warning included hospital security, the one group I should have been able to trust without hesitation.

So after my shift the next night, instead of using the rear exit, I left through the side corridor, cut behind the outpatient wing, and walked to a small chapel wedged between two older buildings slated for demolition.

It was mostly used by families waiting through surgery.

At that hour it was empty.

Silas was inside.

For the first time, I saw him standing in decent light without the performance of exhaustion.

He still wore the blue parka, but his posture was different.

Cleaner.

Deliberate.

The half-slouch I associated with him was gone.

In its place was the stillness of someone used to threat assessment and bad odds.

“My name is Salvador Vega,” he said before I could speak.

“Silas was easier to keep buried.”

I did not sit.

I stayed near the chapel door with the badge clenched in my fist and demanded the truth.

He gave it to me in pieces.

Years earlier he had worked for a federal unit that investigated kidnappings and disappearances tied to medical transport contracts.

During that investigation he and his partner uncovered something uglier hiding beneath the normal chaos of the city’s healthcare system: private ambulances, compromised security staff, falsified toxicology reports, and a network of people who made dangerous witnesses disappear by making their deaths look unrelated.

Before they could bring the case in cleanly, his partner was killed and the evidence chain was poisoned.

Someone inside law enforcement leaked everything.

Vega vanished before he could be next.

He went underground.

Literally at times.

Shelters, alleys, rooftops, charity kitchens, abandoned stairwells.

Places where invisible men can see more than important men ever realize.

He had spent the last year watching San Judas from the outside because he believed the same network was active again.

I asked why me.

That was when the ground beneath my life tilted for the second time.

Two weeks earlier, I had rerun bloodwork from an unidentified female patient brought in after midnight by a private ambulance.

The chart said overdose.

The tox screen did not support it.

There were traces of a hospital sedative and a paralytic agent that had no business appearing with the listed narrative.

I flagged the mismatch and logged a repeat test because the barcodes on the specimen tubes looked wrong.

I remembered the case immediately.

I also remembered what happened the next day: my supervisor, Dr.

Tomás Rivas, casually asked whether I was tired, whether I ever double-checked my own entries, whether I was still taking the park route home or had changed apartments.

At the time I heard it as bureaucratic small talk.

In the chapel, hearing Vega recount it, I felt sick.

“They noticed your rerun,” he said.

“Rivas pulled your name from the lab trail.

Mendez in hospital security pulled your schedule.

I heard them discussing you three nights ago from the loading dock.

They said you were precise, hard to bribe, and easy to intercept after shift change.”

“Then who was the woman they killed?”

Vega looked down for a moment before answering.

Her name was Mariela Soto.

She lived in my building on the floor below mine and worked nights in environmental services.

We were similar height.

Similar build.

We