapping the banner behind her with a manicured nail that made a sharp click against the laminate. “Energy careers. Stability.” The paperwork had been thick as a phone book, the pages making that specific sound paper makes when you turn too many at once. Everything bundled together: the student loans from her two years at community college, the relocation stipend, the training costs. Twelve years of payroll deduction. The woman had flipped to the back page, the one with the fine print so small Elara had to squint. “If you leave early, of course, the balance converts. Standard rates apply. But why would you leave? This is the future.”

The pen had felt heavy in Elara’s hand. The ink was blue. She’d pressed hard enough that her signature dented the pages beneath.

What else was there to do? Her mother cleaned rooms at a motel off Highway 77, came home smelling like bleach and other people’s cigarettes, her hands cracked and red from chemicals. Her brother worked construction when he could get it, skin dark from the sun, shoulders already starting to hunch from the weight he carried. The Yard paid twice what either of them made, and it came with housing, with healthcare, with the kind of certainty you couldn’t find anywhere else along the coast.

The shuttle slowed at the checkpoint. The hydraulic brakes hissed. Guards in windbreakers waved them through, scanning badges without looking up, their faces slack with the boredom of routine. The woman next to Elara—Rosa, late forties, third year at the Yard—was already asleep, her head tilted back, mouth open, a small sound in her throat like a distant motor. She’d worked the night shift, would sleep until noon, wake up and do it again. Her breath smelled like stale coffee and something sweet, artificial.

“First day?” The man across the aisle leaned forward. Tattoos on his forearms, faded blue-green, wedding ring catching the overhead light and throwing little gold flashes. His voice was rough, like he’d been shouting over machinery.

“Training week,” Elara said. Her own voice sounded thin.

He nodded. “You’ll get used to the rhythm. Twelve on, twelve off. Once you’re in it, it’s not so bad. Like being on a boat. You stop noticing the rocking.”

The terminal was bigger up close than it looked from town. Pipes thick as houses rose into the sky, their surfaces slick with condensation that caught the first light. Tanks the size of buildings sat on concrete pads, everything wrapped in scaffolding and catwalks that crisscrossed the space like a giant web. The air smelled like diesel and hot metal and something chemical she couldn’t name but that made the back of her throat itch. Heat radiated from the equipment even at dawn, making the air shimmer. The shuttle dropped them at the main gate, and Elara followed the others through, past the security post where the fluorescent lights hummed a pitch just high enough to set her teeth on edge, into the maze of corridors and stairwells that honeycombed the facility. The walls were painted industrial green, scuffed at shoulder height from years of people brushing past. The floor was concrete, polished smooth in some places, rough in others, and her footsteps echoed differently depending on where she walked.

Training was four other new hires and a supervisor named Garrett who walked them through the basics: safety protocols, emergency procedures, the location of the shelters in case of a hurricane or a fire. His voice was flat, rehearsed, and he never quite looked at any of them. “Level 3 means you don’t leave the zone without a permit,” he said, pointing to a laminated chart on the wall with a ruler he tapped against his palm between sentences. “No exceptions. Hurricane season, we go to rotating shifts. Twelve on, twelve off, everybody works. You signed up for that when you took the job.”

Someone raised a hand. “What about family? If there’s an emergency—”

“Pre-approved weekends,” Garrett said, still tapping the ruler. “Put in the request two weeks in advance. If there’s a real emergency, talk to your supervisor. We’re reasonable people. But the terminal doesn’t stop, so neither do we.”

At lunch, Elara sat in the break room with the others. The chairs were molded plastic that had absorbed years of body heat and released it slowly, warm and slightly damp. The TV in the corner showed news from Houston: flooding, traffic, something about the governor. The volume was low enough that you couldn’t quite make out the words, just the cadence of bad news. No one was watching. Rosa sat across from her, eating a sandwich she’d brought from home, not saying anything. The sandwich was on white bread, slightly flattened, and Elara could see the imprint of Rosa’s fingers in the bread. The tattoo guy—Marcus—was talking about his kids, how his oldest was starting high school in the fall, his voice animated in a way that made the air feel heavier when he stopped.

“You married?” Rosa asked, not looking up from her sandwich. A piece of lettuce fell onto the table.

“No,” Elara said.

“Good. Easier that way.” Rosa crumpled the plastic wrap, tossed it toward the trash can. It hit the rim and fell to the floor. She didn’t pick it up. “How much you owe?”

“Eighty-three thousand.”

Rosa whistled, a low sound through her teeth. “Take you ten years, maybe. If you don’t miss payments.”

“Twelve,” Elara said. “That’s what the contract says.”

“Yeah, well.” Rosa stood up, the chair scraping across the linoleum with a sound that made Elara’s jaw clench. She brushed crumbs off her shirt, and Elara watched them drift down, tiny and weightless. “They always say twelve. But things come up. Clinic visits. The store. You’ll see.”

II.

Vance’s flight landed in Doha at 3 AM local time. The cabin pressure change made his ears pop, and when he stood up his knees cracked. He slept four hours in a hotel near the airport, the air conditioning so aggressive it dried out his sinuses, made his throat hurt when he swallowed. He woke to an alarm that seemed to come from inside his skull, showered in a bathroom the size of his apartment back in Arlington, the water pressure so strong it left his skin pink. The car picked him up at seven, leather seats so cold they felt wet.

The meetings started at eight.

