“You bring it to the club if the shit gets too deep,” Damron replied, but softer. “Anything else?”
I thought about the way Seraphina had gone blank after the fight, the way she’d studied the damage, sorted the chaos, and not once had she looked at me like I was the monster in the room. Not even when I shot a man dead for her.
“She’s not normal,” I said. “She’s like us.”
Seneca snorted. “Didn’t think you went for brainy types.”
I ignored him. “She’s going to want answers. She’s not going to roll over, not even for the feds.”
Damron’s jaw clenched, and he rubbed the scar that split his eyebrow—a nervous tic from before the club, before he’d learned to be the unmoved mover. “You think she’s going to be a problem?”
I shook my head. “She’s going to be the solution. Or the thing that kills us all.”
That seemed to satisfy him, or at least make him give up the argument for tonight. He closed the ledger, snapped the elasticshut. “We don’t need more news until we figure out who’s got the worst intentions.”
Seneca peeled off the wall and headed for the exit, passing close enough to brush my shoulder. “Don’t fuck this up, Chemist,” he whispered, just loud enough for me and the ghosts to hear. “You’re not the only one who can read a room.”
Augustine nodded to me, then started making calls on his burner, voice low and clipped.
I stayed in the chair after the room emptied, letting the echoes of their footsteps die in the steel bones of the warehouse. Damron poured another drink and slid the bottle across the table. For the first time, he looked at me, not through me.
“You ever regret it?” he asked. “Any of this?”
I considered the question. The line of choice and consequence, how every day in the club was a choice to make it worse or not make it at all. How the only real currency left was loyalty, and how even that got traded cheap.
“I regret nothing,” I said. “Except not shooting faster.”
He gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You’re a cold bastard, Seager.”
I took the drink and tossed it back. “That’s why you keep me around.”
I walked out with the weight of it on my shoulders, and the strange comfort of knowing that in this world, the only thing that never lied was the pain.
My room at the clubhouse was a coffin. I liked it that way—four walls, no windows, nothing inside but a cot, a steel desk scavenged from an abandoned elementary school, and a set of wire shelves loaded with motorcycle manuals, explosives handbooks, and half a dozen binders filled with chemical equations.
I closed the door behind me and booted up my laptop, watching as the blue glow spilled across the scars on my hands.The system was set up for speed, everything passworded, but nothing encrypted unless I was expecting real heat. Tonight I wasn’t sure what I was expecting.
The Internet was slow and ugly, like everything else in Los Alamos, but it only took a few keystrokes to get past the basic firewalls and into the good stuff. I started with her lab profile. Dr. Seraphina Dalton, Ph.D. in computer science, specialty in artificial intelligence and quantum neural networks. Her photo was clinical and undersold, hair back, eyes dark behind librarian glasses, a smile that was either carefully practiced or the only one she knew how to make. According to her CV, she’d spent time at MIT, then Stanford, then Los Alamos. She’d published more papers in three years than most tenured faculty managed in a decade. Some of them had coauthors whose names I recognized from various government watch lists.
I read her most recent abstract, something about self-assembling code and machine learning algorithms that “adapt and optimize in hostile environments.” I didn’t understand all the math, but I recognized the tone. This was the kind of work that got entire divisions of DARPA jerking off and black-bag teams showing up at your parents’ house. No wonder someone wanted to get at her.
I scrolled deeper through the breadcrumbs of her digital life. She had no Facebook, no Instagram, no LinkedIn, except a ghost account that hadn’t been updated since 2018. She’d given a talk at DEFCON, though, and the video was still on YouTube. I clicked it, let the sound bleed into the room.
She didn’t look comfortable on stage, but her voice was steady and low, the kind of register that made people lean in even if they didn’t care about the topic. She talked about emergent behavior in AI, about the ethical risks of giving machines “unfettered self-improvement.” There was a slide at the end, a diagram of a network that looked like a human brain, onlyangrier and hungrier. “We’re not ready for what comes next,” she said, and I believed her.
I paused the video, rewound, and watched the way she held the pointer in her hand, never letting it shake. I realized I was staring and closed the window. This was not the kind of interest that ended well.
But I kept digging. Her name appeared in a handful of patents, all co-owned by the Department of Energy and a company I’d never heard of, likely a shell for one of the alphabet agencies. There were news articles, mostly dry science press, but one from a Santa Fe paper about a panel on women in STEM. The journalist described her as “fiercely intelligent, but with the wary detachment of a person always calculating escape vectors.” I wondered if the writer realized how accurate that was.
I found a few forum posts from years ago, technical debates where she never gave an inch but always followed up with a footnote apology if she’d gone too far. I found no record of family, no photos of her at parties or conferences. She was a void in the shape of a person, and I understood that, too. We finally had something in common.
The last place I looked was the most obvious: the classified server I kept patched into the club’s private net. I ran her name against a few keywords: “project,” “contract,” “escort,” “exfil.” There were hits, but most were redacted to hell, with only fragmentary references to something called BLUE GHOST and a set of GPS coordinates not far from the edge of town. The coordinates were for a storage facility I knew well—a secondary data center for the lab, but also a known hangout for private security types with ex-military training. I flagged it for later.
My phone buzzed—a text from Damron, terse as always: “Patrols set. Don’t go near the lab tonight.” I thumbed back “Copy,” but I was already planning otherwise.
I returned to the laptop, back to her photo. The quality was crap, a thumbnail meant for badge printers, but I studied it anyway. She had the look of someone who’d spent a long time learning to hide the way she thought, the way she saw the world. I wondered how much of that was habit, and how much was fear.
“Who the hell are you, Doc?” I said, not expecting an answer. “And what kind of trouble are you in?”
