Chapter 10
TEN
FIGHT ME (NICELY)
LARK
We have our meeting with Ozzy and Arrow, and they send us work. It’s busy work, sure, but at this point I’ll take anything. We need to find these fuckers, and sitting around a cabin staring at one another isn’t helping.
Mainly because I want to kiss him.
It’s been hours since we received the packets from Ozzy.
There’s a special kind of intimacy in sharing a screen with someone.
Not the Netflix-and-chill kind.
The we might die and we’re building the map that decides how kind.
I kind of love it.
Knight and I end up side by side at the tiny cabin table, knees bumping under the wood, the battered tablet propped between us on a stack of canned beans.
Knight scrolls, jaw tight.
I steal a cold grape from the bowl we found in the fridge. Apparently Ranger also stocked fresh fruit, which I’m choosing to interpret as his way of saying don’t die of scurvy.
“Okay,” Knight says, eyes narrowed. “This is the bounty board’s backbone. Obfuscated, obviously. But you can’t fully hide behavior.”
Lines of text fill the screen—hashes, timestamps, transaction routes, string after string of data that makes most people’s eyes cross.
Mine light up.
I tuck one leg under me and lean closer.
“So the main node is this ‘HubZero’ address,” I murmur, following his cursor. “All these subnodes feed into it. Different vendors, different taggers, different ‘clients.’ Like a marketplace.”
“Exactly.” He zooms in on a cluster in the top right. “Here’s the part that matters to us.”
Three entries glow, highlighted in yellow.
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / OBSERVER
ALIAS: VANTAGE
BOUNTY: 15BTC
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / VIGILANTE
ALIAS: MASK-01
BOUNTY: 20BTC
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / VIGILANTE+ASSET
ALIAS: MASK-01 + ASSET
BOUNTY: 35BTC
My stomach does a small, unfriendly flip.
“That’s us,” I say quietly.
Knight taps the screen. “The first tag went up about six months ago. Anonymous ‘observer’ noticed interfering with operations. No face. Just an alias. VANTAGE.”
“Arrow,” I guess.
“Probably,” Knight says. “Then three months ago, this one—” he indicates the second entry “—went live. Vigilante interfering. Alias ‘MASK-01.’ Stills pulled from one of Gage’s ops.”
“You,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“And the last one?” I swallow. “Vigilante plus asset.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says, “Us. Last night. Mask-01 and his problem child.”
A shiver runs down my spine that isn’t entirely fear.
“Who’s VENDR-ALFA07?” I ask. “Vendor? Handler? Etsy shop for murderers?”
Knight snorts, humorless. “Vendor tag. Same entity posts all three. Same payment address. Same signature. They’re the one selling us as targets.”
“And,” I point out, “they’ve been watching you longer than you’ve been watching them.”
His jaw flexes.
“Dean thinks ALFA07 is an internal Cathedral handler,” he says. “Someone high enough to see multiple operations across different cities.”
“So not just a random creep with a laptop,” I say. “Like… a project manager. But for evil.”
His mouth twitches despite the tension. “Something like that.”
I tap the timestamp column.
“But look,” I say. “The bounty goes up after each escalation. First Vantage. Then Mask alone. Then Mask plus asset. They’re leveling up the reward every time you piss them off.”
“I noticed,” he says grimly.
“Doesn’t that mean they’re… scared?” I ask. “Like, if we were nothing, they wouldn’t throw money at us. Right?”
He thinks about it.
“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe they’re just possessive. This network thrives on control. We’re a variable they can’t account for yet.”
“Well,” I say, sitting back. “Let’s become a variable they regret.”
We fall into a rhythm—he runs scripts and parses logs, I pattern-match and dig into the weird stuff. It’s not quite internet access, more like getting packages delivered through a very paranoid mailman, but it’s enough.
We build a conspiracy corkboard that isn’t a corkboard, just layers of data in my head:
ALFA07 pops up in three other bounty threads over the past year. All “interference” tags. All targeting people who got in the way of Cathedral’s bigger structures.
One is a journalist in another city.
One is a whistleblower.
One is a hacker whose alias I recognize from some old white-hat boards.
All their tags are stamped with the same little signature identifier: >
“Helios,” I say aloud, tasting the word. “Sun god. Loves attention. Big ego.”
Knight taps it. “Or a misdirection.”
“Maybe,” I shrug. “But whoever this is? They like watching. They like marking people. You’re not just a nuisance to them, you’re a pet project.”
He grunts.
Not a fan of that image.
“Dean and brAVO will be chewing on this from the outside,” he says. “We hit it from here. If we can isolate where ALFA07 connects to local operations, we might find a real-world handle. Name. Front company. Something.”
