27. Enley
Enley
Three months later, Dean Maddox asks me to join the crew.
Not formally. Dean doesn't do formal. He does a Tuesday afternoon in his office at Maddox Security with two cups of coffee and a folder on the desk that contains the operational history of every case the crew has worked.
"Read it," he says. "All of it. The successes. The failures. The NovaPlay incident. The cases that went sideways. The file I keep of every collateral impact. Read it and then tell me if this is something you want to be part of. I want you to answer because you want this. Sure, you’re brother is part of it.
And sure the man you love is too, but I want you to answer because you want to be here. "
I take the folder home. Home is an apartment in the city that Render and I found six weeks ago, a two-bedroom on the fourth floor of a building that has a coffee shop called The Bean Flicker on the ground level and a rooftop with a view of the Saint Pierce skyline and neighbors who don't ask questions about the irregular hours or the occasional delivery of equipment that arrives in unmarked cases.
The apartment isn't the lake cabin. It doesn't have the golden light or the quilt or the window that faces water.
But it has a kitchen where Render makes coffee every morning before I wake up, and a living room where we work side by side on laptops that now sit on an actual desk instead of a scarred wooden table, and a bedroom with a real bed that neither of us has to argue about sleeping on the floor to avoid.
It’s got a door that doesn't have a padlock.
That's the detail I keep coming back to.
The door locks from the inside with a deadbolt that I control, and the act of turning that deadbolt every night, the simple, domestic gesture of securing a space that's mine, that's ours, feels like a contradiction of every locked room I've ever been in.
I read Dean's folder over four days. Slowly. Thoroughly. The way I read everything: with the kind of attention that catalogs not just the information but the patterns underneath it.
I finish the folder on a Friday evening. Render’s in the kitchen stirring a pot of sauce. He’s no chef, but he does make a mean vodka sauce that I can’t get enough of.
"Well?" he asks without looking up from the stove.
"Well what?"
"You've been reading Dean's folder for four days. You have that look."
"What look?"
"The look you get when you've finished processing something and you've arrived at a conclusion and the conclusion is non-negotiable."
I carry the folder to the kitchen counter and set it down beside the cutting board.
He looks at it. Looks at me. The soft assessment that used to come from across rooms now comes from across a kitchen and the proximity doesn't diminish it.
He sees me the same way he's always seen me: clearly, completely, with the full understanding of a person who knows what they're looking at because they've been studying it, carefully and without permission, for years.
"I want in," I say.
"In."
"The crew. The work. The whole thing. Not as Poe's sister.
Not as your partner. As me. Enley Cameron.
The person who mapped a criminal empire from a storage unit and built a biometric exploit in ninety minutes and went through a nineteen-year-old's bank account because the evidence was worth the cost. That person.
I want her to have a seat at the table."
He turns off the stove, and gives me his full attention. The weight of it, the focused, unwavering quality that used to feel like surveillance and now feels like sunlight.
"You've always had a seat at the table," he says. "The table just didn't know it yet."
I call Dean the next morning, and tell him my answer. He says, "Good. Be here Monday. Lark's been asking when you're starting for three weeks."
Monday. I start on Monday. A seat at the table in the room where the work happens. Not on the other side of the wall. Not in the safe little space that Poe built with good intentions and insufficient understanding. At the table. Where I belong.
Render drives me to Maddox Security on Monday morning.
The building is unremarkable from the outside, commercial office space in a district that specializes in unremarkable, the kind of facade that says "nothing interesting here" with the specific conviction of a place that is hiding everything interesting behind its ordinariness.
Inside, the crew is waiting. Not formally.
They're just... there. Arrow at his workstation with a second chair pulled up beside it.
Gage leaning against the doorframe with a coffee mug that says "World's Okayest Hacker" which is either a gift or a trophy and I'm afraid to ask which.
Knight in the corner, acknowledging my arrival with a nod that contains the compressed warmth of a man who watched me run digital infrastructure during a facility breach and has revised his assessment accordingly.
Lark sits on Ozzy’s desk, feet dangling. She’s chewing gum and blows a bubble occasionally and Ozzy keeps trying to pop it.
“Seriously, River’s got every girl in here chewing that Misfit gum,” Ozzy mutters.
“It’s only the best,” River says, standing and crossing the room to offer me a piece of gum.
I smile and take a piece, removing the wrapper and popping it into my mouth. “Thanks,” I say, and Ozzy rolls his eyes.
“Oh no, she’s recruited another one.”
Gage laughs. “The gum’s not half bad.”
I glance around, looking for the one person who I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.
Poe’s at the back. Standing. Arms crossed.
His face has healed to the point where the damage is visible only in certain light, the ghost of bruises that have faded but not disappeared, the thin scar along his hairline that will be there permanently.
He looks at me walking into the operations center and the expression on his face is the one from the porch: love and pride and the specific, complicated letting-go of a brother who built a wall to protect someone and is now watching her walk through the door he left open.
"Don't break anything on your first day," he says.
"No promises."
Arrow spins his chair to face me. "I've set up your workstation.
Dual monitors. Custom encryption suite. The ghost layer Render built is preloaded but I've added some modifications based on that rotation fix you designed in the cabin.
Also, your coffee order is a flat white with an extra shot, which Gage is going to get because he lost a bet. "
Gage pushes off the doorframe. "I didn't lose a bet. I lost an argument, which is different."
"You argued that Enley wouldn't join for at least six months. She joined in three. That's a bet you lost."
"That's a prediction that was optimistically wrong. There's a difference."
"The difference is you owe her a flat white."
I sit down at the workstation. Dual monitors.
Custom encryption suite. A chair that swivels and a desk that's solid and a view of a room full of people who started in a printing shop and built something that saves lives and are now, apparently, willing to let the sister with the stolen fries and the self-taught code sit beside them and do the work.
Render stands behind me. He doesn't say a word. He doesn't need to. After everything we've survived, the simple fact he's here is enough..
I open the laptop. The ghost layer loads. The screens fill with data.
I start working.