Risk assessment. Quarterly review. Projected volumes through 2045. The conference room had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Gulf, blue water stretching to the horizon, so bright it hurt to look at directly. The Qatari delegation sat on one side of the table, Vance and his team on the other. Everyone had laptops, the fans whirring softly, a collective mechanical breathing. Coffee in porcelain cups, hot enough to burn the roof of your mouth. Folders full of charts that made that particular papery sound when you turned pages quickly, trying to find something.

“Port Isabel is online,” Vance said, pulling up the slide. The projector hummed. “Full capacity by Q4. European commitments are locked through 2032, with options to extend. We’ve secured the supply chain, upgraded security protocols. Resilience is our top priority.”

The lead negotiator—a man named Khalid, silver hair, expensive watch that caught the light when he moved his hand—nodded slowly. “The political situation. Your election. How stable is the commitment?”

“Bipartisan,” Vance said. His own voice sounded confident, practiced. “National security buffer. Energy independence. Nobody’s walking that back.”

“And the workers? Labor disputes?”

“Turnover is normal for the industry. We’ve got the workforce locked in through payroll structures. Low attrition. Community buy-in is strong.”

Khalid leaned back. His chair creaked. “And if there’s another storm? Another shutdown?”

“We weathered the last three,” Vance said. “Infrastructure is hardened. Redundancy built in. The terminal stays online even when the grid goes down.”

The meeting ran two hours. Vance’s back started to ache from sitting, a dull pressure in his lower spine. They broke for lunch—grilled fish that flaked perfectly, rice that was somehow both sticky and separate, vegetables Vance couldn’t name but that tasted like earth and salt—and then reconvened for another session on pricing mechanisms and delivery schedules. By the time they finished, the sun was low over the water, the sky turning pink and orange, and Vance’s eyes felt gritty from staring at screens.

Back at the hotel, Vance opened his laptop. The keyboard was warm from his lap. He checked the dashboard: Port Isabel was a single line in a long spreadsheet, black text on white background, rows and columns extending beyond the edge of the screen. Repayment curves, default contingencies, projected volumes. Everything green. Everything on track. He clicked through to the risk column: political instability, environmental factors, labor issues. All low. All manageable. The numbers were clean, precise, satisfying in their certainty.

He thought about calling his wife, but it was still early morning in Virginia. She’d be getting the kids ready for school, rushing around the kitchen, no time to talk. He closed the laptop and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The mattress was too soft. His shoulders ached. He was too tired to sleep, too wired to relax.

The next flight was in six hours. Brussels after that, then Singapore, then back to Washington for a briefing with the Senate subcommittee. Somewhere in there, he’d see his family. Somewhere in there, he’d sleep in his own bed.

III.

The first hurricane came in September, three months after Elara started. It wasn’t even a big one—Category 2, they said, maybe Category 3 depending on how warm the water stayed. But the terminal went to Level 3 anyway, and the sirens started at 6 AM, pulling everyone out of sleep, a wailing that seemed to come from everywhere at once, from inside her own chest. Her heart was pounding before she was fully awake, that animal panic that precedes thought.

She threw on clothes, grabbed her phone, nothing else, and ran. The hallways were full of people, bodies pressing close, the smell of morning breath and fear-sweat. Someone’s elbow caught her ribs. Someone else stepped on her heel, and her shoe came half off. She hobbled, kicked it away, kept running. The concrete was cold under her bare foot.

The shelter was under the loading arms, down three flights of stairs that rang with footsteps, a metallic thunder. Elara’s legs burned by the time she reached the bottom. She sat on a metal bench with a hundred other people, feeling the cold of it seep through her jeans, listening to the wind howl outside. The building shook with each gust, a deep vibration she could feel in her sternum, in her jaw. The lights flickered but stayed on, their hum rising and falling. Someone had brought a deck of cards, the snap and shuffle a small sound against the wind. Someone else had a radio, tuned to emergency broadcasts that crackled with static and warnings, the voices urgent but somehow distant, like they were talking about somewhere else.

Rosa sat next to her, eating peanuts from a vending machine, cracking the shells with her teeth. The smell was salty, earthy. “Last year we were down here for eighteen hours,” she said, spitting a shell into her palm. “Lost power halfway through. Generators kept the terminal running, but the housing went dark. Came back to find the freezer had died. Lost a week’s worth of groceries.”

“They reimburse you for that?”

Rosa laughed, a short bark that held no humor. “You’re funny.”

The storm passed by nightfall. Elara had lost track of time, her sense of duration warped by the unchanging fluorescent light, the repetitive howl of the wind. Her body ached from sitting, from the adrenaline that had spiked and faded and spiked again with each particularly violent gust. The all-clear came at 9 PM, a different siren, steadier, lower, and they filed back out into the humid dark. The air outside was thick, hard to breathe, charged with ozone. Branches and scattered debris crunched under her feet. One bare foot, she remembered. She’d lost her other shoe somewhere. The ground was wet, slick with mud and torn leaves that stuck to her skin.

The terminal was fine—lights still burning, flare stacks still lit, everything glowing against the black sky. But the strip mall had lost half its roof. Corrugated metal lay twisted in the parking lot like discarded foil. The grocery was closed for repairs. The clinic was open but running on backup power, emergency lights casting everything in a sickly green.

Elara went back to her room in the prefab housing complex. It was small—kitchenette, bathroom, bed—but it was hers, and it came with the job. She sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the mattress compress under her weight, springs creaking. Her muscles were trembling, aftershocks of fear. She called her mother. The phone rang four times, and each ring felt longer than the last.

“You okay?” her mother asked. “We saw it on the news.”

“Fine,” Elara said. Her throat was tight. “The terminal’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

“You eating enough? You sleeping?”

“Yeah, Ma.”

