He ordered whiskey neat, and I asked for a dirty vodka martini. She didn’t write it down.
The silence between us was not a vacuum; it was a centrifuge, separating out every unspoken thought and spinning it until the only thing left was truth.
I spoke first. “Why did you chase the van?”
He didn’t answer right away. The drinks arrived, set down hard enough to threaten spillage. He waited until the waitress was out of range.
“Because I recognized the type,” he said. “Not local. Not cartel. Military, but not the uniformed kind.”
I let that sit. “You think it was a test run?”
He shrugged. “Or a message. Either way, you were the package. I just intercepted.”
I sipped my drink, cold and briny. “You ever consider that maybe I’m bait?”
He smiled again, and this time it almost reached his eyes. “You’re too smart to be bait, Doc. But you might be a lure.”
I laughed, brittle and brief. “That’s comforting.”
We drank in silence for a while, letting the noise of the bar erode the distance between us. I wanted to ask him everything—about the men in the van, about the scar on his jaw, about why he kept showing up at intersections in my life. Instead, I asked the one question that had been curdling in my chest since that night.
“Do you ever get scared?”
He looked at me, the kind of look that flays all pretense. “Every fucking day,” he said.
I nodded, and we drank, and for a moment the weight of the world shrank to the size of a glass between our hands.
Outside, the cold deepened, and the wind gnawed at the door. But inside, in the radioactive hush of The Atomic, we were just two damaged vectors intersecting at the only point that ever mattered right here, right now, before the next disaster.
I debated how much more about myself or my work I should reveal. We were taught to be careful of strangers in Los Alamos. But he wasn’t a stranger. Strangers don’t come to your rescue or save your life. I looked into his eyes and began my story.
8
Seraphina
There was no menu at The Atomic, only a laminated slip with the day’s four cheapest options and a handwritten warning not to ask for substitutions. I let my eyes flick between the list and Nitro’s silhouette as I started my story. It was like talking to a wall of living scar tissue—his presence as dense and uninterpretable as the smoke above the bar, his attention unwavering but impossible to read.
“I work in Section G of the Lab,” I said, voice low but steady. I let the ice melt in my martini until the olive sank. “Specifically, adaptive networks and quantum entanglement for secure communications. Our latest project—Blue Spirit—is supposed to be a failsafe, a way to maintain command-and-control after a full nuclear exchange. No satellites, no towers, just mesh nodes and black-box learning. That’s the pitch, anyway.”
He didn’t blink. I wondered if he’d ever blinked in his life.
I tried to keep the technical jargon just below his threshold for boredom. “The thing is, you can’t train a system for real-world attacks without exposing it to real-world attackers. We’ve had probes on the net for weeks—test intrusions, botnets, some with actual human fingerprints. The defense teams called them ‘phantoms,’ but they were too creative, too precise. I think they’re Russian.”
He nodded, a single microgesture, as if the world was full of Russians and it was a surprise not to see one in every booth.
“Last week, we caught a rootkit that didn’t match anything on the known exploits lists. It didn’t act like malware; it acted like a learning agent, something designed to hide and watch. When we traced it, the signals looped back to a supposedly dead node in Vladivostok. The kind of dead that means someone paid for the burial.”
“Who else knows this?” His voice was a controlled demolition. I was impressed he was able to keep up.
“Just two people, officially. One is my program lead, who’s now in Bethesda under armed guard. The other is me.” I took a long swallow and felt the vodka’s heat unclench the knot behind my ribs. “Unofficially, the directorate knows, Homeland knows, and half a dozen three-letter agencies are pretending not to.”
He was watching the door now, or maybe the window, or maybe the exact spot where a bullet would enter if someone lined us up from the parking lot. “So you think the hit at the liquor store was Russians?”
“I think it was an outsourced job. American faces, but the training was Eastern. Whoever hired them didn’t care about the optics, only the outcome.” I hesitated, my hand floating over the glass rim, index finger tracing a circle in the condensation. “They want the code. The live neural net, not the source or the white paper. The kind of thing you need a working sample to reverse engineer.”
“Why you?” His tone made it clear the question was not about my gender or even my specialty. “They could pull the same play on your boss.”
“They tried.” I waited a breath. “The car bomb was too obvious. The directorate rotated her out before the fuse was lit. I’m more…expendable.”
