Chapter 8 Seraphina
Seraphina
There was no menu at The Atomic, only a laminated slip with the day’s four cheapest options and a handwritten warning not to ask for substitutions.
I let my eyes flick between the list and Nitro’s silhouette as I started my story.
It was like talking to a wall of living scar tissue—his presence as dense and uninterpretable as the smoke above the bar, his attention unwavering but impossible to read.
“I work in Section G of the Lab,” I said, voice low but steady.
I let the ice melt in my martini until the olive sank.
“Specifically, adaptive networks and quantum entanglement for secure communications. Our latest project—Blue Spirit—is supposed to be a failsafe, a way to maintain command-and-control after a full nuclear exchange. No satellites, no towers, just mesh nodes and black-box learning. That’s the pitch, anyway. ”
He didn’t blink. I wondered if he’d ever blinked in his life.
I tried to keep the technical jargon just below his threshold for boredom.
“The thing is, you can’t train a system for real-world attacks without exposing it to real-world attackers.
We’ve had probes on the net for weeks—test intrusions, botnets, some with actual human fingerprints.
The defense teams called them ‘phantoms,’ but they were too creative, too precise. I think they’re Russian.”
He nodded, a single microgesture, as if the world was full of Russians and it was a surprise not to see one in every booth.
“Last week, we caught a rootkit that didn’t match anything on the known exploits lists.
It didn’t act like malware; it acted like a learning agent, something designed to hide and watch.
When we traced it, the signals looped back to a supposedly dead node in Vladivostok.
The kind of dead that means someone paid for the burial. ”
“Who else knows this?” His voice was a controlled demolition. I was impressed he was able to keep up.
“Just two people, officially. One is my program lead, who’s now in Bethesda under armed guard.
The other is me.” I took a long swallow and felt the vodka’s heat unclench the knot behind my ribs.
“Unofficially, the directorate knows, Homeland knows, and half a dozen three-letter agencies are pretending not to.”
He was watching the door now, or maybe the window, or maybe the exact spot where a bullet would enter if someone lined us up from the parking lot. “So you think the hit at the liquor store was Russians?”
“I think it was an outsourced job. American faces, but the training was Eastern. Whoever hired them didn’t care about the optics, only the outcome.
” I hesitated, my hand floating over the glass rim, index finger tracing a circle in the condensation.
“They want the code. The live neural net, not the source or the white paper. The kind of thing you need a working sample to reverse engineer.”
“Why you?” His tone made it clear the question was not about my gender or even my specialty. “They could pull the same play on your boss.”
“They tried.” I waited a breath. “The car bomb was too obvious. The directorate rotated her out before the fuse was lit. I’m more…expendable.”
He grunted. “Nobody’s expendable. They just think you are.”
A silence grew, slow and ugly. My hand shook, barely, so I set the martini down and let both hands settle flat on the sticky Formica.
“They know where I live, and they know my patterns. That’s why I tried to vanish after the first attack.
Didn’t work. They followed me to the canyon, and when that failed, they changed tactics.
The only reason I’m alive is because you interrupted their timetable. ”
I caught a flicker in his eyes—a hint of something like regret, or at least professional curiosity. “So what’s the play?” he asked. “Go to the Feds and hope they’re not already bought? Run?”
“I don’t run well,” I said. “Besides, there’s nowhere to run. The Lab has a security plan, but it’s a fiction. I saw the memo. They’re more concerned about data loss than human casualties.”
He considered this, tapping a blunt finger against his whiskey glass in a rhythm I couldn’t parse. “You want protection. Or you want to bait them into making a mistake.”
“I want both. But I need to know which side you’re on.”
He showed teeth, but it wasn’t a smile. “Lady, I don’t have a side. I just don’t like people taking shots at me in my own zip code.”
I almost laughed. The thing about growing up with a scientist’s brain and a dog’s nervous system is you can never fully believe in altruism. Every kindness is just another vector for future pain.
The bar had filled in behind us, a slow accretion of drunks, insomniacs, and the kind of men who pretended to ignore but never missed a detail.
