Chapter 11
TOMMY
My brain replays the previous night in fragments, served up in a loop I didn't authorize and can't terminate.
I keep seeing her hands fisting my shirt, keep hearing the sound she made when I pressed her back against the edge of my desk, half surprise and half challenge.
Her eyes stayed open the entire time, watching me watch her, and neither of us blinked because blinking meant missing data and we're both too greedy for that.
The image that hits hardest is the look on her face when control stopped being the point.
I shove my glasses up my nose and stare at the diagnostic report scrolling across my center monitor. I've read the same line of output multiple times and could not, under oath, tell you what it says.
My head is running a different subroutine, and that subroutine involves the curve of Dar's lower back and the specific sound she makes when you find the right frequency.
"You look like someone who slept exactly zero hours," Sarah says from her station, not looking up from her own screens.
"Bold of you to assume I ever sleep."
"You sleep. You just pretend you don't because the mystique serves you." She pauses. Glances over. "Coffee's fresh. You look like you need it more than usual."
What I need is a factory reset on the part of my mind that decided the warmth of Dar's skin under the blue-white glow of my monitors is mission-critical information deserving permanent storage.
What I need is to stop memorizing the way her fingers traced the edge of my collarbone like she was mapping a system she intended to crack.
What I need is for the diagnostic report to be more interesting than the memory of her mouth, which is a high bar because that memory is, objectively, the most compelling data set I've ever encountered.
The diagnostic finishes. All systems nominal.
No residual effects from last night's Committee probe, the one Dar and I neutralized together while the argument was still hot in the air between us, before it stopped being an argument and started being something else entirely.
I pull up the perimeter logs. The outer defenses held. The probe was sophisticated but still preliminary, a test run designed to measure our response times and map our capabilities.
The Committee is building a target profile. The same way someone scouts a building before they breach it.
What catches my attention is the exit pattern.
The probe withdrew cleanly, which means it wasn't interrupted by our countermeasures.
It completed its reconnaissance cycle and left on its own schedule.
That's discipline. That's an operator who isn't rattled by detection, who expected to be seen and factored our response into the data collection.
The Committee learned something last night about how fast we react, and the knowledge sits in my gut like cold coffee.
My fingers move across the keyboard with the steady cadence that's been my baseline for years, but underneath the muscle memory, every synapse keeps catching on her.
Phantom traces of her scent, coffee and something faintly sweet, like sugar dissolving in hot water.
I didn't store it deliberately. My mind just decided it was critical data and filed it without my consent.
Dar arrives at the workspace well after I do, which is unusual. She's typically here first, headphones on, Mountain Dew already half-empty before I've finished my first coffee.
Today she walks in, sits down, opens her laptop, and starts typing without looking at me.
The message is clear. Last night didn't happen. Or if it happened, it happened in a partition she's already encrypted and archived.
Except her hair is still damp from the shower, and the scent of it carries across the distance between our stations, something clean and sharp.
My hands remember the texture of those rainbow strands between my fingers. I have to look at my screen because the alternative is looking at her neck and thinking about the mark I left just below her collar, the one her hoodie is very deliberately covering.
I watch her keyboard pattern from my peripheral vision. Rapid bursts, long pauses. But the bursts are shorter than usual. The pauses are longer.
She's thinking between keystrokes, and whatever she's thinking about is pulling processing power from her work.
I open a chat window and type: Perimeter logs are clean. Probe was reconnaissance. They're building a profile of our response capabilities.
She reads it. Types back: Already mapped three potential follow-up vectors based on what they learned. Sending analysis.
I type: You're here late.
A pause. Then: Didn't sleep well.
Weird. Me neither. Must be something in the recycled air.
Another pause, longer than the first. I can feel her deciding whether to engage, weighing the cost of acknowledging what happened against the cost of pretending it didn't. The calculation plays out in the silence between her keystrokes.
The air is fine. Your desk left a bruise on my hip.
My belly flip flops.
