I watched her handle a shotgun yesterday. That was grit—raw and earned. Watching her now is something else entirely.
Terrifying.
Her fingers move faster than I can track. Windows open and close in cascades of code. Not typing—conducting. The soft blue light of the screen catches her eyes and makes them look electric.
"Talk to me." I snap the slide back onto the frame. "What am I looking at?"
She doesn't look up. "I'm building a ghost."
"A ghost?"
"Black Helix tracks digital footprints. IP addresses, MAC addresses, browser fingerprints. If I try to hide, they'll find the void where I'm supposed to be. Absence of data is still data." She hits a key with a flourish. "So I'm creating a clone. A digital Wren Calloway who is currently booking a flight to London, using acredit card at Heathrow, and logging into a hotel Wi-Fi network in Kensington."
"You can do that?"
"I'm spoofing the transaction tokens. It won't hold up to a deep forensic dive, but it might distract their automated crawlers for forty-eight hours."
She leans back, stretching her arms over her head. Her spine cracks. "God, my shoulder hurts."
"Recoil will do that." I stand and walk to the table, looking at the screen. It's a wall of gibberish to me—matrix rain without the green tint. "You're good at this."
"I'm the best." No arrogance. Just fact. Then her expression closes. "That's the problem."
"What do you mean?"
Her hand hovers over the trackpad. "I found something else. In the raw data I downloaded before I ran."
"Show me."
She minimizes the code window and opens a folder labeled ARCHIVE_77. Inside: a subdirectory. ASSET_ACQ_WC.
"Asset Acquisition, Wren Calloway," I read.
She clicks it.
The screen fills with photos.
My blood goes cold.
Not headshots. Surveillance photos. Wren walking out of a coffee shop in San Francisco. Wren waiting for the BART. Wren sitting in a park, reading on a tablet.
The timestamps are from two months ago.
"They didn't find me on a freelance board." Her voice has gone flat. "They were watching me. Weeks before the job offer came through."
"They profiled you." I lean in, scanning the metadata.
"Because they needed someone specifically talented enough to audit the system, but isolated enough that if they had toliquidate the asset, no one would ask questions. Freelancer. No family. No corporate backing. You were the perfect target."
I rest my hand on her shoulder and feel the tension radiating off her. "And there was never a version where you walked away. The moment you took the job, you were a loose end. The audit was just the method. The outcome was always going to be the same."
She stares at a photo of herself buying groceries. "I was a dead woman before I found the backdoor."
"You were a mark," I say. "But marks are supposed to be sheep. You turned out to be a wolf."
She doesn't answer immediately. She pulls the laptop toward her, navigates to a buried folder, and opens a small timer window. The counter reads 31:04:17 and ticking.
"Thirty-one hours," she says. "Then the packet fires."
