CHAPTER 2 #2
I have approximately eight seconds before he is close enough to read, and I take him as a single sweep — six-foot-zero, lean through the shoulders, light skin gone olive-warm at the open collar; hair golden-blond, short on the sides, longer on top, immaculate at seven oh four by the clock above the door; pale green eyes; an oxblood button-down with the sleeves rolled to mid-forearm; black slacks; dress shoes kept in a closet, not walked in; a thin, white, intentional throat scar under the jaw; and a silver lighter in his right hand, antique, pre-Network, cycling open and shut on a slow three-count, and the second he clocks me clocking it he keeps cycling it because he wants me to know he wants me to know.
Negotiator. Reads people for a living. Will smile while picking the lining out of my jacket. Approximately four minutes to decide what to tell him.
He stops at the threshold of the antechamber. Three meters between us. He stays on his side of it. He has chosen to give me the room — and, I register a beat late, to keep the doorframe at his own back, the way a man stands who always lets the room fill before he commits to it.
"Darling," he says.
The silver catches the cobalt strip and throws a thin coin of light up onto the wall behind me — once, and then he closes the lighter and stills it in his palm, the polished case warming in the curl of his fingers like a tell he has decided to hold back.
"You are either the worst negotiator I have ever met, or the best. I have not decided which. Sit down. Tell me what you stole. Try not to lie. I'll know."
His voice keeps to one low register. He has not introduced himself.
He eases his shoulder off the doorframe — a half-degree of weight, no more, not a step — and the small shift carries him a hand's width into the cobalt, enough to angle his sightline down the room, not enough to be in it.
The strip catches the motion and lays a thin blue line along the side of his jaw, then loses it when he settles.
The brewery smell pushes into the antechamber under the NEON door and dies against the cobalt strip on the back wall. I take it as the boundary of my margin: the air in here is part bar, part bunker, and I am part visitor and part inventory.
I sit.
I take the chair against the side wall. I keep my hands off the steel table.
I leave them palm-down on my thighs, because palms-up reads as begging and crossed arms reads as defensive and palm-down reads as I have done this before — and the truth is I have not done this before, and the lie of having done it is the only currency I have.
"Senna walked me to the door," I say.
"She walked you to the door because I asked her to. I called her at five forty-five. She had already called me at five-thirty. She called you the favor."
"I owe her."
"You owe her quite a lot, in my professional opinion.
" He settles the roll of his right cuff a quarter-turn higher on the forearm, unhurried, the small attendance a man pays a sleeve he has no need to touch — a grooming gesture that is not grooming at all.
"Senna does not call me at five-thirty in the morning for people she has not decided are worth keeping alive.
She has decided, and now my job is to find out whether she is right.
" The pale green of his eyes comes to rest on me with the unhurried weight of a man bringing his reading eye to bear, totting up what I am worth before he has heard a word. "Tell me what you stole."
I tell him.
I tell him the rooftop transit corridor between Sector-3 and Sector-1, 02:47, the signal-jammer pulse, the courier's neural-interface dropping, the wrist-cuff, the decoy slug.
I tell him Hael — only as a contact, no surname; the truth is I never asked — paid me half up front and was supposed to take the drive off my hands at 04:00 behind the Sector-7 noodle stall.
I tell him Hael did not answer at 03:30 and did not answer at 03:45 and that by 04:30 the Black Cell breached his apartment three blocks south of where I was standing.
I tell him I went to my own flat for ninety seconds, wiped the workbench with thermite cleaner, burned three notebooks of my own work in the basin, and was on the roof of my building when the Cell came through my door.
The lead operator at my threshold had a wire visible at his right wrist.
I tell him I have been moving east since 05:30 toward the only Syndicate I have ever cleared a small job through. I am asking for protection.
I do not tell him the drive is Tarn-grade. I tell him it is bench-test schematics — third-generation prosthetic integration architecture out of Vexis R the white case vanishes into the inside pocket of his slacks; his hand settles flat along his hip, where a man rests his hand on a tool he has decided he will not need for the next minute.
The air in the antechamber holds. The brewery smell drifts up from under the NEON door against my collar as if the room had leaned in to hear.
"That," he says, "is interesting."