She's acknowledging what happened against my workstation in a sentence that's equal parts accusation and admission, and the image of Dar examining a bruise shaped like the edge of my desk is going to live rent-free in my skull for the foreseeable future.
Military surplus. I'll file a complaint with procurement.
Do that.
She doesn't look at me. I don't look at her. The chat window sits between us like a live wire, and the careful professionalism of the earlier messages has cracked open just enough to let something through that is decidedly un-professional.
I minimize the window before I type something I can't take back.
The morning passes. We work. The workspace hums with the server frequency underneath it all, steady and familiar.
Every time Dar shifts in her chair, I'm aware of it in my peripheral vision. Every time she reaches for her Mountain Dew, my eyes track the motion of her wrist, the fingerless gloves, the pale strip of skin between glove and sleeve.
I spent an unreasonable amount of last night memorizing the geography of that skin, and my hands are lobbying for a return visit.
At one point she leans across my station to grab a reference cable from the rack behind my monitors, her shoulder brushes mine, and the contact lasts maybe half a second but the warmth of it prints itself into my skin like a brand.
She smells like her shampoo and Mountain Dew and something underneath both that is just her, and my jaw locks because if I open my mouth right now, what comes out will have nothing to do with reference cables.
She pulls back. Plugs the cable into her secondary terminal. Doesn't acknowledge the contact.
I don't either. But my shoulder hums where she touched it for the next twenty minutes, and I type slightly faster because the alternative is sitting still and feeling it.
Later, she reaches past me for a pen she left on the far side of my desk, and her hip grazes the edge of my chair, and the accidental geography of her body against my workspace is the most effective form of torture I've experienced since the time Stryker made me watch his attempt at network troubleshooting.
"Sorry," she says, and the word is clipped and perfunctory and her fingers are tapping on the pen at the speed of someone whose pulse just spiked.
"You're fine," I say, which is both a response to the apology and a completely involuntary observation about the state of her body in close proximity to mine.
She goes back to her station. I stare at a line of code that I've already reviewed and pretend the English language didn't just betray me.
Around noon, Sarah stands, stretches, and says she's heading to the communal area for food. Her tone is casual. Her exit is anything but.
She pauses at my station on her way out, and the pause has the quality of a woman who's been composing her opening statement for hours.
"Walk with me."
I follow her into the corridor, and she doesn't speak until we're well out of earshot.
Then she stops walking and faces me with the expression I've seen her use when signals analysis produces a result she didn't want but can't ignore.
"Is your assessment of her technical capability compromised by personal involvement?" Sarah asks, cutting straight to the incision without anesthetic.
"Define personal involvement."
"Tommy."
"Fine." I lean against the cold stone wall and take my glasses off. Clean them on my shirt. Put them back on.
The whole routine, buying time I don't have for an answer I don't want to give.
"My ability to be objective about Dar may not be fully intact."
Sarah absorbs this with the same composure she brings to intercepted communications that carry bad news, processing the new data without judgment or surprise.
"How compromised?"
"Somewhere between 'slight bias' and 'completely screwed.' Leaning toward the latter."
She doesn't smile, but something in her expression softens by a fraction. "Your technical judgment. Can you still assess her work objectively? Whether the code she's producing is sound. Whether her analysis of the Committee weapon is reliable."
"Yes." The answer comes without hesitation because it's true. Whatever my head is doing with fragments of last night, my professional assessment of Dar's capability hasn't shifted.
She's one of the two best signals analysts I've ever worked with—Sarah being the other. That was true before I touched her. It's true now. It'll be true tomorrow when the memory of her biting my shoulder is competing with encrypted traffic analysis for my attention.
"And her loyalty?"
I let the silence sit for a beat. "I believe she's genuine. I can't prove it yet."
Sarah nods once. "Fair enough. Keep the professional evaluation clean, Tommy. We need her. And we need you thinking clearly about what we need."
She turns and walks toward the communal area.