"All systems recovered," I tell him. "The malware is neutralized, the counterstrike is holding, and if Garrick's handler tries to reactivate the network from the outside, my monitoring framework will catch the attempt before it reaches the first node."
"I know." His gaze tracks from the screens to my face, cataloging damage before deciding where to put his hands. "You told me over the radio."
"I'm telling you again, in person, because the radio version didn't include the part where the forensic sweep of Garrick's code turned up parallel deployment signatures. The architecture I pulled from his malware wasn't built for a single installation. It's modular, designed to replicate, and the configuration files reference at least two other target environments."
The muscles along his jaw flex. "How certain?"
"Certain enough to bring it to Hartwell. I'll have the full forensic analysis documented within the hour."
"Good." He pushes off the doorframe and crosses the room. The smell of solvent and concrete dust arrives before his hand does, his thumb pressing once against the knot at the base of my skull with enough pressure to make my breath catch. "You look like hell."
"Charming."
"You look like hell and I'm glad you're in one piece. Take the compliment."
His hand drops from my neck before anyone walks in, but the warmth of the contact stays on my skin through the walkto Hartwell's conference room and into the chair I take at the briefing table.
The debrief runs with Rivera taking notes on her tablet and Hartwell's expression locked into controlled fury, the kind that means careers are about to be restructured. I walk them through the full conspiracy architecture, projected on the briefing screen in the clean, layered format I built during the time I spent taking apart Garrick's network: the handler's command-and-control infrastructure, the burst transmission protocols, the malware's activation mechanism, and the parallel deployment signatures embedded in Garrick's configuration files that indicate Tidewater's attack was designed to be replicated at other installations.
Griff stands against the wall near the door, arms crossed, one boot flat against the concrete. His position hasn't changed since the first briefing I gave in this room. What's changed is the quality of his attention on me, heavier now, more proprietary, no longer bothering to disguise itself as professional interest. I feel the weight of it between my shoulder blades every time I turn toward the screen.
"The handler is still operational," I tell the room. "Garrick was an asset. The person who recruited him, who designed the C2 infrastructure and coordinated the timing, has the capacity to deploy this methodology anywhere they have a contractor foothold. Arresting Garrick stopped one node. The network is intact."
Hartwell looks at Rivera. Rivera looks at her tablet. The silence in the room carries the weight of an investigation that just expanded beyond a single base and a single agency.
"I'll coordinate with the other installations and flag the parallel signatures for their cybersecurity teams," I add. "But the forensic analysis of Garrick's communications is the priority. Rivera's interrogation combined with the decrypted trafficshould give us the handler's operational pattern, and from there, the identity."
"You'll have everything you need," Hartwell says. "Full authorization, expanded scope, whatever resources Rivera's office requires. This doesn't stop at Tidewater."
The debrief ends. Rivera collects her files. Hartwell dismisses us with his version of gratitude, a nod that conveys it without requiring him to say the word.
Griff falls into step beside me in the corridor, his stride adjusting to match mine so automatically that I don't think he registers doing it. The afternoon light through the windows carries the flat gold of a day that started before dawn and has been running on adrenaline ever since.
"You're staring," I tell him, because he is.
"Yeah." He doesn't look away. "Gonna file a complaint about that too?"
My body is registering the exhaustion now, the dull ache behind my eyes and the tightness in my shoulders from hours hunched over keyboards, but the exhaustion sits on top of something else, something that has been building underneath the code and the briefings and the crisis management since Griff's voice came through the radio this morning telling me I was the most important thing he'd ever touched.
He peels off toward the EOD bay without asking where I'm going, without saying when he'll be done, without any of the coordination two people perform when they're still negotiating proximity. He just goes, and I go to my workstation, and both of us know where the other will be when the work is finished.
The knowledge hums through me like a frequency I've been tuning toward for weeks.
The last system checks clear. The topology map turns solid green, and with nothing left to verify, the comm building feels too empty, too still, too full of screens and not enough of thething my body is actually reaching for. I close my laptop and walk across the compound.
The bay door is open. Inside, the overhead lights cast the long concrete space in flat white. Griff is at his workbench with his back to the door, cleaning tools with methodical precision, each piece disassembled, wiped, inspected, and returned to its position on the bench in the order he uses them.
The ritual is familiar. I've watched him do it through camera feeds and across radio channels and from across rooms for long enough to understand that this is how he thinks: by touching things, by holding them, by running his hands over components until the mechanism makes sense.
"I'm not going to apologize for hiding the threat," I say from the doorway.
His hands still on the wire cutters. He doesn't turn around.
"I'm not asking you to," he says.
"Good, because the apology would be dishonest and you'd know it." I step inside the bay and stop at the edge of the workbench, close enough to see the scrape on his knuckles and the tension he's carrying in the set of his wrists. "What I will tell you is why. Needing someone has been the most dangerous variable in my life, more dangerous than any code I've cracked or any network I've infiltrated. Every time I've let someone become load-bearing, the structure failed, and the version of me that rebuilt from the wreckage learned to build without support walls. So when the threat came in with your address on it, I handled it the way I handle everything: alone, because alone is the architecture I trust."
Griff sets the wire cutters down and turns to face me. His expression is bare, the tactical composure he wears like a uniform gone, and what's underneath it is simpler and harder than anything I've seen on his face during a render-safe.
