"Couldn't I?" She stands abruptly, pacing again. "Anonymous client, too much money, software too sophisticated for a startup? I'm supposed to be smart. It's literally my job to see patterns, find flaws. And I walked right into this."
"You found their vulnerability. That makes you the smartest person in this equation." I catch her wrist as she passes—gentle but firm. "They built a multimillion-dollar network with one critical flaw, and you found it in two weeks. That's why they want you dead. You're the only one who knows their weakness."
She looks at our joined hands. Then up at me. "So what now? I hide forever? Witness protection? Spend my life looking over my shoulder?"
"Now we figure out how to use what you know." I release her wrist, already running scenarios. "If we can access their shadow server?—"
"We can't. I found the vulnerability, but I don't have access credentials. It would take massive computing power to break in, and even then?—"
"What if we don't break in? What if we make them think their system is already compromised?"
Her head tilts, that sharp intelligence focusing like a beam. "Psychological warfare. Make them panic, turn on each other."
"Exactly. You documented everything. We leak portions strategically, make them think someone inside is talking."
"That's..." She sits back down, wheels turning. "That could work. I have everything backed up and encrypted across multiple servers." A pause. "I could set up a dead man's switch. If something happens to me, everything goes public automatically."
"Walk me through it."
She looks up. I'm not nodding and moving on—I need to know if this plan holds weight or if it's just a thing she said to feel less cornered. An operator who can't picture the mechanism can't build around it.
"Scheduled packet transmission," she says, shifting into the focused register she uses when she's solving rather than surviving. "I pre-address the full documentation—audit report, all the shadow server logs, everything—to three federal agencies and two investigative journalists. FBI, DOJ, Homeland. Contacts at the Times and ProPublica who would run it within the hour."
"Firing window?"
"Forty-eight hours from when I arm it. It goes out automatically unless I cancel from my authenticated device. Biometric verification plus a rotating token that changes every sixty seconds." Her voice steadies as she lays it out. "Black Helix can't intercept from outside. The transmission queues on a server that they have no record of. The cancellation key never leaves my hardware. They'd have to physically take my device and my hand to stop it."
"How long will it take to set up?"
"Not long." She opens the laptop again. Meets my eyes. "I'll do it now."
"Now you're thinking like a survivor."
"I don't want to survive." The fire in her eyes makes something kick hard in my chest. "I want to burn their whole network down."
"That's my little bird."
The words slip out—too familiar, too possessive for what we are. She doesn't flinch. If anything, she leans forward and starts working.
I pull a chair around to her side of the table and watch her build it. The dead man's switch assembles under her fingers with methodical precision—pre-addressed packets, staggered fifteen minutes apart, so no single intercept stops all of them. Timer set. Biometric lock engaged. The rotating token cycling its first sequence on the screen.
Her hands are steady now. This is the language she was built for.
"Five recipients," she says, more to herself than to me. "Staggered. FBI, DOJ, Homeland. Times and ProPublica."
"What's the cancellation window?"
"Forty-eight hours. My thumbprint and the current token. That's it." She closes the laptop without ceremony and pushes it aside. "Done."
She doesn't look relieved. She looks like a soldier who just took up a defensive position and knows it's the best one available.
"It's armed," she says.
"Good." I hold her gaze. "That was your first weapon. Now you're dangerous."
The words land somewhere behind her sternum. I watch the impact move through her—the recognition of what she just did. Not hiding. Not hoping someone else handles it. She drew a line in the sand and dared them to cross it.
She stands. Moves closer.