“Your brother’s thinking about applying. Saw they’re hiring again.”

Elara looked at the wall. There was a crack running from the ceiling to the floor, thin as a hair, barely visible unless you knew to look. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now she couldn’t unsee it. “Tell him to think hard about it.”

“It’s good money,” her mother said. “Better than what he’s making now.”

“Yeah,” Elara said. “It’s good money.”

After she hung up, she lay back on the bed. The pillow smelled like the industrial detergent they used in the housing laundry, chemical and faintly floral. She stared at the ceiling. The crack was still there, a dark line against the white paint. She could feel the building settling around her, tiny shifts and groans. She could hear the hum of the generators, steady and mechanical. The distant roar of the flare stacks, a sound like breathing. Twelve on, twelve off. Hurricane season meant rotating shifts, emergency protocols, permits required to leave the zone. But the paychecks kept coming, and the debt kept shrinking, and that was what mattered.

She closed her eyes. Her bare foot was still cold from the concrete. She tried to sleep.

IV.

The dashboard update came through in October. Vance was in Washington, sitting in his office on the ninth floor, drinking coffee that had gone lukewarm, slightly bitter. He was scrolling through emails, the blue light from the screen making his eyes ache. The subject line was routine: “Quarterly Security Assessment—Port Isabel.”

He opened it. The changes were highlighted in yellow, bright against the white background. New protocols, tighter restrictions, updated timelines for permit approvals. Nothing dramatic. Just adjustments. The risk team had recommended extending the Level 3 designation indefinitely, citing “ongoing geopolitical volatility” and “infrastructure vulnerability.” The recommendation had been approved. His cursor hovered over the attachment. He clicked. The modeling looked solid, rows of numbers that aligned in satisfying columns. Projected losses from a shutdown—even a temporary one—were in the tens of millions. The cost of maintaining enhanced security was a fraction of that. The math worked. It always worked.

He forwarded the report to his assistant with a note: “Please add to Senate briefing materials. Highlight resilience metrics.” His fingers moved quickly over the keyboard, muscle memory.

The meeting with the Senate subcommittee was the following week. Vance sat at the witness table, the leather chair creaking when he shifted his weight. The room smelled like old wood and floor polish. Senators at their elevated bench, looking down, their faces in shadow from the overhead lights. Vance fielded questions about supply chains, about partnerships with allies, about the strategic importance of domestic energy production. His voice was steady. He’d done this before. One senator asked about labor conditions, leaning forward, squinting at his notes.

“We’re proud of the workforce at Port Isabel,” Vance said. “Strong community investment. Low turnover. These are good jobs in a part of the country that needs them.”

“And the security measures? Are they excessive?”

“Proportionate to the risk,” Vance said. His throat was dry. He reached for water, the glass cool and slick with condensation. “We’re talking about critical infrastructure. A single disruption could affect energy security across Europe. The protocols are designed to ensure continuity.”

The senator nodded and moved on to the next question. The rest of the hearing blurred. More questions, more answers. Vance’s back ached from sitting straight. His tie felt too tight. The air conditioning was too cold.

Afterward, in the hallway, one of Vance’s colleagues clapped him on the shoulder, the impact solid and brief. “Smooth,” he said. “You make it look easy.”

Vance smiled, felt the muscles in his face arrange themselves. “It’s just numbers. You show them the numbers, they understand.”

Back at his desk, he opened the dashboard again. Port Isabel was still green across the board. Repayment curves on track. Default rates within projections. Workforce stable. Everything running exactly as planned. The numbers glowed on the screen, clean and certain.

He closed the laptop and looked out the window. The city stretched below him, glass and concrete and traffic, tiny cars moving in patterns, brake lights red in the gathering dusk. Somewhere out there, his daughter was in a ballet class, learning positions, her small body arranging itself into prescribed shapes. His son was at soccer practice, running until his lungs burned. His wife was picking up groceries, navigating the chaos of suburban Virginia, the fluorescent lights of the store, the weight of bags in her arms. Normal life. The kind of life the numbers were supposed to protect.

V.

Elara noticed the changes in November. Little things at first. The permit process took longer—two weeks became three, became four. Forms that had been single-page were now multi-page. Signatures required in triplicate. Weekend visits home got harder to schedule. The checkpoint guards started asking more questions, checking bags, running names through additional databases, their fingers slow on keyboards. The line backed up. People shifted their weight, sighed, checked phones. The wait stretched from five minutes to fifteen, to half an hour.

One morning, she asked Garrett about it. Her shift had just ended, and she was tired, that bone-deep exhaustion that made her joints ache. “Is something happening? Security’s been weird.”

“New protocols,” he said, not looking up from his clipboard. He was always holding a clipboard. “Same as always, just tighter. Don’t worry about it.”

But it wasn’t the same. The shift rotations changed without warning. One day you’d show up expecting twelve on, twelve off, and they’d tell you it was fourteen on, ten off. Then sixteen on, eight off. The numbers stopped making sense. The company sent around a memo on paper so thin you could see through it: “Temporary adjustments to meet operational demands.” Temporary became permanent. Nobody said anything. What was there to say?

Rosa stopped coming to work in December. Just didn’t show up one day. Her locker stayed closed, the lock hanging there, untouched. Elara asked around, but nobody knew anything. Shrugs. Averted eyes. A week later, someone said she’d tried to leave, tried to break the contract and move back to Corpus. The balance had converted. The interest hit, compounding daily. She couldn’t make the payments.

“Where is she now?” Elara asked. Her voice sounded small.

