Natalia looked at me like she wanted to either kiss me or throw me through a wall. Sometimes both. The line between those two impulses had gotten dangerously thin over the past six months.
"For now," she repeated. She wasn't satisfied with that answer. Natalia was never satisfied with an answer that involved uncertainty. Her entire personality was built around control, around planning, around knowing every variable before she made a move. And here I was, telling her the biggest variable in our lives was a cosmic surveillance state that could crush us on a whim.
"I got another hour before the next thing on my schedule," I said. "Braxton wants to see me. Something about integration testing that isn't the VHC kind."
"He knows?"
"He suspects. Which for Braxton is basically the same thing."
