Chapter 15
Travis
The gray kitten was on my keyboard again.
Not near my keyboard. Not beside it. On it, with all four paws planted across the keys like it had claimed the territory and was prepared to defend it. The screen behind it displayed a string of gibberish where my intercept query used to be: ffffffffjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkk.
I picked Gray up. Set it on the floor. Turned back to the screen and deleted the gibberish. Started retyping the query.
Thirty seconds later, the kitten was scaling my pant leg with a determination that bordered on obsession. It hauled itself up the denim, crossed my lap, climbed onto the desk, and sat down on the escape key.
"That's the third time in twenty minutes," Maude said.
"I'm aware."
"Your cortisol actually drops when you pick one of them up. By a measurable amount. I'd recommend holding them for longer intervals, but I know how you feel about recommendations."
"I feel great about recommendations. I ignore them equally and without prejudice."
Five days since Lark had deposited three foster kittens into my compound like biological grenades. Five days since one of them had figured out how to wedge itself behind the server rack and bat at cables that carried data streams worth more than most vehicles.
Five days since the other two had decided that every flat surface in the compound belonged to them, including the heavy bag in the gym, which the white one had launched itself at mid-swing and attached to like a furry parasite while I was trying to work my shoulder back into rotation.
They had ruined the place. The controlled environment I'd spent three years engineering to a narrow tolerance had been invaded by three animals that weighed nothing, understood nothing, and respected absolutely nothing about my operational security.
And they'd arrived at exactly the right time.
The first two days after I'd kissed Sera had been unbearable.
Polite. Careful. The kind of careful where you measure the distance between yourself and another person down to the inch and never, under any circumstances, close it.
We'd moved through the compound like two people navigating a room full of invisible tripwires, speaking in complete professional sentences and avoiding eye contact that lasted longer than two seconds.
Then Lark had shown up with a box of kittens and blown through fucking all of it. You couldn't maintain rigid operational distance when something the size of a fist was climbing your pant leg during breakfast.
The kittens had given us something to talk about that wasn't the thing we weren't talking about.
I'd rather credit three half-pound animals for saving the dynamic than admit I didn't know how to be in the same room as Sera after I'd kissed her.
"Your heart rate just shifted," Maude said.
"Don't."
"You were calmer a moment ago. Now you're not. I wonder what changed between the kitten and this exact second."
"What changed is you started talking."
"Statistically unlikely. My voice has a negligible impact on your autonomic responses. I've tested it."
"You've tested the effect of your own voice on my nervous system?”
"Extensively. You find me mildly irritating at worst. Whatever just spiked you, it wasn't me."
I really really really really really needed to reprogram Maude.
I picked the gray kitten up off the escape key and set it on the floor again. It looked at me with an expression of absolute betrayal and began washing its paw.
Sera would have laughed at that. She'd started narrating the kittens' inner lives out loud, giving them motivations and grudges like they were characters in a novel. Gray, according to Sera, had a personal vendetta against my productivity.
She wasn't wrong.
Sera and I had continued training together even with the kittens around. Self-defense, conditioning, the basic framework I'd laid out. It was still sometimes… potent. Teaching someone to break a hold meant putting your hands on them, but we'd both gotten very good at pretending that was all it was.
She was sore from the workouts. I knew because she rolled her shoulders when she thought I wasn't looking, and she'd started stretching her neck after long sessions at her workstation with the kind of deliberate care that meant something ached. She never mentioned it.
She was fighting through her limitations, and all I could do was be pretty fucking impressed by her grit. I was always the one who called a halt to our sessions. I had a feeling she would keep going until her body gave way, if I let her.
And then there was tonight’s mission, that we’d been working on for days.
A moving target this time. A courier in transit on a predicted route, a vehicle with a window measured in minutes.
The kind of operation that had never been possible when I worked alone because a courier on a highway moved through gaps in camera coverage, and Maude could only track what she could see.
Sera could project where the courier would be based on pattern analysis, filling the blind spots in real time with the kind of intuitive leaps that software couldn't make. Sera changed that equation. Sera changed most of my equations, which was becoming a problem I didn't have a formula for.
The sound of her on the stairs pulled me back.
She came into the control room with her legal pad and a coffee mug and settled into her workstation without breaking stride.
Same routine every time. Mug three inches from the monitor base.
Legal pad to the left. Pen between her teeth while she pulled up her screens.
She'd made the space hers. I hadn't asked her to. She just had, the way water finds its level.
The black kitten appeared from somewhere behind the rack, trotted across the floor, and climbed into Sera's lap.
She shifted her leg to make room without looking down, without pausing whatever she was reading on screen.
The kitten turned twice, dropped into a ball against her thigh, and closed its eyes.
I watched this way longer than I should have.
Sera cross-legged in her chair, pen between her teeth, hair pulled back, screens casting blue light across her face.
The kitten rising and falling with her breathing.
She was working my data, in my space, and she looked like she belonged in this room in a way that had nothing to do with the workstation and everything to do with something I wasn't ready to name.
I looked away.
"I need you to check something." Sera pulled the pen from her mouth and turned her monitor toward me. "The timing on intercept point two. I've run the courier's probable route against the fuel purchase pattern and the window is tighter than I projected yesterday. Look at this interval."
The relief of having somewhere else to put my attention was immediate. I checked the floor was clear of kittens and rolled my chair toward her screen.
"Show me."
She'd mapped the courier's probable path using her model, narrowed the viable stretch to twelve miles of highway with three possible intercept points.
The data was laid out clean and precise.
Each intercept point annotated with timing windows, margin of error, and a confidence rating she'd calculated to two decimal places.
"Point one is the earliest window, but it's right after a junction where they could take an alternate route. If they deviate, I've sent you to the wrong place. Point three has the widest margin, but it's less than a mile from a residential area. Too many variables."
"So point two."
"Point two. Twelve-minute window. Single-lane stretch with no turnoffs for six miles in either direction. If the courier is on the route my model predicts, they hit this stretch between ten-fourteen and ten-twenty-six."
"That's a tight window."
"It's a twelve-minute window on a single road with no exits. That's not tight; that's a corridor."
“What’s your confidence interval with that?”
"Eighty-nine percent on the route. Ninety-one on the timing.
" She held my gaze the way she did when she believed in her data and was prepared to fight for it.
"The three percent margin comes from the fuel stop in Elmo.
If they skip it, they're here seven minutes early.
If they linger, they're multiple minutes late. I've accounted for both."
I studied the map. She was right about the corridor. But the timing depended on a fuel stop prediction that was based on a pattern of three data points.
"Maude. Road conditions on the Route 28 corridor between mile markers forty and fifty-two."
"Dry pavement. No construction. County patrol runs a northbound loop through that stretch at nine-forty-five. They'll be clear by ten-oh-eight. You'll have the corridor to yourself."
Sera was watching me. I could see the tension in her jaw, the way her fingers pressed a little too hard against the legal pad. She'd triple-checked every number on that page. I knew because I'd watched her do it twice today already, and there was no way this afternoon was the first time.
This was her first mission. She wouldn’t be in the field, but she’d be at the screens, on the comms, running the operation from the other end.
Her data was sending me out the door tonight.
If the intercept point was wrong, it wasn't a bad number on a spreadsheet.
It was me in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I trusted her. I trusted her data.
"Point two it is," I said.
Some of the tension left her shoulders. Not all. But some.
"Okay." She turned back to her screen. "I'll have the final route package ready in an hour. Maude, can you overlay the patrol schedule onto the corridor map so he has it in one view?"
"Already done. Uploaded to his mobile unit."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome. It's remarkable how smoother operations run when someone in this compound actually says please and thank you."