He was still there when they buried me.
My hands stay still. The stillness is deliberate now, controlled, because if I let my fingers move they'll shake and I refuse to give this that much power.
Data is signal. Emotion is noise. Neil Marsh is a data point, and I will process him the way I process every other piece of intelligence that crosses my screens.
Except the data tastes like metal and the signal keeps degrading.
I pull up every file Victoria provided. Cross-reference against my own GCHQ maps. The coding signatures match.
I've been staring at Marsh's work for weeks without recognizing it because he's gotten better since I left, or because I wasn't looking for him, or because the possibility that someone I worked alongside would build a weapon designed to crack open a facility full of people and aim it at the man sleeping next to me was so far outside my operational parameters that I never ran the scan.
My fault. Should have been broader. Should have been faster.
Tommy's keyboard goes quiet. The absence of his rhythm pulls my attention sideways the way an anomaly in a data feed would, involuntary and immediate.
"The briefing is in twenty minutes," he says. His voice is stripped of its usual layers. No sarcasm. No deflection. When Tommy drops the humor, the silence where it used to be has a weight that presses on my sternum. "Kane wants your assessment. Victoria's already in the conference room."
"I know."
"You don't have to do this alone."
"If I needed a pep talk, I'd have asked for one in a less patronizing font."
The words come out sharper than I intend, but I don't take them back. Tommy absorbs the edge without flinching, which is one of the more infuriating things about him. Most people retreat from precision. Tommy leans into it.
"Noted," he says. "How about a tactical observation instead? You've been staring at the same screen for twenty minutes andyour hands haven't moved, which means you're either catatonic or composing a masterpiece. Since your eyes are tracking, I'm going with masterpiece."
My jaw loosens by a fraction. The irritation recedes and what's underneath it is worse: gratitude. Because he read the stillness, identified the state, and chose humor as the intervention, and the accuracy of the diagnosis is almost as unsettling as the warmth behind it.
"Marsh was a contractor embedded in my division," I say. His name sounds different in this room than it sounded in my head. Smaller. More ordinary. "Same years. He was competent. Methodical. The kind of coder who builds by the manual and never deviates."
"And now?"
"Now he's deviated." I pull up the weapon's control layer on my primary monitor. "This isn't manual work, Tommy. This is creative. Sophisticated. Somebody taught him to think laterally, or he learned it himself after I left, and either way the gap between who he was at GCHQ and who he is now means someone invested in him. The Committee didn't just recruit a contractor. They cultivated an asset."
Tommy moves closer. His shoulder enters my peripheral vision and with it comes the specific warmth of his body and the faint cedar of whatever soap he uses and the knowledge that twelve hours ago his mouth was on my neck and his hands were learning me with the same thoroughness he's now applying to the code on my screen.
I shove the thought into a partition and close it. Not now.
He looks at the weapon's control layer with the particular intensity he gives to things that concern him, his whole body orienting toward the data like a compass finding north.
"You're saying he was mediocre and now he's not."
"I'm saying he was institutional and now he's insurgent. Those are different skill sets, and the transition isn't natural. Someone mentored him into this."
"Volkov? Victoria flagged him as the Committee's European operations lead. He'd have the resources."
"Maybe. His name surfaced in some of the signal traffic I mapped before I came in. Or it could be someone we haven't identified yet." I close the file. Open the assessment I've been building for the past fifteen minutes, clinical and structured and stripped of every personal detail that doesn't serve the operational picture. "I can present the GCHQ connection. It's relevant to understanding his methodology and predicting his next moves. Kane needs to know how he thinks, and I'm the only person in this facility who's watched him think."
Tommy is quiet for a beat too long. Then: "And the personal stuff?"
"There is no personal stuff." I stand. My legs are steady. Good. "Neil Marsh is a threat vector with a known behavioral profile. I worked alongside that profile for years, and that proximity is an intelligence asset, not a liability."
"Uh-huh." He adjusts his glasses. The stalling mechanism I've cataloged across dozens of conversations, the barrier that goes up when he's about to say something that costs him. "You know, for someone who prides herself on data integrity, that statement has a lot of corrupted packets."
"My data is clean."
"Your data is airtight. Your delivery is shaking." He reaches out and touches the edge of my wrist, two fingers against the thin skin where my pulse is probably broadcasting at a frequency his fingertips can read.
