His lips twitched, some emotion almost surfacing, but I didn’t wait for it to finish. I turned, opened the door, and let it slam behind me.
The sound reverberated down the corridor, all the way to the next security checkpoint. I counted my steps, counted my breaths, trying to slow the runaway animal inside my chest.
I’d just declared war on the only authority I’d ever trusted.
By the time the clock shuddered past sixteen hundred, the place was mostly empty. The adaptive systems lab always thinned out before sunset, as if the building’s design repelled human occupation after working hours. Most of my team ghosted out the minute the last standup was finished. The only trace of them lingered in the recirculated air—a blend of old coffee, stress sweat, and the plastic aroma of government keyboards.
I tried to lose myself in the work, but my mind kept replaying the morning’s scenes on a loop. The echo of the door slamming behind Holloway. The venom in his voice. The subtle, awful high of talking back for the first time since childhood. Every time I tried to refocus, my pulse stuttered and I saw the inside of his office—wood, glass, warnings—overlaid on the code I was supposed to be reviewing. Something rubbed me the wrong way about Holloway.
I watched Dev pack up, then called out before he made the door.
“Do you trust Holloway?” I said.
He froze, then turned, eyes wide. “I… don’t really know him. But he runs a tight program.”
I laughed, bitter and clipped. “That’s one way to put it.”
He hovered, wanting to ask if I was okay, but knowing it would violate some boundary I’d spent years establishing. Instead, he offered a tiny, awkward smile, then bolted. I was left with onlythe buzz of the AC and the thrum of the server racks two floors above.
At 17:34, my phone buzzed, a text from an unknown number:
How was your day?
I stared at it, thumb hovering over the reply button. I knew who it was—nobody else would dare be so direct, or so casual. Nitro. The man who’d wrecked my sense of risk, and whose last words to me hung in the air like a dare. My boyfriend?
I should have ignored it. I should have deleted it, or forwarded it to Security, or at the very least composed a response so bland it would pass any audit. Instead, I stared at the glowing words, the icon of the red scythe, and tried to remember what it felt like to want something for no reason but itself.
I thought about what Holloway had said—that the oversight committee wouldn’t be as understanding. That my career, my future, my entire sense of self depended on keeping my head down and my mouth shut.
But in that moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done either of those things.
I typed out a response, deleted it, then typed another: Ask me in person.
My heart beat so loud I thought I might black out. I sent the message.
Then I sat in the dark, waiting for the next disaster, or the next chance to feel alive.
Either way, I knew he’d come.
12
Nitro
The war room smelled of old thermite and skin oil. Every surface was polished concrete or steel, designed to erase warmth, to keep the ghosts at bay. I walked in on Damron St. James bent over a scatter map of Los Alamos, his beard a shadow line under the baleful buzz of the overhead fluorescents. It was dawn, but inside, you couldn’t tell if it was noon or midnight or the moment before an airstrike.
I set my coffee—black, no pretense—on the concrete, careful not to slosh it on the territory lines he’d drawn in Sharpie. He didn’t glance up, just kept tracing the path of Trinity Drive with the tip of a ballpoint, eyes eating up the block numbers and the shaded areas he’d marked “soft.” There were two handguns on the table, one gloved, one naked. I didn’t know which was for business and which for pleasure.
He finally said, “You got something?”
“Yeah.” My throat was still raw from the cigarettes, and my voice scraped out flat. “Russian ops are in town. Real ones, not the strip-mall variety. Saw black vehicles doing slow rolls past the lab perimeter, and there were two men casing the utility van near Canyon Road. No obvious patch, but the way they moved, I’d bet money on private ex-mil, not federal.”
He tapped the map, still not looking at me. “Pattern?”
“They’re floating, not sticking to a schedule. Dots are random but always loop back to the east gate. Last night, they used a local burner—cloned, but the tower handshake gave away the drop. I cross-checked against last week’s weird traffic and got three more hits.”
He nodded once. His hands were steady, even when he switched between the pen and the whiskey glass that always hovered nearby. “You run the plates?”
I felt my jaw grind. “All government rentals. Same front company, but the address in ABQ is a shell. I got Seneca’s guy looking for the registration pool.”
