I reach for my phone. Griff's number sits at the top of my recent calls, and this time I don't scroll past it.
9
GRIFF
Nox calls while I'm at the EOD bay running Rowe through the post-drill inventory. Her voice on the phone is one I haven't heard before: controlled, precise, and stripped of every layer of sarcasm that usually buffers whatever she's actually feeling.
"They have the address," she says. "Your address. The message recommends removing me before activation."
I hand the clipboard to Rowe without explaining, and I'm in the truck before the bay door finishes closing. The comm building is across the base, and I cover the distance at a speed that would earn me a citation from the MPs if any of them were paying attention.
My hands are steady on the wheel because they're always steady, but the rest of me is running a threat calculus that keeps arriving at the same answer: the woman sitting behind those monitors has a target on her, and the target includes a street address I chose because its concrete walls and a single entry point made it defensible. Someone just told me it's not defensible enough.
The comm building's corridor is empty when I push through the door. Nox is at her workstation, monitors glowing, a mugof cold tea beside her keyboard. She doesn't flinch when I come in. She either heard me coming or she's too deep in the work to register the door.
The calm on her face is operational, deliberate, and it's costing her. I can see it in the rigid line of her shoulders and the way her hands rest flat on the desk, still, like she's holding them down by force. She'll never admit it, and I'm not going to insult her by asking.
"Show me," I say.
She pulls up the decrypted message. I read it twice. The language is clinical and the address is mine. The phrasing is sanitized, the way people writekillwhen they want the paperwork to read like a logistics decision.
"We're going to the loft," I tell her. "Now. Pack what you need from here."
"I need all of it."
"Then we'll come back for the rest tomorrow with an escort. Right now, I want you behind a steel door that I can reinforce myself. A place that has a single sightline on the only way in.
She looks at me, and whatever she finds in my face is enough to make her close the laptop and start pulling cables. She packs in minutes, fast and methodical, filling a bag with drives and equipment the way someone packs who's learned not to get attached to where they are. I carry the bag and walk her to the truck, scanning the parking lot and the corridor and the building entrance the way I check a blast zone: systematically, looking for the thing that doesn't belong.
The drive to the loft is quiet. She sits in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and her gaze tracking the mirrors, and neither of us pretends this is a normal evening.
I won't tell her to leave. She wouldn't even if I did. I've stopped wanting her to, and both of those facts sit in my chest with a weight that doesn't feel temporary.
What I do instead is harden the loft. New deadbolts on the front door by morning, installed by me because trusting a locksmith means trusting a stranger with the layout. A wireless camera at the door aimed down the stairwell, another angled through the front window to cover the building entrance and the parking lot below, a third mounted on the balcony railing to catch the alley and the waterfront side. All three feed to a tablet I keep on the kitchen counter where I can check them without crossing the room.
I can alter our approach route to the base, switching between the waterfront road and the highway on a rotation that doesn't repeat. Park the truck in a different spot every night and check the cameras around the perimeter of the building before we go inside, checking the corners and the alley and the narrow strip of gravel between the warehouse and the water where someone could wait.
Nox watches me install the cameras without comment. When I finish, she pulls up their feeds on her laptop and integrates them into the monitoring framework she built for Garrick's surveillance, which means my home security is now running on the same system she uses to track a domestic terrorist. She didn't ask. She didn't mention it. She just folded my loft into her threat infrastructure like it belonged there, and that tells me she's scared in the way she'll never say out loud. She shows fear by building defenses. I show it by checking sightlines. We're the same animal in different uniforms.
That first night with the cameras live, I lie in the dark and don't sleep. The bedroom door is open because closing it adds a second between me and the main entry, and those seconds matter. The tablet on the nightstand glows with the camera feeds cycling through the stairwell, the entrance, the alley. Empty concrete. Still shadows. Nothing moving except the timestamp ticking forward.
Beyond the bedroom doorway, the blue light of her monitors shifts as she works, and the soft click of her keys has a rhythm to it, steady and precise, the sound of someone building a wall out of code. I track both. The feeds for threats. The typing for her. At some point the distinction stops mattering, and I'm just lying in the dark listening to a woman type and telling myself the reason I can't sleep is tactical awareness and not the fact that the other side of this bed is empty and I'm angry about it. Angry at myself for noticing. Even angrier for caring.
The next morning, I split the day in half. The first half belongs to the EOD bay.
Rowe and the team are waiting when I arrive. I can't tell them what I know. The investigation is compartmentalized, and loose talk in an EOD bay travels through a base faster than a pressure wave. But I'm not sending my people into a blackout blind because some protocol said the information was above their clearance. So I split the difference the way EOD splits everything: carefully, with my hands steady and my mouth shut about the parts that would get me court-martialed.
"We're running a new contingency protocol," I tell them. "Joint exercise is coming up. I want this shop ready to operate in a full communications blackout. No radios, no encrypted channels, no base-wide alert. Assume everything digital goes dark at the worst possible moment."
Rowe's face goes flat. The rest of the team is quiet in the way that trained men get quiet when someone hands them a scenario they can't solve with the tools they're used to.
"This isn't hypothetical," I say, because softening is how people die and my people deserve better than comfortable lies. "This is what happens when the wrong person gets inside the right system. If it hits during the exercise, we don't get a warning. We get silence. And this shop keeps functioning when the lights go out, or people don't go home." I pull outthe laminated base map and spread it across the workbench. "Comms go dark, we fall back to analog. Hand signals, runners, prearranged rally points. Every man in this bay needs to know the fallback routing by heart, because if the digital systems die, you won't have time to look it up."
We spend the morning drilling it. Rowe runs the team through communication failover procedures while I map the rally points and establish protocol for maintaining the EOD chain of custody on equipment and personnel during a blackout. It's paranoid work, the kind you're grateful for when the thing you prepared for actually happens.
Between drills, I check my phone. One text from Nox, sent an hour ago:
Your kitchen has no organizational logic. I've fixed it. You're welcome. Underneath it, a second: Also, your tea selection is an insult to hot beverages everywhere. We'll discuss.