The guy shrugged. He was eating an apple, the crunch loud in the break room. “Who knows? Not here.”

Elara went to the clinic for her six-month checkup. The waiting room smelled like disinfectant and old magazines. The doctor was young, tired-looking, dark circles under her eyes. She read from a tablet while Elara sat on the exam table, the paper crinkling under her every time she moved. Blood pressure cuff squeezing her arm, tight enough to make her fingertips tingle. Heart rate. Mental health questionnaire. “How are you sleeping?” the doctor asked, her finger swiping across the screen.

“Fine,” Elara said.

“Any trouble concentrating? Mood changes?”

“No.”

The doctor made a note, tapping the screen. “Your debt-to-income ratio is flagged. You’re behind on payments.”

Elara’s stomach dropped. A cold sensation, like falling. “I’m not behind. It’s automatic deduction.”

“Says here you had a clinic visit in October. Respiratory infection. That wasn’t covered under the basic plan. The balance went to your account. With interest, it’s four hundred dollars.”

“I didn’t know—”

“It’s in your welcome packet. Page seventeen.” The doctor handed her a printout, the paper still warm from the printer. “You can set up a payment plan. Talk to the office downstairs.”

Elara took the paper. Her hands were shaking slightly. Four hundred dollars. At the payment plan rate, it would take six months. And the interest would keep compounding. She could feel it already, the weight of it, invisible but heavy, pressing down on her chest.

She went downstairs. The office was a single room with a desk and a woman behind it who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else. She was eating something from a paper bag, the smell of fried food and grease. Elara handed over the printout, and the woman glanced at it without really reading, wiped her fingers on a napkin.

“Payment plan,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question. Her voice was flat, rehearsed.

“How much per month?”

“Depends. Minimum is seventy-five. You want to pay it off faster, you can do more.”

Elara did the math in her head. Seventy-five a month was groceries. Was gas, if she ever got approved to leave the zone. Was the margin between making it and not making it.

“Seventy-five,” she said.

The woman printed out a form, the printer whirring and clicking. Elara signed it. The pen was cheap, plastic, the kind that skips if you write too fast. Her signature looked shaky.

VI.

In March, the company sent around another memo. The paper was glossy this time, full-color. They were expanding the terminal, adding a second export line, increasing capacity. More jobs. More opportunities. The governor came down for a photo op, his motorcade a line of black SUVs with tinted windows. He shook hands with the managers, men in ties and hard hats, gave a speech about economic growth and American energy. His voice was amplified, echoing across the terminal, the words bouncing off metal and concrete.

Elara watched it on the break room TV. The governor stood in front of the terminal, the flare stacks burning behind him, talking about the future. His teeth were very white. His suit looked expensive. “This is what we mean when we talk about energy independence,” he said. “This is what we mean when we talk about good jobs in good communities.”

Marcus turned off the TV. The screen went black. “Load of shit,” he said. His voice was quiet, tired.

Nobody disagreed. The silence in the room was thick, heavy.

The expansion meant more shifts, longer hours, fewer days off. The housing complex filled up with new hires, young people with the same look Elara had seen in the mirror three years ago: hopeful, a little scared, not quite understanding what they’d signed up for. Their eyes were bright. Their shoulders weren’t hunched yet. She wanted to tell them. Wanted to say, It’s not what they told you. It’s not what you think. But what good would it do? They’d signed the papers. The debt was real. The terminal was running. The rest of it didn’t matter.

She saw her mother twice that year. Both times at the bus station in Brownsville, the smell of diesel and hot asphalt, the hiss of brakes and idling engines. Her mother looked older, smaller, tired in a way that made Elara’s chest hurt, made it hard to breathe. “You’re doing good,” her mother said, hugging her. Her mother’s arms felt thin, fragile. “I’m proud of you.”

Elara nodded and got back on the shuttle. The hug had been brief, her mother’s hands patting her back, and then letting go. Back to the terminal. Back to the rhythm. Twelve on, twelve off. Except when it wasn’t. Except when it was sixteen on, or eighteen on, or twenty-four straight because someone called in sick and there was nobody to cover. Her body moved through the shifts on autopilot, muscle memory doing the work while her mind drifted. She stopped feeling hunger at normal times. Stopped feeling tired at night. Just felt a constant low-level exhaustion that never quite resolved into sleep.

She stopped calling home. The phone felt heavy in her hand. Stopped trying to get permits. The forms were too long. Stopped thinking about leaving. What was the point? The balance was still there, still growing, still following her like a shadow. Eight more years, the contract said. But the clinic visits kept adding up. The payment plans kept stretching out. The numbers stopped making sense. She’d lost track. The spreadsheet in her mind had become a blur, columns and rows that no longer aligned.

VII.

The first time Elara couldn’t afford groceries, she went to the company store. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, a high-pitched whine that set her teeth on edge. Eight dollars for a bag of flour. Six dollars for a dozen eggs, the carton slightly dented. The prices were double what they’d been in town, but her paycheck came in company script now—had for the last year, since the “payment optimization program” rolled out—and the store was the only place that took it. The script was plastic cards with magnetic strips, no cash value anywhere else.

She bought what she could carry and walked back to her room. The bags cut into her palms, plastic handles digging red lines into her skin. The crack in the wall had gotten wider. She could fit her finger in it now, feel the roughness of broken drywall, the cool air from the space behind. She reported it to maintenance, filled out the form, dropped it in the box. They were backed up, they said. Six weeks, they said. Maybe more.

