The Question You Pay For
Elisabeth Marrow hadn't slept.
Not properly.
She'd dozed twice, both times upright, head jerking against the padded headboard of the hotel bed, heart hammering in the seconds before she remembered where she was, and what she'd seen.
The room looked like every other conference hotel she'd ever stayed in.
Beige walls. Artwork that pretended to be abstract enough not to offend anyone, but cheap enough not to matter if it fell. The desk under the window, the chair designed to make you leave rather than work. Two complimentary bottles of water pretending to be generosity.
Her laptop sat open on the desk. The company-issue one, with Aegis's logo etched small and discreet in the corner. The progress bar on the encrypted backup she'd started crawled on, indifferent to her pacing.
She checked the chain again.
External drive, wiped and reformatted. Check.
Fresh image from the ruined datacenter logs, copied locally. Check.
File name: audit_notes_2032-06-14.enc
Boring enough that even a casual thief would ignore it. Encrypted enough that anyone who knew what they were looking for would ask questions she didn't want to answer.
Her phone lay on the bedspread.
No new messages. The nondisclosure document still sat in her inbox where she'd left it, flagged, unread.
She could sign it.
Most people did.
It was standard practice: you went somewhere, saw something, signed a piece of paper promising not to say that you'd seen it. If you broke the promise, a lawyer got angry on a call and a corporation got angrier in a letter, and then you either backed down or paid the kind of money normal people never had.
This felt different.
It wasn't the fire.
Fires happened. Systems failed. Her job was literally to find out why.
It was what had burned.
She'd gotten to the site three hours after the first siren.
Fire crews still worked the perimeter, hoses snaking into the building like veins. Aegis security had carved out their own zone inside the police boundary tape, where men with vests and radios talked in short bursts of jargon and management-speak.
Someone had pushed her through the check-in process with the kind of brisk urgency that wasn't actually about speed. Sign here, sign here, yes that authorizes hazard pay, put this on, those are the stairs, the elevator's dead, watch your step.
The hallways past the first set of doors had been choked with soaked drywall and melted plastic. The server rooms themselves had been worse: steel and glass warped by heat, racks blackened and sagging, cable bundles dangling like cooked vines.
She'd walked it all, cataloguing damage, tracing the path of the fire, noting which containment systems had triggered and which had mysteriously "malfunctioned."
It hadn't been Aegis's panic that bothered her. Large organizations panicked all the time. It was the specific doors they were panicking about.
Aegis datacenters were compartmentalized. You didn't place every client's data in the same room if you could help it. Liability preferred small boxes over large.
But there had been one room, at the end of a corridor that wasn't supposed to exist on the plans she'd been given.
A door with a different badge reader. A strip of charred black on the floor where something heavy and hot had been dragged out.
Inside, the wreckage had looked like the rest, at first glance. Racks, melted plastic, scorched metal.
Then she'd seen the tags.
Not labels on the hardware. Those had burned, or been deliberately scraped off. Labels in the logs.
She'd pulled a partially salvaged node, jacked a diagnostic tool into a surviving port, and watched the metadata scroll.
Not company names.
Not IP addresses.
Entries coded with three-letter strings and unlabeled numeric hashes. Transaction logs referencing "cargo," "transit," "origin," "processing."
She'd seen enough shipping manifests in other contracts to understand how people hid things in plain sight.
But in the half-corrupted columns, where someone had clearly tried and failed to scrub everything, other words had slipped through.
FORGE/GRY-CH-117.
FORGE/BLK-W-042.
Status: INTAKE.
She hadn't known what "Forge" meant yet.
She'd known what the rest meant.
Children as shipments.
Aegis's man on-site, a sharp-jawed, sharp-suited liaison called Darrow, had hovered too close as she worked. When he saw what her tool had pulled, his hand had landed on her shoulder with the perfect weight of casual pressure.
"That's corrupt junk," he'd said. "Old test labels. This room handled anonymized simulation data. None of it was live."
"Then you won't mind if I make a copy," she'd said.
He'd smiled.
"We'd prefer you didn't," he'd said. "Legal gets fussy whenever anything leaves the premises, corrupted or not."
She'd made the copy anyway.
He'd seen that too.
When they'd come back out into the cooler corridor, he'd handed her the nondisclosure notices. Bigger than standard. Broader. Not just about company secrets this time, but about "sensitive security frameworks" and "non-attributed partners."
She'd told him she needed time to read it.
He'd told her not too much.
That had been yesterday afternoon.
Now it was early morning, light not yet fully dragged over the hotel's windows, and she was still reading.
