Chapter 34 Gage
THIRTY-FOUR
GAGE
We spread the contents of River’s backup drive across two laptops and an external monitor like a crime scene—timestamps, folder trees, filenames that mean nothing until they suddenly mean everything.
On the coffee table: still-warm cartons of Chinese, chopsticks, two sweating cans of ginger ale, a bottle of chili oil that could qualify as a weapon.
“Rules,” I say, cracking open the sesame chicken. “One—no coding while hungry. Two—if you find a smoking gun you’re legally required to take a victory dumpling.”
River salutes me with a spring roll. “Addendum: if you quote legal statutes while eating lo mein, you’re banished.”
“Cruel.”
“Necessary,” she says, eyes dancing.
We eat over spreadsheets—me driving the directory crawl, her surfacing the human context only she would remember.
It’s comfortable in a way that should scare me and doesn’t.
She hooks one bare foot under my thigh without noticing, and the casual touch feels like someone just drew a circle around us and wrote home.
“Here,” she says, pointing at the monitor. “That project folder. Odin Patch — ‘Odin_revC.’ Shawn worked on that.”
I scroll. “Two weeks before his ‘car accident.’”
She flinches on the last words, then leans in until her shoulder bumps mine. I click into /Odin_revC/HR-shadow/. A handful of PDFs, redacted names in the filenames, and one encrypted text bundle labeled PSALM88-notes.enc.
My heart does a slow, heavy thud. “Psalm 88.”
Her breath catches. “Open it?”
“Trying.” I drag it into a clean sandbox, fire up a local decryptor, and try common corp keys. No dice. “Whoever encrypted this didn’t want IT reading it.”
“Try ‘HelenaAuth’ as a seed,” she says, voice dry. “She loves naming things after herself.”
I raise a brow. “That can’t possibly—”
The prompt flips green. The bundle unfurls into dated memos, clipped emails, and a transcript of a sealed Zoom meeting. We both go very, very still.
I scroll the first memo aloud. “‘HR Compliance Note: Subject S. Presley asserts compensation fraud in DevOps; alleges punitive assignment practices. Referred to liaison H.L. for escalation review. Action: contain.’”
River swallows. “H.L. as in—”
“Helena Lune,” I finish. My pulse spikes. I open the transcript. It’s short, clinical, the worst kind of tidy:
Andrew K.: “We can’t let this get out before the Q4 investor call.”
H.L.: “I’ll handle the employee. We’ll frame it as a burnout sabbatical.”
Unknown (audio only): “If he goes public, we push Psalm 88. We don’t get squeamish.”
River’s hand finds mine under the table, fingers tight. “That’s the file name.”
“Yeah.” My mouth is dry.
We keep reading. A second doc is a “post-incident checklist” template, last modified by hlune-admin. The checklist includes “device retrieval,” “HR narrative alignment,” and—my stomach turns—“bereavement talking points.” Timestamps fall two days after Shawn’s last code push.
River’s voice is barely there. “They buried him.”
“And anyone who could prove it,” I say. My jaw aches. “There’s more. Look—an access log export.”
We scan the CSV. Three names pop in bold—a telltale flag left by some lazy internal auditor:
hlune-admin elevated to superuser on a Sunday.
tkincaid-hr (Tasha) used a shared service account to mount a backup image from River-Q-Backup.
akent (Andrew) approved an emergency HR “data hygiene” sweep two hours after.
River exhales shakily. “So Helena planned the escalation, Andrew signed off, and Tasha did the dirty work.”
“And Psalm88 was their ‘in case of whistleblower’ folder,” I say. “Which means you have proof Helena’s been running an off-books HR machine and using company systems to cover a death.”
She looks at me like she’s on a cliff—wind in her hair, nowhere to go but forward. “This is why I’m the target.”
“Yeah.” My voice is rough. “This and the fact that you won’t fold.”
We go quiet. The city hums through the windows, and the plant Juno brought stands smug on the sill like it knew we’d get here eventually.
To break the tension, River digs into the lo mein with both chopsticks like it owes her money. “Confession,” she says around a bite. “I used to hate pair programming.”
“Blasphemy.”
“It felt like someone watching me breathe. But this—” she nods at our little command center “—this doesn’t feel like being watched. It feels like being… seen.”
There’s a difference. I feel it like heat under my sternum. “You are.”