That night, she lay in bed and listened to the building settle, the pipes groaning, metal expanding and contracting. The generators humming, a steady drone that she could feel in her bones. The terminal never stopped. The flare stacks never went out. The work never ended. The sound was constant, rhythmic, like breathing, like a heartbeat.

She thought about Rosa. Thought about the others who’d left, who’d tried to leave, who’d disappeared into the debt and the distance and the endless accumulation of late fees and interest charges and penalties for breaking what couldn’t be broken. Where did they go? What did they do? The questions had no answers, just the absence where people used to be.

She closed her eyes. Sleep didn’t come easy anymore. When it did, it was shallow, broken by the siren tests, by her alarm, by the grinding of her own jaw, tension she carried even in sleep. Her dreams were of running, of forms that needed signing, of numbers that grew no matter what she did.

VIII.

Vance flew into Houston in April for a site visit. The descent was bumpy, turbulence that made his stomach drop, made him grip the armrests. It was his first time at Port Isabel, his first time seeing the terminal up close. The facility manager—a man named Holloway, ex-Navy, buzzcut and handlebars, shoulders like he still did push-ups every morning—met him at the shuttle and walked him through the operation. His handshake was crushing, brief.

“Running at 97% capacity,” Holloway said, pointing to a bank of monitors in the control room. The screens glowed blue and green, numbers scrolling past too fast to read. “On track for record output this quarter. Workforce is solid. Turnover’s down.”

The control room was cold, the AC blasting, raising goosebumps on Vance’s arms under his suit jacket. The hum of equipment, the click of keys, the low murmur of operators on headsets. Vance looked at the screens. Everything functioning. Everything optimized. “What about the expansion? On schedule?”

“Ahead of schedule. Second line comes online in June. We’re already hiring for it.”

They walked out to the loading docks, the heat hitting Vance like a physical force when they opened the door. The air was thick, humid, hard to breathe. They stood on a catwalk overlooking the ships, metal grating under their feet. The water was gray-green, choppy with wind, oil-slick rainbows on the surface. Tankers lined up at the berths, loading, unloading, a constant flow of commerce and fuel. The ships were massive up close, hulls rusted and streaked. Vance felt the scale of it, the sheer industrial weight, the millions of tons of metal and liquid moving according to schedules and contracts. This was what kept the lights on. This was what the numbers meant.

“Any issues I should know about?” he asked. The wind carried the smell of diesel and brine.

Holloway shrugged, squinting against the sun. “The usual. Weather. Maintenance. Workers complain about the hours, but they always do. We’re managing it.”

“Labor disputes?”

“Nothing organized. Just individual grumbling. We’ve got the contracts locked in, so there’s no real leverage. They know that.”

Vance nodded. His shirt was already sticking to his back from the heat. “Good. Keep it that way.”

They went back to the control room, the cold air a shock after the heat outside. Holloway pulled up the workforce dashboard on a large monitor: retention rates, productivity metrics, debt repayment curves. Lines on graphs, percentages in green. All green. All optimized. The data was clean, satisfying in its completeness.

“You should be proud,” Vance said. “This is a model operation.”

Holloway smiled, his teeth straight and white. “We do our best.”

That night, Vance flew back to Washington. The cabin lights were dimmed. Most passengers were sleeping. He wrote up his site report on the plane, the laptop screen bright in the darkness, his fingers moving over the keys by feel: operational excellence, strong fundamentals, no red flags. He filed it with his assistant and closed his laptop. The screen went black. Out the window, the lights of the cities scrolled past, a web of glowing nodes stretching across the dark, beautiful and impersonal, like constellations.

IX.

In June, the second line came online. The company threw a party—barbecue in the parking lot, the smell of charcoal and meat smoke, grease sizzling and popping. There were speeches from management, standing on a makeshift platform. Free beer for the workers, sweating in plastic cups that left wet rings on the folding tables. Elara stood with the others and listened to Holloway talk about growth, about opportunity, about the future. The sun was setting, the sky turning pink and orange, and the heat was starting to break, the first cool breeze of evening. Holloway’s voice boomed from speakers that crackled with feedback.

“You’re the backbone of this operation,” Holloway said, his face red from the heat or the beer or both. “You’re the reason we’re succeeding. You should be proud.”

Marcus took a long drink from his beer, the cup crinkling in his grip. “Should be paid more, is what we should be.” His voice was quiet, but not quiet enough.

Someone laughed, a nervous sound. Someone else told him to shut up, hissed it through their teeth.

The barbecue ran until dark. Elara ate a burger, the meat dry and slightly charred, ketchup too sweet. Drank a soda, the carbonation sharp on her tongue. She watched the sun set behind the terminal. The flare stacks burned orange against the purple sky, flames rippling in the wind. It would have been beautiful, maybe, if she could have looked at it without seeing the numbers, without feeling the weight of the years still ahead. But she couldn’t. The beauty and the burden were the same thing.

She went back to her room. The crack in the wall was bigger now, wide enough to see through to the cavity behind, the darkness there. She’d stopped reporting it. What was the point? The forms, the waiting, the inevitable nothing. Her room smelled stale, like old laundry and the ghost of dinners past.

Her phone rang. Her mother. Elara almost didn’t answer, her thumb hovering over the decline button, then pressed accept. Lifted the phone to her ear.

“Your brother signed up,” her mother said. Her voice crackled slightly, the connection not quite clear. “Starts training next month.”

Elara closed her eyes. Felt a headache starting behind her right eye, a dull pulse. “Ma—”

“He’s excited. Says it’s good money. Says you’re doing well there.”

“I didn’t tell him to apply.”

“He knows. He made his own choice.” A pause, static on the line. “You sound tired.”

