She looks at the man on her floor. Then at me.
"Yeah." Her grip tightens around mine. "I trust you."
We go out the back, down the fire escape I scouted last night out of habit so ingrained it doesn't register as a choice anymore. The Charger still idles out front—I catch the faint exhaust plume as we clear the alley. The driver is waiting for a check-in that isn't coming. He'll give it another few minutes before he moves, and by then we need to be gone.
My bike sits two blocks east. I never park at the location. I am profoundly grateful for the paranoia right now.
The sky is just beginning to crack open at the horizon, thin lines of pink and gold splitting the dark above the mountain ridgeline. It should be something. I track every window with asightline to street level, every shadow deep enough to conceal a position, every rooftop with a reasonable angle.
I hand her the spare helmet. "Ever been on a bike?"
"Once. Hated it."
"You'll hate this more." I hold her gaze over the helmet. "Lean when I lean. Keep your hands locked around my waist. Don't let go for any reason."
She pulls the helmet on without argument. Climbs on behind me and wraps her arms around my waist. A tremor runs through her—deep and continuous, the full-body rattle of someone whose adrenaline has nowhere left to go and whose brain is only now beginning to understand what just happened in that apartment.
"Where are we going?" she asks.
I start the engine. Her arms lock down around me like a reflex.
"Somewhere Black Helix won't find you while I get Frost on the line and figure out exactly what we're dealing with." I pull out of the alley and into the empty street, both mirrors burning in my peripheral vision. "Talk to me. The man said you accessed something you shouldn't have. What were you working on?"
"Nothing sensitive. A client's messaging app—basic UX review. I flagged some unusual backend architecture in my report, but it was just a note, I didn't—" She stops. Her whole body goes rigid against mine. "Oh, God. The user database. There were encrypted user IDs that didn't follow any standard format I'd ever seen. I documented them with screenshots."
I run that through what I know about Black Helix. Communications infrastructure is their backbone — the thing that makes everything else they do possible. Encrypted non-standard user IDs in a messaging app's backend would be exactly the kind of fingerprint they'd need to scrub.
"The app. Who was the client?"
She gives me the name.
Everything clicks into place.
"That app has thirty million users." I keep my voice level. "If Black Helix owns the backend, they own thirty million private conversations. Politicians. Executives. Journalists." I take a hard right, tires biting the asphalt. "Your report didn't just flag unusual architecture. You documented proof that their entire network exists. With your name on it."
"I didn't know what I was looking at?—"
"Doesn't matter. You saw it. You put it in writing. That's all they needed." I push the engine harder. "They won't stop. Not until the liability is removed."
Her arms tighten. Her pulse hammers against my back—I can feel it through the layers between us.
"So what do we do?"
"We run. We find ground I can defend. We figure out how to keep you breathing." I reach back with one hand and grip her thigh—brief, solid, the only promise I can make with my hands occupied. "I won't let them touch you."
It's a reckless thing to say. Black Helix has reach I can't fully account for from a mountain town before sunrise, resources and personnel I haven't mapped. But she's pressed against my back with her arms locked around me, trusting me with her life on the strength of one night and a gut instinct, and there is no version of this where I don't honor that.
The pendant sits heavy in my pocket as we accelerate through the waking streets, the mountain dark beginning to loosen at the edges.
Black Helix has made a mistake. They've never gone against a Guardian.
And they've never tried to take someone I've decided is mine.
FIVE
Wren
The motorcycle screamsbetween cars like a bullet through tissue paper, and I'm going to die clinging to a stranger's back with my laptop bag cutting into my ribs.
