"Unit 14, copy. Backup en route, four minutes out." Four minutes. Amara did the math without meaning to. 4 minutes was a long time when your chest felt like it was folding inward one breath at a time.
She kept her hands still in her lap, the folder with her grandmother's program pressed flat beneath them, and made herself breathe slow through her nose. In. Out. Slower than she wanted to. Priya Nassa hadn't looked away since the cough started.
She'd clocked out 20 minutes ago. She was still wearing her badge clipped to the strap of her bag, and some old habit made her count Amara's breaths per minute without meaning to. 14, then 16, climbing. "Officer." Priya stood, one hand braced on the seat rail as the bus swayed.
"I'm an ER tech. That's not fear. That's air hunger. You need to give her the inhaler back." Kowalski didn't turn around.
"Ma'am, I appreciate you trying to help, but this is a police matter now. It's a medical matter that you're making into a police matter." That should have landed. It didn't. He was already looking past her toward the front doors, waiting on his 4 minutes like they were the only clock that mattered.
Priya sat back down, jaw tight, phone gripped but not raised. She told herself she'd wait for backup. Surely backup would ask the obvious question. Surely someone with a supervisor's radio code would look at a 17-year-old wheezing in a window seat and think to check her wrist before her lungs. She was wrong.
Within 90 seconds of the second officer boarding, he was younger than Kowalski, moved like someone who'd learned to defer before he'd learned to question, and he didn't ask Amara a single thing. He looked at Kowalski. Kowalski gave him three sentences. "Unlabeled canister, evasive, uncooperative." And the younger officer nodded along like he was memorizing a script rather than hearing evidence.
"We'll get this sorted at the next stop," he said to no one in particular, already reaching for the radio to log it. Amara's stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with her lungs. He never even looked at her. She could stop this. One sentence.
One name. One phone call finally answered. But if she said it now, in front of all these strangers with their phones raised, none of this would stay small anymore. It would become a headline instead of an afternoon. She wasn't ready to hand her father's name to a bus full of witnesses.
Not yet. Not like this. The bus lurched forward again, back into traffic. Rain streaking sideways now against the windows. Rainwater ran down the glass behind Amara in wavering lines, blurring the city until everything outside looked under water.