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

Elara didn’t answer. Her throat was tight. What was there to say? The truth was too heavy, too complicated. And what would it change?

After she hung up, she sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress sagged under her weight, springs groaning. She looked at the wall. The crack was still there. It would always be there. And tomorrow, the shuttle would pull out at 5:15 AM. And the terminal would run. And the debt would compound. And the years would pass. An endless present tense, no future that looked different, no past she could return to.

She lay back and stared at the ceiling. A water stain had appeared, brownish-yellow, spreading slowly across the white paint.

X.

The storm that came in August was worse than the others. Category 4, sustained winds at 140 miles per hour. The weather reports showed it as a red spiral on radar, massive, spinning, inevitable. The sirens started at midnight, pulling everyone from their beds, that wailing sound cutting through sleep like a knife. Elara’s heart was already racing when she woke, her body responding before her mind caught up.

She grabbed her phone, her jacket, nothing else. The hallways were crowded with people running, shouting, half-dressed, the panic thick in the air. You could smell it, sharp and acetic, fear sweat and adrenaline. Someone’s elbow caught her ribs, a sharp pain that made her gasp. Someone else stepped on her heel, and her shoe came off. She hobbled, kicked the other one away, kept running barefoot. The concrete was cold, then wet, her feet slapping against it, splashing through something she didn’t want to think about.

The shelter was under the loading arms, down three flights of stairs that rang with footsteps, a metallic thunder that echoed and multiplied. Elara’s legs burned by the time she reached the bottom, her calves cramping, lungs aching. She sat on a metal bench with a hundred other people, the cold of it immediate and shocking, seeping through her thin pajama pants. The wind howled outside, a sound she’d never heard before, inhuman, a sustained scream that vibrated through the building. The whole structure shook with each gust, not just movement but something deeper, a fundamental instability that made her stomach drop. The lights flickered but stayed on, their hum rising and falling with the electrical surges, dimming to brown and then brightening again.

Someone had brought a deck of cards, the snap and shuffle a small, desperate sound against the wind. Someone else had a radio, tuned to emergency broadcasts that crackled with static and warnings, the voices urgent but somehow distant, like they were talking about somewhere else, someone else. Not here. Not us. But they were.

Rosa sat next to her, eating peanuts from a vending machine, cracking the shells with her teeth. No. Not Rosa. Rosa was gone. This was someone else, a woman Elara didn’t know, but the gesture was the same, the mechanical eating, the attempt at normalcy. The smell was salty, earthy, wrong in the stale air of the shelter.

The building shook. The wind screamed. Metal groaned and tore somewhere above them, a sound like the world ending, followed by a crash that rattled Elara’s teeth. Someone was crying. Someone else was praying, the words running together, incomprehensible. Elara sat with her back against the wall and felt the world come apart above her. She could feel it in her spine, in her jaw, vibrations that went all the way through her. Time stopped meaning anything. There was just the wind, the shaking, the waiting.

It lasted six hours. Or maybe eight. Or four. Elara had lost track of time, her sense of duration warped by fear and exhaustion and the unchanging fluorescent light. Her body ached from sitting, from tension, from the adrenaline that had spiked and faded and spiked again with each particularly violent gust. Her muscles trembled. Her hands were cold. When the all-clear finally came, a different siren, steadier, lower, a release rather than a warning, they filed back out into the dawn.

The air outside was thick, hard to breathe, still charged with electricity. The sky was an unnatural color, greenish-gray. Branches and scattered debris crunched under her feet, her bare feet, she remembered. She’d lost her shoes. The ground was wet, slick with mud and torn leaves that stuck to her skin, cold and slimy. Something sharp cut her heel, and she felt blood, warm and wet, but didn’t stop to look.

The terminal was still standing. The flare stacks were still burning, impossibly, the flames bright and steady against the devastated landscape. Everything glowing, orange and surreal. But the housing complex was damaged—roofs torn off, walls collapsed, debris everywhere. Elara looked up at her building. Her room was on the third floor. The third floor was gone. Just sky where the wall used to be, her furniture visible from the ground, exposed like an open wound.

She went to work.

XI.

They set up temporary housing in the terminal itself—cots in the break rooms, sleeping bags in the conference rooms. The cots were canvas on metal frames, folding things that pinched your skin if you weren’t careful. Elara worked eighteen-hour shifts for two weeks straight, sleeping four hours at a time, never enough to feel rested. Her body moved through exhaustion into something else, a kind of floating numbness where pain became abstract, background noise. She ate whatever was available in the cafeteria—sandwiches that tasted like cardboard, soup that was always lukewarm, coffee so strong it made her hands shake.

Marcus’s oldest daughter had her birthday during that time. He missed it. He tried to get a permit to leave for the day, just a few hours, filled out the forms, waited in line at the checkpoint. The request was denied. Emergency protocols. Everyone stays. No exceptions.

“It’s just one birthday,” someone said. Trying to help, maybe, or just filling the silence.

Marcus didn’t talk for three days after that. His face went blank, expressionless, and he moved through his shifts like a ghost, doing the work but not present, not really there.

Elara lost track of time. The days blurred together, indistinguishable. Shift after shift after shift. The terminal ran at capacity, ran beyond capacity, because the ships kept coming and the contracts had to be honored and the numbers had to stay green. Her hands developed blisters, then calluses. Her shoulders ached constantly. She developed a cough that wouldn’t go away, a rattle in her chest.

