Chapter 22 - THE NUMBER ON THE BACK
Enzo didn't hang up while he walked upstairs.
I listened to the muted rhythm of his footsteps, the opening of Amelia's bedroom door, and the kind of silence that can make a perfectly safe room seem impossibly far away.
Then I heard her sleepy voice.
“Dad? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“It's Tuesday. I'm supposed to be all right on Tuesdays.”
He gave a strained laugh. “You're right.”
When he returned to the hallway, his voice was lower.
“She's here. She's fine. Tell me what happened.”
I described the record, carefully. He let me finish.
“Whoever entered that,” he said, “used her name.”
“Yes.”
“And the gate address.”
“Yes.”
He exhaled, one long controlled breath. “I want the account shut down.”
“So do we. The reviewer is preserving it first. If we erase everything before copying the logs, we may lose the only trace of who used it.”
“Understood.”
There was a pause in which I could hear his old instinct struggling against his new one.
“Can I come over?” he asked.
“Not tonight. Amelia needs you at home, and I need to finish a report. Call me in the morning.”
“Okay.”
He meant it. He didn't argue.
I slept badly anyway.
At the office the following morning, Celeste had arranged for an external digital investigator named Tara Singh to meet with the program's lawyer and its technology provider. Tara was in her forties, with close-cropped hair and an unhurried voice that made complicated things sound manageable without making them sound harmless.
“We need to separate three questions,” she told us. “Were these rides performed? Who created the digital entries? And how did the person obtain names that should not have been available?”
“Can you answer all three?” June asked.
“Not yet. If anyone promises certainty before checking the source records, send them home.”
She showed us how the old import account worked. Before the program relaunched, the technology vendor had migrated limited family-contact data so participating families wouldn't have to repeat every detail. The migration was supposed to exclude historical case notes and deactivate temporary access after validation.
Instead, the account remained open with permission to create test rides.
“The odd part,” Tara said, “is that the entries aren't random. Someone selected names connected to very specific historical files.”
She enlarged a list.
Leah's name. Another family that had filed a complaint in the county transport review. A former caregiver who had testified about missed pickups. And Amelia.
“The child isn't an ordinary program passenger,” Tara said. “Why would her name be in a transportation database?”
I knew one possible answer. Sofia had run the original Blue Harbor project, and Amelia had visited as a child. An old contact card could have survived in an archive. But that didn't explain why someone had chosen it now.
Enzo arrived with Meredith at ten. He had asked Amelia's school to follow its ordinary pickup-verification procedures, without turning the day into a frightening security exercise. Her teacher knew to call him if anything unusual happened, just as she would for any parent.
“Amelia asked why I checked her room,” he admitted to me while the others reviewed the logs.
“What did you tell her?”
“That a computer record was wrong and I wanted to make sure she was safe.”
“Did she believe you?”
“She said computers are wrong all the time and I should stop buying the expensive ones.”
I smiled, then asked, “Are you going to tell her more?”
“Enough that she knows what affects her. Not a crime story she's expected to solve.”
It was exactly the answer I would have hoped for a year earlier, and still I could see how frightened he was.
Tara joined us with a printed page.
“There may be a physical connection,” she said. “The user added a five-character note to each suspicious ride. They vary, but one repeats.”
She placed the page between us.
GATE4.
June frowned. “The fourth entrance?”
“Or a meaningless tag,” Tara said. “We don't know.”
I remembered the four posts of the old Blue Harbor fence and the red rocket Jonah had painted. The image appeared in my mind so sharply that I could smell wet paint.
“Has anybody photographed our gate recently?” I asked.
“Hundreds of people,” June replied. “It's on the program website. The photograph was approved for publication.”
“Then knowing the gate isn't proof of being there,” Tara said. “That's important.”
She was right, and I hated how much I wanted the tag to be a clue I could hold in my hand.
We contacted the technology contractor, HarborLine Access. Their operations director, Graham Pike, arrived after lunch wearing a navy coat and the weary expression of a man prepared to explain why everybody else had made a mistake.
“Migration accounts are maintained for quality control,” he said. “You can't simply pull the plug on a live system.”