She blushes, pretends not to. “Your turn. Confession.”
I pretend to ponder. “In the third grade I cheated at the science fair.”
Her eyes go wide. “Gage Dawson!”
“I hot-glued a store-bought volcano to a cardboard base and called it a day. Lark ratted me out. I had to do a report on igneous rocks as penance.”
She laughs, the real kind that starts in the chest. “I love that.”
“Thanks,” I say, then tap the screen. “Who wants to ruin a tyrant?”
She sobers, nodding once. “Me.”
We work through the rest of the bundle, flagging anything that will hold up under daylight: Helena’s calendar breadcrumbs, two sloppily anonymized payments from a shell vendor to a “security consultant,” and a list of internal badge IDs that pinged the data center after midnight the week Shawn disappeared.
Andrew’s included. So is Tasha’s. Helena's admin token doesn’t need a badge.
By the time we lean back, the food is cold and the case feels hot enough to burn a hole through the floor.
“Victory dumpling?” I offer.
River takes one and feeds it to me, grinning when I almost drop it. “You’re impossible.”
“You love it.”
She sets the carton down like she’s made a decision. “I do,” she says softly.
The air changes. Not sharp—sweet, heavy, inevitable. She shifts across the couch, knees bracketing my thigh, and I’m already falling before she kisses me.
It starts soft—gratitude, relief, the press of a mouth that knows exactly where mine lives. Then it crests—heat, want, the elastic snap of something pulled too tight for too long. I cup the back of her neck and tilt her up to me, and she sighs, opens, and her name is a warm sound against my tongue.
“Hi,” I murmur, useless and happy.
“Hi,” she echoes, breath teasing my lips.
Her fingers slip under my T-shirt and flatten over my ribs, possessive like she’s staking claim. I’m embarrassingly easy, and I go where she guides me, kiss where she wants me, learn the map of her with my hands like there’s going to be a test and I plan to ace it.
“Tell me you want me,” I say, because I need to hear it from her lips.
She shakes her head and kisses me harder. “I want you. Oh Gage, I want you so damn bad.”
“I like you so fucking much,” I breathe, and she laughs into my mouth, which does inconvenient things to my self-control.
We tip sideways, the couch protesting while I gather her in.
Her shirt goes first, then mine, and the room narrows to the slick heat of her kiss, the soft drag of skin, the sound she makes when I trace the line of her waist and pull her closer.
I take my time anyway. Every yes she gives me is another brick in a house I didn’t know I was allowed to build.
“Gage,” she whispers when I find that spot below her ear.
“River,” I answer, because her name is a vow.
We stumble to her bedroom in a tangle of laughter and want, bump the doorframe, shush each other and then fail at shushing.
The sheets are cool, and she’s warm everywhere.
I’m done for. She pulls me down and I go, gladly.
We undress each other like a secret, slow where it matters, needy where it’s safe to be.
Her hands shake; I kiss the tremor away.
“Hey,” I say, foreheads touching. “With me?”
“Completely.”
What happens next we keep for us—heat and breath and that feral sweetness that only shows up when trust does. I anchor her. She ruins me. We move together like we’ve been calibrating for this for years and finally hit perfect sync.
After, I roll onto my side and pull her in, an arm around her waist, my mouth in her hair. Our hearts slow together, a two-line graph easing down to the same baseline.
“I’m in love with you,” I say into the quiet before I can scare myself out of it.
She goes still in my arms, then melts like the words were the thing she was waiting to hear all along. “Good,” she whispers. “Because I’m already lost.”
I laugh, helpless and wrecked. “Terrible navigation skills.”
“Only with you,” she says, and pinches my side until I squeak, which she will deny in a court of law.
We lie there in the afterglow with the laptops still humming in the next room, proof waiting like loaded dice. The world remains dangerous, complicated, liable to bite.
But she’s curled into me, and I’ve got my hand splayed low on her stomach like a promise I intend to keep.
“We hit the party Friday,” I say into the dark. “We tag Helena, track her, catch her. We bring Psalm88 into the light.”
“And if she runs?”
“We run faster.”
She tips her face up, and I kiss her once, slow and certain. “Sleep,” I tell her. “Tomorrow we sharpen the knives.”
“Stay?” she asks.
“Always,” I say, and mean it.