In September, the temporary housing was still temporary. The trailers leaked when it rained, water dripping from the ceiling, pooling on the floor. The air conditioning broke down, and the heat inside was suffocating, thick and airless. The water pressure was a joke, barely a trickle from the showerhead, never hot, only lukewarm or cold. But the terminal ran. The flare stacks burned. The debt kept compounding, numbers adding themselves in darkness, automatic, relentless.

Elara’s brother started in October. She saw him once, at orientation, in a room full of new hires. He looked young, impossibly young, his face still unmarked by the particular exhaustion that came from this place. But they didn’t talk. She couldn’t. What was there to say? Welcome? Good luck? Run? She caught his eye across the room, and he smiled, uncertain, and she looked away.

She went back to her cot in the break room. The canvas smelled like mildew and other people’s sweat. She lay down and stared at the ceiling, water-stained acoustic tiles, one of them sagging. Somewhere far away, Vance was in Brussels, or Doha, or Singapore, looking at dashboards, reviewing numbers, telling people the operation was sound. The numbers were green. The curves aligned. The workforce was stable.

And maybe it was. Maybe the numbers were fine. Maybe everything was running exactly as planned.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, never fully dark.

XII.

In November, Elara’s balance increased. She didn’t understand why until she checked the statement on her phone, the screen small and bright in the dimness of her trailer. Storm damage deduction. The company had itemized the cost of the temporary housing, the increased cafeteria usage, the extra security during the emergency protocols. All of it apportioned across the workforce. All of it added to their accounts, divided equally, everyone paying for everyone’s survival.

She sat in the trailer, staring at the number on her phone. Ten thousand dollars. Added to what she already owed. With interest, it would take—

She stopped trying to do the math. Her brain couldn’t hold the numbers anymore. They slipped away, refused to stay still. It didn’t matter anyway. The years had stopped meaning anything. The contract had stopped meaning anything. There was just the terminal, and the shifts, and the debt that would never end. An infinity that had become ordinary, unremarkable.

Marcus quit in December. Just walked off the job one day, mid-shift, didn’t clock out, didn’t say anything to anyone. Got on a bus, disappeared. The company sent letters to his trailer, then to his last known address, certified mail with return receipts. The debt converted. The interest hit. The liens were filed. He was gone, but the numbers followed him. They always did.

Rosa came back in January. Not to work—she couldn’t, not with her credit destroyed, not with the liens and the garnishments, the red flags in every system. She just showed up one morning at the checkpoint, asked to see someone, anyone. Her voice was thin, desperate. The guards turned her away. Elara heard about it from someone who’d been there, the story spreading through the break rooms like smoke.

Rosa had looked bad, they said. Thin, too thin, her clothes hanging off her. Tired in a way that went past physical exhaustion into something else, something broken. Lost.

“Did they let her in?” Elara asked. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears.

“No. What were they gonna do? She doesn’t work here anymore.”

Elara thought about that. Thought about what it meant, the weight of it. You could leave, but you couldn’t really leave. The numbers followed you. The debt followed you. And if you came back, there was nothing here for you except the memory of what you used to have, what you used to be, a ghost haunting your own past.

She worked her shift. Her hands moved automatically, her body doing the work while her mind drifted. She went back to her trailer. She lay down on the thin mattress, felt the springs through the foam. Stared at the ceiling. The crack was still there, wider than ever, a branching fracture that spread across the plaster like a river delta.

The terminal never stopped. The flare stacks never went out. The work never ended. The sound was constant, that mechanical breathing, that heartbeat, and after a while you couldn’t tell if it was outside or inside, if it was the building or your own pulse.

XIII.

In March, the company announced a new initiative. The memo came on glossy paper, full-color, professionally designed. Family housing. They were building apartments, real apartments, for workers with children. Subsidized rent, childcare on-site, schools in partnership with the district. Holloway gave the presentation in the break room, standing in front of a projector screen, clicking through slides. Smiling families, kids playing on green grass that didn’t exist here. A vision of stability. Progress. Future.

“This is about community,” he said, his voice amplified through tinny speakers. “This is about building something that lasts.”

Elara looked around the room. Most of the faces were blank, exhausted, past the point of hope. A few people were nodding, but the movement was mechanical, automatic. One guy in the back was asleep, his head tilted back, mouth open.

After the presentation, she walked to the edge of the terminal, past the restricted areas, to a catwalk overlooking the water. The fence was chain-link, rattling in the wind. She stood and looked out at the loading docks. The ships were there, always there, cranes moving, the whole operation humming with activity. It looked like progress. It looked like the future. It looked like something that mattered.

She thought about her brother, somewhere in the maze of pipes and tanks, learning the rhythms, learning to accept what couldn’t be changed. His body adapting, his mind adjusting, the way everyone’s did eventually. She thought about her mother, cleaning rooms at a motel, her hands cracked from chemicals, proud that her children had found something better.

Better. The word felt wrong in her mouth, tasted like metal.

She went back to her trailer. The air inside was stale, close. She lay down and closed her eyes. Tomorrow, the shuttle would pull out at 5:15 AM. The hydraulic brakes would hiss. The terminal would run. The debt would compound. The years would pass, one after another, indistinguishable.

She could feel it closing in, the weight of it, the inevitability. Not like a wall. Not like a door slamming shut. Just like the tide coming in, slow and steady and impossible to stop. The water rising inch by inch, cold around her ankles, her knees, her waist, and no high ground to run to. Just water, everywhere, and the slow realization that there had never been another shore.

XIV.

Vance retired in 2038. There was a ceremony in a hotel ballroom downtown, the kind with chandeliers and thick carpet that swallowed sound. A plaque with his name engraved in gold. A speech about his years of service. He stood at the podium, feeling the weight of eyes on him, the heat of the lights. He talked about resilience, about partnerships, about the importance of energy security in an uncertain world. The words came easily, polished by repetition.