Tara looked at the contract. “The account had a deactivation date.”
“We made a practical exception.”
“Who authorized it?”
“I'll check.”
“Please do. Preserve the written approval.”
Graham glanced toward Enzo. “Mr. Moretti knows these systems are complicated. His group used similar workflows for years.”
Enzo didn't rescue him.
“My former companies made plenty of mistakes,” he said. “That's why we're asking you for the record.”
Graham's expression tightened.
For the rest of the afternoon he answered questions without quite answering them. He agreed to preserve logs, but asked that we avoid alarming families over what might be a routine test. Celeste rejected that suggestion politely and sent a narrowly worded advisory, offering families a way to check their records and report discrepancies.
By evening, fourteen families had contacted us. Most had no concerns. Three reported receipts they couldn't explain. One woman said an unfamiliar driver had once called her and seemed to know where her son attended therapy. We documented her account without turning it into a conclusion about the same person.
Before Amelia arrived, I stopped by the bakery below my apartment and asked whether they had any plain rolls left. The owner, Mrs. Navarro, brought a paper bag from the back and asked why I looked as though I had been trying to solve a math problem with my forehead.
“Because a computer says people went places they didn't go,” I answered.
She clicked her tongue. “Then the computer needs to talk to the people.”
“I think that's exactly the problem.”
She told me about a delivery marked complete at her shop when the driver had never arrived. It had taken four calls to establish which door was supposed to have been used. “And that was a box of flour,” she said. “Imagine if it had been my mother's appointment.”
I carried the rolls upstairs thinking about scale. A single mistaken status could be annoying or devastating depending on the person attached to it. What frightened me wasn't the software itself. It was the speed at which one system's confident answer became another system's unquestioned fact. I put the rolls on the table, opened a clean notebook, and wrote: Ask the person first.
At six, Amelia came to my apartment with Enzo and a tin of cookies she'd baked under his supervision. She insisted the dark edges were intentional.
“They're meteorites,” she said.
“Then I suppose burning is scientifically accurate.”
We sat at my little kitchen table. I explained the disputed record in the simplest words I could find. Amelia listened with her hands wrapped around a glass of milk.
“Did somebody pretend to be me?” she asked.
“Somebody put your name on a computer record. We don't know why.”
“Does that mean they know where I live?”
“The place on the record is Blue Harbor, not your home,” Enzo said. “But we're checking which information was accessible.”
She considered that. “Could it be somebody who thinks the rocket is ugly?”
“Your rocket is excellent,” I said.
“Jonah's rocket,” she corrected. “He gets the credit.”
Then her face grew serious. “I don't want everybody talking about me at school.”
“We won't tell your classmates,” Enzo said. “And if anyone asks, you can say there was a mistake in some paperwork. You don't owe anyone more than that.”
She looked relieved. She took another cookie and asked whether we could still go to the planetarium on Saturday.
“Yes,” Enzo said. “We're not canceling your life because someone entered a false number.”
After they left, I found one cookie wrapped in a napkin beside my laptop. Amelia had written FOR LATE WORK on the paper, with a crooked drawing of Saturn.
The note almost made me cry.
At eight-thirty, Tara called. The reviewer had recovered a small batch of archived files referenced by the compromised account. Most were ordinary contact templates. One was a scanned page from Sofia's original Night Lantern procedures, with her handwriting in the margin.
Tara sent me only the approved redacted image.
Beside the section on who could access family addresses, Sofia had written: Never let contractors decide what families have consented to.
Below it, in a different pen, someone had added a date and five characters.
GATE4.
Then the investigator pointed out something else.
“The page wasn't just viewed,” Tara said. “It was copied from an old archive three weeks before the relaunch. And the audit trail identifies an administrator who hasn't worked at Blue Harbor in years.”
“Who?” I asked.
She read the name.
It belonged to a man who had helped shut down the original Night Lantern transport operation.
May you like
A man Enzo had once called his most reliable finance adviser.
And by the time I reached Enzo on the phone, I could hear from his silence that he remembered exactly who he was.