I scanned the room and felt my own paranoia reflected in the blank stares and too-quiet conversations.
Every booth was its own closed system, radiating potential violence.
I reached for my purse and slid across a thumb drive, palmed in a napkin so casual it could have been a tip. “That’s a decoy net. I burned it myself. If you get a contact from anyone about Blue Spirit, hand them this and nothing else.”
He weighed the drive in his hand, turning it over like a bullet he didn’t want to waste. “You trust me?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “But I trust the part of you that likes to break things more than the part of them that likes to own things.”
He set the drive on the table and laid his hand over it, hiding it from the world. “Anything else I should know?”
I could have told him about the other Russians, the ones who watched from the food co-op or the post office, their shoes too new, their rental cars never parked overnight.
I could have told him about the phone call last night, the heavy silence on the line, the sense that someone was listening to the sound of me breathing.
Instead, I said, “You’ll see them before I do. ”
The waitress reappeared, eyes glazed. “Another round?” she asked, already sure of the answer.
I shook my head, and Nitro did the same.
He pocketed the drive and leaned forward, elbows on the table.
“If they make another play, it won’t be clean.
You need somewhere to hole up, you call this number.
” He slid a business card across—just a burner, no name, only a red scythe logo and ten digits.
“Don’t text, just call. I answer, or someone meaner than me will. ”
I ran my thumb over the edge. “And if I’m already dead?”
“Then make sure you take at least two of them with you. That’s the club standard.”
He said it with the finality of a closing door.
I rose, not because I wanted to leave, but because staying was impossible.
The booth was suddenly a trap, the air inside it too thick for human lungs.
Nitro watched me stand, then followed, both of us moving with the precision of people who’ve been shot at enough times to learn that nothing is ever over.
Outside, the night was colder, the stars distant and contemptuous.
I was three feet from the Honda when a hand grabbed my shoulder from behind.
I heard a grunt—maybe mine, maybe the man’s—and then the world pivoted.
Nitro’s fist came down, not with the wildness of a street brawl, but the sharp, controlled arc of a butcher at work.
The man’s face caved inward, nose flattening.
He staggered back, spitting teeth and blood.
The second one reached for Nitro’s jacket. A gun flashed—a real one, not the imagined kind. I dropped to the ground, hard, as Nitro had commanded. The shot cracked, deafening. The window of a nearby car exploded, glass raining down in a kinetic glitter.
Nitro didn’t flinch. He stepped in, one hand on the gunman’s wrist, the other breaking his jaw with a palm heel. The gun dropped, and Nitro caught it before it hit the ground. He turned it, double-tapped the attacker in the kneecap, and the man dropped, howling.
I crawled to the car, got the door open, and slid inside, shaking so badly I could barely force the key into the ignition. Nitro scooped the fallen gun, then bent to eye level with me through the shattered glass.
“You good?” he said, the question all business.
I nodded, or tried to. My teeth chattered.
“Get home. Take side roads. Don’t answer the door for anyone until I call.” He wiped blood from his knuckles on the hem of his shirt, then tossed the gun into my passenger seat.
I started the engine, which coughed but caught, and drove. Every mile felt like a century, every streetlight a possible ambush. I checked the rearview with the twitchy desperation of a hunted animal, and every time I did, I saw only the empty road and the white sickle of the moon overhead.
When I finally pulled into my driveway, the adrenaline drained, leaving only a hollow space inside me. I sat for a long time, staring at my own hands on the wheel, the lines and whorls of my fingerprints. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt safe, and couldn’t.
I thought about what Nitro had said—about not having a side, about survival being the only real currency. I wondered if it was true, or if I was just too far gone to remember what normal looked like.
Inside, I checked every lock, every window. I found the gun I’d bought years ago on a whim, heavy in my palm, its weight a comfort and a threat all at once. I hid it under the bed, knowing it wouldn’t matter if someone really wanted in.
I drank water until my hands stopped shaking, then collapsed onto the futon, still wearing my coat. I stared at the ceiling and waited for sleep, knowing it wouldn’t come. The dark pressed in on all sides, alive with the memory of footsteps and violence.