I take the Mountain Dew without thanking him, pop the tab, and drink. The can is cold and green and familiar, the one constant from my loft that exists inside this mountain.
The man who put it here is typing at arm's length away with his sleeves rolled up and his glasses reflecting code and his quiet, deliberate attention wrapped around me like a system I didn't notice being built until I was already running inside it.
The server hum holds steady beneath us. The screens cast their light. The weapon we're building against ticks closer to deployment while two people who don't trust anyone learn, keystroke by keystroke, how to work as one system.
7
TOMMY
Dylan corners me outside the armory with the stillness of a man who's already decided what he's going to say. He's giving me the courtesy of not saying it in front of an audience.
I've been expecting this. Dylan Rourke doesn't do casual encounters. When he shows up in your peripheral vision with that set to his shoulders, the conversation that follows is going to leave marks.
His choice of the corridor outside the armory tells me everything I need to know about his mood. This is the hallway where the operational world lives, weapons and tactics, the physical domain where Dylan is fluent and I'm a tourist. He picked his terrain.
"Walk with me." He says it the way he says everything that matters, flat and leaving no room for refusal.
I fall into step beside him. The corridor is dim, carved rock catching the overhead lighting in uneven planes that throw shadows across his face.
Dylan walks with economy and purpose, each step covering ground without wasting motion. I've watched him through feeds across years of operations, and the stride never changes. Hekeeps the same pace in a corridor as in a combat zone. The man carries grief the way other people carry oxygen, so constantly that it's become invisible to everyone except the people who've been watching long enough to remember when it started.
"You built the system that keeps this place running." He says it flat and direct, no softening prelude before delivering an assessment you won't like. Dylan doesn't soften. Softening implies the thing underneath needs cushioning, and Dylan deals in things that don't.
"Parts of it." I keep my voice light, casual, the humor right there and ready to deploy, coiling in my throat like a reflex. "Kane built the parts that involve concrete and load-bearing walls. I built the parts that glow."
"You know what it costs when someone inside it can't be trusted."
The humor dies. Dylan didn't come here for banter. He came here for answers, and the directness of his approach tells me he's past the point where my deflections will be tolerated.
"I know what it costs."
"Then tell me what you see when you look at her."
The question is precise. He's asking me to be honest about something I haven't been honest about with myself, and he's doing it in a corridor that smells like cold stone, on his terrain, where honesty is easier to extract from someone standing on unfamiliar ground.
"I see a signals analyst who broke into the most secure system I've ever built and used the access to help us instead of exploit us." The answer's true. It's also incomplete. Dylan reads people the way I read code, looking for the vulnerabilities I don't advertise.
"That's the operational assessment." He stops walking and turns to face me. The corridor feels smaller with Dylan squared up in it, and the effect is entirely the man filling the space,not the mountain pressing in around us. "I'm not asking about the operation. I'm asking if your judgment about her is compromised."
The word choice is deliberate.Compromisedis the same word Dar sent through my system, the same word that started all of this.
"My judgment's intact."
"Your judgment has you leaving Mountain Dew on her workstation. Your judgment has you redesigning your relay protocols to account for the way she approaches your perimeter. Your judgment has you spending more time watching than monitoring actual threat vectors."
Dylan's voice doesn't rise. Each observation lands with the flat impact of data presented without commentary, and the commentary isn't necessary. The data speaks for itself.
"I'm not blind, Tommy. Neither is anyone else in this base."
The heat that climbs my neck has nothing to do with the recycled air. I push my glasses up, take them off, and clean the left lens with the hem of my shirt while my brain scrambles for a response that doesn't confirm everything he just said.
"She's a technical asset. I'm integrating her into our workflow. That requires understanding how she operates."
"That requires knowing her favorite drink?"
"I can't have a dehydrated analyst crash during a marathon decryption session. It's resource management."
Dylan looks at me. The look carries a sniper's patience: sustained, focused, designed to outlast whatever defense the target has erected. I've seen Kane try to hold that look and concede the point. I've never seen anyone outlast it.