The document said what all those documents said, in the end:
There are things bigger than you. You will not talk about them.
The knock came just after six.
Three sharp raps. The precise kind made by someone who knocked on doors for a living.
Elisabeth froze.
Housekeeping didn't come this early. Room service didn't either, not unless drunk and desperate people called them. She hadn't.
She crossed the room, feet cold on the carpet.
"Who is it?" she asked, keeping her voice steady.
"Aegis security liaison," a man's voice said. Calm. Even. "Here to discuss your ongoing engagement, Ms. Marrow."
Legal, she thought. Or risk. Or both.
She opened the door on the chain.
The man on the other side looked like someone a hotel wouldn't remember.
Medium height. Dark hair. Clothes in the comfortable middle between smart and unremarkable: dark jacket, shirt with a collar, jeans that fit without advertising it.
He held an ID wallet just high enough for her to see the stylized Aegis emblem and a name: K. Holt.
"Ms. Marrow," he said. "Good morning."
His eyes were the only interesting thing about him.
They didn't flick around the room like Darrow's had. They didn't narrow with calculation. They just looked at her, level and steady, the way a surveyor might look at terrain.
"Security liaison," she repeated.
"We prefer 'risk consultant,'" he said. "May we speak inside? The hallway is not ideal for sensitive topics."
His accent was difficult to place. Not clipped enough to be upper anything, not loose enough to be obvious. Neutral, like everything else.
"How do I know you're not with the press?" she asked.
He didn't smile.
"If I were with the press," he said, "I'd be wearing a worse suit and talking faster."
"Not reassuring," she said.
"Then use the chain," he said. "I'm patient."
It was the first odd answer he gave her.
Pressuring someone to open the door would have fit. Threatening consequences would have fit. Telling her to take her time and keep her precautions in place did not.
She studied his ID again. The name. The holographic shimmer over the emblem. The photo that looked like him but three years younger.
She shut the door, unhooked the chain, and opened it again.
"If you make me regret this," she said, "I'm calling hotel security."
"They won't get here in time," he said mildly, and stepped inside.
She hesitated only half a heartbeat before closing the door behind him.
---
On the roof opposite the hotel, Jonas Rhee lay prone with his rifle nestled into his shoulder and his eye behind the scope.
He watched the window that matched her room number.
"Visual confirmation," he said into his mic. "Holt's inside. No sign of external interference."
"Copy," Elena's voice came. "Internal's on the line."
"Of course they are," Jonas muttered.
Another click. A different voice, cooler.
"Noor Kasim," she said. "We're monitoring the interaction for behavioral variance."
"That what you're calling eavesdropping now?" Jonas said.
"I prefer not to romanticize it," Noor said.
Jonas smothered a sigh.
His job was simple: watch the building. If anything came from outside that threatened Kieran, he handled it. Anything that came from inside was above his pay grade.
Mostly.
---
Inside the room, Holt moved like someone who had been in too many anonymous hotels.
He didn't sit.
He took two steps in, scanned the corners and the bathroom, noting the angles and reflections in a glance. No weapons on display. No packed bags. No visible second person.
His gaze landed on the laptop, the half-finished backup, the nondisclosure document on the bed's screen, still open where she'd been rereading the indemnity clause.
"You're an early riser," he said.
"I never went to sleep," she said.
"Efficient," he said.
"Or anxious," she replied.
He inclined his head, conceding the point.
"You were at the site yesterday," he said. "You saw the damage."
"I saw a lot of melted plastic," she said. "And a lot of men who didn't want me to see anything else."
He didn't deny it.
"Aegis uses people like you because you see things others miss," he said. "They also prefer that insight be…targeted."
"You mean controlled," she said.
"That too," he said.
She crossed her arms.
"So which are you?" she asked. "Control? Or something else?"
"I'm here to understand what you think you saw," he said. "And what you plan to do with that understanding."
"You read my mind," she said.
"That's what I'm here to prevent," he said.
That earned him a brief, involuntary huff of air that might have been half a laugh.
He moved a little closer to the desk, but not around it. He wasn't trying to corner her physically. Just map the room in relation to her.
"You connected to an unlisted room," he said. "Pulled partial metadata from a burned node. You saw labels that didn't match your brief."
"You've got good logs," she said.
"We have good eyes," he said.
She gestured at the laptop.
"And delicate software," she said. "Half of what I pulled was corrupted beyond use."
"But some wasn't," he said. "You made a local copy."
Her throat tightened.
"If you're going to threaten me," she said, "could you get to the part where you say 'for your own good'? I've always wanted to hear that one in real life."
"I'm not here to threaten you," he said. "Threats assume leverage. I'm here to measure it."