“Port Isabel is a success story,” he said, his voice strong, confident. “A model for public-private collaboration. A testament to American ingenuity.”

The audience applauded. The sound filled the room, echoed off the walls. Vance smiled, felt the muscles in his face arrange themselves into the appropriate expression, and stepped down. His knees ached from standing. Afterward, there was a reception—wine in glasses that caught the light, cheese arranged on slate, crackers that broke when you bit them. Colleagues shaking his hand, their grips firm and brief, telling him he’d earned it, asking about his plans.

“Consulting, maybe,” he said, the wine slightly sour on his tongue. “Spend more time with the grandkids. We’ll see.”

That night, he flew home to Virginia. The plane was half-empty, the cabin lights dimmed. His wife picked him up at the airport, her face tired but smiling. They drove through the suburbs, past the shopping centers lit up against the night, the chain restaurants with their bright signs, the soccer fields dark and empty. Normal life. The kind of life the numbers had protected, had made possible. The kind of life that had been happening somewhere else while he was in meetings, on planes, in hotel rooms.

“How does it feel?” his wife asked, her hands on the wheel, eyes on the road.

“Good,” Vance said. He could feel the vibration of the car through the seat, the hum of the engine. “Like closing a book.”

She smiled. “You always hated that job.”

“I didn’t hate it. It was just—” He paused, looking for the word, feeling his way toward something true. “Complicated.”

They pulled into the driveway. The house was lit up, warm and inviting, every window glowing yellow. His daughter’s car was there, his grandkids probably inside, waiting, their voices high and eager. He could already hear them through the door, or thought he could, or remembered them that way.

He got out of the car and went inside. The air was warm, smelled like dinner, like home. The weight of years lifted, replaced by something else, something lighter. Relief. Rest. The numbers were someone else’s problem now.

XV.

Elara turned forty in 2039. She’d been at the terminal for thirteen years. The balance on her account had stopped making sense, numbers so large they lost meaning, became abstract again. She didn’t check it anymore. What was the point? The screen glowed, the numbers updated, but they might as well have been in another language, another universe.

The family housing had been built. It stood on the north side of the terminal, a cluster of low-rise buildings with playgrounds and a community center, fresh paint and new landscaping that hadn’t died yet. People moved in. People had kids. The daycare expanded, painted bright colors, primary red and blue and yellow. The school opened, modular classrooms and a chain-link fence. Life, of a kind. Reproduction. Continuity.

Her brother had a daughter now. Two years old, bright-eyed, running around the playground while he watched from a bench, smoking a cigarette. The smoke drifted up into the hot air, dispersed. He looked older than he should, lines around his eyes, his shoulders hunched in a way that made him look like their father had looked, before their father left.

“You doing okay?” Elara asked, sitting down next to him. The bench was metal, hot from the sun.

He shrugged. Took a drag, exhaled slowly. “Same as everyone else.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer there is.” His voice was flat, resigned, already defeated.

Elara watched the kids play. They looked happy, running and shouting, their voices high and clear. Maybe they were. Maybe they were happy now, in this moment, and maybe that was enough. Maybe it didn’t matter that tomorrow they’d wake up in the same place, that their parents would go to work in the same terminal, that the numbers would keep growing.

“Ma called last week,” her brother said, flicking ash. “Asked if I was coming home for her birthday.”

“Are you?”

“Can’t get the time. Tried. Got denied.” He looked at his daughter, watching her climb the slide. “What’s home anyway? This is home now.”

Elara nodded. She’d stopped trying years ago. Stopped imagining somewhere else. The world had contracted to the terminal, the housing, the strip mall, the thirty-minute radius that was all they had.

They sat in silence. The terminal hummed behind them, constant, eternal. The flare stacks burned, orange against the pale blue sky, flames rippling in the heat. The ships loaded and unloaded and sailed away, carrying the fuel that kept the lights on somewhere far away, somewhere that wasn’t here.

“You ever think about leaving?” her brother asked. His voice was quiet, tentative, like he was afraid to speak the words out loud.

Elara looked at him. His face was serious, hopeful and hopeless at the same time. “Where would I go?”

He didn’t answer. There was no answer. The debt followed you. The credit checks followed you. The years of employment history with no other skills followed you. Where could you go? What could you do? The world outside the terminal had become theoretical, abstract, might as well be another planet.

She stood up, her knees cracking. “I should get back.”

He nodded. Didn’t say goodbye. She walked back to her trailer, past the new buildings, past the playground where the children played, their laughter bright and sharp in the afternoon heat. The sound hurt, somehow, like looking at something too bright.

She lay down and stared at the ceiling. The crack in the wall was still there. It had been there so long she didn’t notice it anymore, just part of the landscape, permanent as the terminal itself. Outside, the machinery ran. The shifts turned over. The debt compounded. The years passed, one after another, each one the same as the last, a flat line extending into a future that looked exactly like the present.

The Vault was full. The Vault was always full. New workers arrived, old workers disappeared, but the number stayed constant, optimized, the workforce stable, turnover within acceptable parameters.

And tomorrow, the shuttle would pull out at 5:15 AM. The hydraulic brakes would hiss. The engine would rumble. The glass would be cold against her forehead. The strip mall would slide past, the causeway would stretch ahead, the terminal would rise against the sky.

The flare stacks would burn. They always burned. Orange flames against the dark, beautiful and terrible, keeping the lights on somewhere else.