"Sarah's worried about you," Dar says without looking up from her screen.
"Sarah's worried about my objectivity."
"Same thing." Dar's fingers pause. Resume. "Is it compromised?"
"My objectivity or my judgment?"
"Take your pick."
I look at her profile. The sharp angle of her jaw. The rainbow hair catching screen light. The deliberate set of her mouth that I now know is softer than it looks, and the memory of that softness hits me low and warm.
"Probably," I say.
She turns her head. Meets my eyes. The flat affect is there, the controlled expression, the analytical assessment. But underneath it, in the slight dilation of her pupils and the barely perceptible increase in her breathing rate, is the same data I'm generating: we're sitting too close and neither of us is moving away.
"Good," she says, and turns back to her screen.
Good. She said good. I am going to be thinking about the implications of that single syllable for the rest of the goddamn day.
Late afternoon, Khalid appears at the edge of the workspace. I've been teaching him basic systems work for months, and his confidence has grown from nonexistent to fragile, which is progress I'm proud of even if I'd never frame it that way.
"Dar?" he says. "Could you look at something? Tommy showed me a routing protocol last week, and I think I'm implementing it wrong, but I'm not sure where."
Dar is already turning her chair toward him, and her face does something I've never seen it do. The edges ease. The flat line of her mouth curves into something almost patient.
"Show me," she says, and pulls up a second chair.
I watch from my station as she walks him through the error with the same precision she brings to Committee encryption, but gentler, pausing to let him catch up. She asks questions that guide rather than correct, angling her screen so he can see her build the same function in parallel, giving him a visual reference alongside the verbal instruction.
"What happens to layer two when layer three initializes?" she asks, and her voice has a quality I've never heard in any other context: calm, stripped of edge, the voice of someone who was once a student and remembers what it felt like to need the answer and not have it.
Khalid frowns. Traces the execution path. His face changes when he finds it.
"I need to buffer each layer independently," he says.
Dar nods. The approval in the gesture is quiet and real. "Build it."
She never tells him the answer. She leads him to find it himself, and when he does, the brightness on his face is the uncomplicated kind that hasn't learned to be suspicious of itself.
He thanks her and leaves, and Dar turns back to her workstation without commentary.
She catches me watching. For a fraction of a second, her expression flickers, something unguarded passing across her features before the flat affect resettles. She knows what I saw. She knows I watched her be gentle, and the vulnerability of that exposure sits between us like a shared secret she didn't intend to offer.
"What?" she says.
"Nothing."
"You're making a face."
"I'm not making a face. This is my face. It does this."
"It doesn't usually do that."
I can't argue with her because she's right. The thing my face is doing is the thing my face does when Dar surprises me, and she surprises me more often than I'd like to admit.
An outsider mentoring an outsider, and the tenderness of it hits me harder than the sex did, which is saying something because the sex was spectacular.
Victoria sends an encrypted brief that evening. European contacts report movement in the Committee's cyber division. Personnel transfers. Resource allocation shifts.
