"So you cracked military-grade encryption on four hours of sleep and a cup of coffee." He glances sideways at me as we crossthe compound, and the look has an edge of something that isn't quite amusement and isn't quite admiration and sits in the space between the two where it can do the most damage. "Gwen's going to be thrilled."
"Gwen can take it up with my cortisol levels."
"Gwen will take it up with me, because apparently I'm the one responsible for making sure you don't code yourself into a medical event."
"Nobody assigned you that responsibility."
"Didn't need assigning."
The words land like he's tossing them over his shoulder, careless and offhand, but the set of his jaw tells a different story. The afternoon is overcast, the bay flat and grey beyond the buildings, and the wind carries the salt-mineral smell of the Chesapeake at tide change. His shoulder is close to mine, close enough that the gap between us feels like a choice being made and remade with every step, and the pull in that gap is the same one that sat between our hands on the balcony railing last night before he closed it.
He closed it. He covered my hand on the cold steel without asking, without hesitating, with the same steady certainty he brings to a live wire. And I turned my palm up and laced my fingers through his and felt his pulse against my wrist, strong and unhurried while my own was racing, and the only thing more terrifying than letting him in was how much I wanted him closer.
I feel the memory in my fingers as I walk beside him now. The warmth of his hand. The rough texture of his palm. His thumb tracing a single line across my knuckle before he stopped himself. He stopped himself. Like there was a line past that single touch that he'd decided he wouldn't cross until I told him to, and the restraint in that, the leashed patience of a man who dismantles bombs for a living and has decided to give me thesame careful attention, is tightening behind my ribs in a way that has nothing to do with caffeine.
At the comm building, he does the sweep he always does: corridor, ceiling panels, exits. But today he lingers afterward, one hand braced high on the doorframe, his body filling the opening in a way that turns a threshold into a question.
"I'll be at the shop until seventeen hundred," he tells me. "Rowe's running the afternoon drill. I need to be there for it."
"Because of the device."
"Because my team just learned that someone planted a bomb in their training equipment. They need to see me standing in that bay running the drill like nothing's changed, or the confidence goes and the confidence is everything." His eyes hold mine, and underneath the tactical rationale there's a rawness he's not letting the words carry. "Same reason I'm standing in your doorway right now instead of walking away."
"And what reason is that?"
The corner of his mouth lifts, but his gaze doesn't waver. "Seemed like the right doorway to stand in."
The statement sits between us, dressed up as offhand and failing at it completely.
I look at him, and for a moment the code and the encryption and the countdown fall away, and what's left is the image of this man standing in an empty bay yesterday afternoon, hands braced on a steel workbench, holding the fury of what happened inside a stillness that cost him something to maintain. He didn't fall apart. He locked it down, walked through hours of procedure, drove home, ate soup I made badly, and stood on a cold balcony and told me about watching his best friend drown in grief, and the reason he told me is because I'm the person he chose to tell, and I am nowhere near equipped to carry the weight of that.
But I'm carrying it anyway.
"I'll be here," I say.
"I know you will." He holds my gaze for a beat longer than operational necessity requires, taps the frame once with his knuckle, and then he's gone.
His footsteps fade down the corridor, and the comm building settles back into the hum of servers and the quiet that belongs to me alone. I turn to the monitors.
The afternoon passes in the blue glow of monitors and the focused quiet that settles over me when the work is good and the stakes are high. I build the monitoring framework in layers, setting traps across every network node that Garrick's access logs show him touching. Each trap is passive, invisible, designed to record without alerting. If he moves data, I'll see it. If he communicates with his handler, I'll capture it. If he breathes on a keyboard connected to this base's infrastructure, I'll know.
His patterns are already shifting. The access logs from today show a shorter visit to the eastern corridor than his average, and his route between the maintenance contract workspaces has changed. He's using different entry points, different timing, avoiding the junction near the server farm where we found the relay device. The adjustments are small, possibly coincidental, possibly a test to see whether anyone is watching.
He's careful, but careful people make careful mistakes, and careful mistakes are the ones I'm best at finding.
The sun drops behind the warehouses and the overcast goes dark, and I'm deep in Garrick's traffic logs when the monitoring framework flags a new burst transmission.
My hands go still on the keyboard.
The transmission fires from Garrick's known access point to the handler's server, and my decryption runs automatically against the captured packets. The plaintext resolves on my screen, and I read it twice because the first time, my brain refuses to process what it says.
The message is short. It references "the analyst" by role, not by name, with a recommendation to"remove the obstacle before activation."There is a street address appended to the message, and I know the address the way I know the sound of the deadbolt turning and the creak of the balcony door and the cadence of footsteps crossing a converted warehouse floor.
It is the address of Griff's loft, the place where I sleep, where I work, where I stood on a balcony last night and let a man hold my hand while the bay went dark below us.
They've been watching. Garrick has had access to the compromised camera feeds for months, has had visibility into base security movements, and Griff drove me to and from the comm building every day in a truck registered to an address that any contractor with access to motor pool records could find in minutes. I assumed the loft's anonymity was protection. I forgot that anonymity only works against adversaries who aren't already inside the system.
The threat is no longer abstract. It has a street address, and the street address is where I sleep.