“So we’re basically reverse-stalking our stalker,” I say.
“Pretty much.”
I grin. “Romantic.”
He gives me a look.
We work.
Hours blur.
I love this part—the puzzle, the flow. The way our brains click together. I’ll spot a pattern, and he’ll already be halfway to validating it. He’ll mutter something about a subnet, and I’ll be rewiring how to visualize it before he finishes.
We fall into little pockets of banter that keep the air from getting too heavy.
At one point, I flick a grape at his forehead because he’s being too grim about a dead-end log file. It bounces off his temple and lands in his lap.
He looks down at it. Then at me.
“Really?” he says.
“Consider it vitamin C.”
He picks up the grape, rolls it between his fingers, then eats it without breaking eye contact.
Unnecessarily hot.
“I hate you,” I mutter.
“No, you don’t,” he says.
He’s not wrong.
Sometime in the afternoon, my back starts to protest the wooden chair. I stretch, arms over my head, spine cracking.
Knight notices.
Of course he does.
“You need a break,” he says. “Stand up.”
I make a face. “I’m fine.”
“Lark.”
I sigh theatrically and push back from the table, standing. “Okay, Dad.”
He stands too. He’s been more restless than usual—tapping fingers, glancing at the window, scanning corners that never change.
I know that look.
“The data will still be here in twenty minutes,” I say. “What’s up?”
He hesitates.
Then, “Last night made it very clear you’re not going to stay in the metaphorical car ever again.”
“That’s correct.”
“So if they find us,” he continues, “we can’t rely on you just hiding behind me. You need better physical skills.”
I arch a brow. “You’re going to teach me how to fight?”
“Yes.”
I bite back a grin. “This should be good.”
“I’m serious, Lark.”
“So am I. Do your worst.”
We move the chairs aside, clearing a slightly-less-tiny patch of floor in front of the couch. The cabin isn’t big, but there’s enough room that we won’t immediately kill each other on furniture.
Knight motions me to the center of the space.
“Rule one,” he says. “If someone gets close enough to put hands on you, you don’t freeze. You don’t flail. You do something specific. You commit.”
I nod. “Commit to violence. Got it.”
He steps closer. “I’m going to grab your wrist. I want you to try to pull away.”
He takes my right wrist in his hand, not digging in, just firm enough that it feels real.
“Go,” he says.
I yank back.
He doesn’t move an inch.
“You see the problem,” he says calmly.
“I see your ego,” I counter.
“This is what I mean. People are stronger. Bigger. They grab you, you don’t just yank in the direction they’re already anchoring. You go where they don’t expect.”
He loosens his grip slightly. “Again.”
Instead of just pulling, I step toward him, rotating my arm in a tight circle, my hand cutting toward his thumb. I drop my weight as I move, pivoting my hips.
His fingers slip off like butter.
He stares down at his now-empty hand.
Then at me.
“…you knew how to do that,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I told you I wasn’t just making up the Krav Maga thing. I’ve been taking classes for years.”
He squints.
I grin. “You thought I was lying to impress you?”
“I thought you took, like, a seminar at a self-defense night and spent the rest of the time eating free pizza.”
I gasp. “How dare you. It was free wings, actually. And I’ve been training twice a week since then.”
He runs a hand over his jaw. “Show me.”
I step back, plant my feet.
“Okay,” I say. “Grab me from behind.”
His eyebrows climb. “Excuse me?”
“Relax, prude. This is literally in the textbook. Someone grabs you from behind, you can’t see, your options change. So do it.”
He mutters something under his breath but moves behind me. His arms loop around my torso, pinning my arms just above the elbows, not crushing tight, just enough that I feel the restriction.
“Okay?” he asks quietly near my ear.
Too near.
My heartbeat stutters.
Focus, Lark.
“Okay,” I manage. “Common reaction is to panic. Try to pry their arms off. But if they’re stronger—which they usually are—that’s a losing game. So instead…”
I slam my heel down onto his instep.
He grunts, loosening a fraction of his hold.
At the same time, I throw my head back, connecting with his chest—would be nose if he were closer—and drop my weight, twisting my hips, cutting my arms down and out.
His hold breaks.
I spin, using his momentary off-balance state to step into his space, bring my hand up in a mock palm strike that stops a millimeter from his throat.
“If this was real,” I say, breathing a little faster, “I’d aim for soft spots. Throat, eyes, groin. Then run like hell.”
He opens his mouth.
Nothing comes out.
His hands hover like he’s still processing being reversed.
A slow grin crawls across my face. “You okay there, tough guy?”
He blinks. “Where did you learn that level of technique?”