“Then you have the wrong version.”
Silence. A stand-off, old as time. I felt the sweat cooling under my collar.
Martinez moved forward. He was less menacing at a distance, but only just. “Dr. Dalton, we’re not here to hurt you. We know about your work, about the importance of Blue Spirit. We just want to make sure you’re protected. But that only happens if you cooperate.”
I watched him, measured. “You want me to testify.”
Keller nodded. “Your testimony could put these criminals away for good.” She didn’t blink. “You’d be doing the country a service.”
I almost laughed. “Is that how you see it? A service?”
She shrugged. “You’re a patriot, Dr. Dalton. You work at Los Alamos. That means something.”
A chill ran through me, colder than the sublevel air.
“And if I don’t?”
Martinez leaned in, voice almost tender. “It gets complicated. For you, and for anyone you care about.”
The threat was soft, but it had weight.
Keller placed both hands flat on the table. “You’re in a unique position. You survived. Most don’t. All we want is the truth. The real truth, not some patched-over version.”
I nodded, the motion mechanical. “You’ll have it. Tomorrow.”
She seemed surprised. “You need time to remember?”
“I need time to process,” I said, and it was true.
Keller’s gaze narrowed. “We’ll be back at 0900. Don’t leave the facility.”
I stood, waited for them to clear the way. They watched me leave, as if I were a dangerous animal.
The walk back to my lab was a parade of shame. I felt every eye on me, every whisper. Dev hovered outside my door, trying and failing to look casual.
“You okay?” he asked again.
I almost said no. But I nodded, pushed past him, and locked the door behind me.
Inside, the lab was dead, the screens blank, the hum of the server racks now a dirge. I sat at my terminal, stared at the login screen, and let my mind go blank.
The government had made it clear. Tomorrow, I was supposed to hand over the only man who had ever tried to save me.
The office after dark was a ghost town. The cubicles were stripped to bone, vending machines humming like insects, the motion sensors on a hair trigger, flicking the overheads alive if you so much as coughed. I lingered, made a show of work until the last wave of badge-outs, then waited fifteen minutes more. I watched the clock on my monitor, the numbers rolling over with a pointless precision. 7:00, 7:01, 7:02.
When I was sure the floor was empty, I turned off the desktop and slid open my bottom drawer. The watch was still there, wrapped in a cracked antistatic bag. I pulled it out with both hands, the tremor barely noticeable unless you were looking for it.
It had been dead for days. I’d left it off to keep its location from pinging any of the facility’s silent alarms. When I pressed the button, it vibrated weakly, the screen booting to the lastrecorded time: 13:42, the exact minute I’d been hauled into the van behind the liquor store.
I slipped it onto my wrist, feeling the weight of it settle on the bone.
The audio logs were buried—encrypted and invisible to any casual query. But I’d written the damn firmware myself; I knew the backdoor. I tapped through the menus with practiced speed. File directory. Hidden. Voice logs.
There were four.
The first was a mess of panic, the microphone catching only static and the thump of my own pulse as I was thrown onto the metal floor of the van. The next was worse: rough hands, someone muttering in Russian, the crack of a pistol whip, the sound of my own voice trying to remember the right words for “please” and “stop.” I listened, face blank, because the pain was old now, just another data point.
The third file was the one I wanted. It started with the sound of boots on linoleum, the wet snarl of a man struggling to breathe, then, unmistakable, Nitro’s voice. It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t gentle. It was a string of profanities, then the sharp, clean order: “Get behind me, Doc. Now.”
