Nina had built her career on invisible damage. Eviction lists, waiting rooms, forms that swallowed people. Her podcast listeners liked stories where the villain was a process, not a person. Once, she had believed that it was safer. Then, a boy she covered vanished before her episode aired. She still heard his mother crying.
After that, she promised herself she would never move slowly again. If she saw a hole in the system, she would run at it. Her new series, “In Limbo,” followed people trapped by “temporary” measures. The twins sounded exactly like that. But she had three weeks until a national policy vote turned “temporary” into law.