"You do realize that doesn't sound less sinister," she said.
He let that pass.
"The room you accessed," he said. "What do you think it was?"
"You tell me," she said.
"I asked you first," he said.
She looked away, toward the window.
"Off-books storage," she said. "Compartmented. No client names, no labels that tie it cleanly to a contract. 'Simulation data' is the official story, but the metadata didn't read like simulations. It read like shipments. Transit. Origin points. Intake."
"Could have been anonymized product movement," he said. "Logistics runs. Test data for optimizing routes."
"Could have been," she said. "Except for the tags."
"'Forge,'" he said.
"Among others," she said. "Gry. Blk. Numeric extensions. Status flags that don't match hardware. You don't mark servers as 'intake.' You mark people."
He watched her face as she spoke. Not the words. The muscles around them.
"You jumped to people quickly," he said.
"Numbers that low, grouped that way, tagged across multiple locations?" she said. "It's not shipping containers. It's units smaller than that. Identifiable. Countable. Trackable."
"Children," he said.
She swallowed.
"That's the obvious conclusion," she said.
"Obvious conclusions are dangerous," he said.
"So is ignoring them," she said.
He shifted his weight.
"What do you think those tags mean?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. "I know what they look like. Intake. Processing. Transfer. I know the room shouldn't have existed on the plans I was given. I know the fire suppression failed there first. I know someone yanked hardware out of that room before the fire crews got in, and that the logs I scraped weren't meant for my eyes."
His eyes flickered to the NDA still glowing on the screen.
"And you know legal sent you that," he said.
"And I haven't signed it," she said.
"Why not?" he asked.
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Because I'm not stupid," she said. "And I'm not a hero. And I'm trying to figure out which one they expect me to be."
"Define 'hero,'" he said.
"Person who leaks everything, gets a three-day news cycle, loses their career, maybe their freedom, maybe their life," she said. "Person whose name becomes shorthand for a scandal, and who gets to live the rest of their extremely short or extremely long life as a warning label. No thanks."
"And stupid?" he asked.
"Person who signs blind and pretends they didn't see what they saw," she said. "Collects the check, goes home, tells themselves there was nothing they could have done. That those tags were probably just corrupted test data and not, say, children being shuttled through systems designed to lose people on purpose."
"You haven't called the press," he said.
"I called a lawyer," she said. "He told me to think very carefully about what I wanted more: to change the system, or to survive it. I hung up before I answered."
"Have you sent copies of the data to anyone?" he asked.
She hesitated.
"I sent a checksum to myself," she said. "Encrypted. No raw content. Just enough to prove something existed if anyone claims it didn't."
"Not to anyone else?" he pressed.
"Not yet," she said.
"Who are you considering?" he asked.
"The usual suspects," she said. "Investigative outlets. Smaller, ideally. Big ones are too scared of losing access. The ones that still run on reader money rather than ad buys or government grants."
"Name one," he said.
She squinted as if trying to read something in his expression.
"You know them already," she said. "Your side wouldn't have sent you if you didn't."
"Humor me," he said.
She held his gaze, then said, "There's a platform run by a woman named Kovács. Crowdfunded, stubborn, annoying. She's been sniffing around private security for years."
He didn't react.
Not visibly.
Internally, something clicked into place.
"No contact yet?" he asked.
"Not yet," she repeated. "I'm still deciding if I'm the kind of person who goes that far."
"You came to that room," he said. "You made the copy in front of Darrow. You brought it back here, started an encrypted backup. You haven't signed the NDA. Those are steps toward 'that far.'"
"You sound like you disapprove," she said.
"I don't have room for approval," he said. "Only risk."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" she asked.
"No," he said.
She sat on the edge of the bed, as if her legs had decided the conversation required more stability than standing offered.
"What are you going to tell them?" she asked. "Your side."
"That depends on what you are," he said.
"Is that a multiple choice question?" she asked.
"Three options," he said. "One: you're Ruiz. You took money to facilitate something you didn't bother to understand until too late, and now you're afraid the guilt will catch up before the consequences do. Two: you're Kovács. You'll burn your life down to show other people the match. Three: you're something between the two."
"And what does your side do with each?" she asked.
"Ruiz gets shallow regret and a short life," he said. "Kovács gets hunted. The third kind gets an offer."
Her lips parted.
"An offer," she repeated. "From you."
"From the people who pay me," he said.
"What's the offer?" she asked.
"Survival," he said. "With conditions."
She laughed. It sounded more like a cough.
"Of course," she said. "There are always conditions. Say them out loud. Let's hear how they sound in this lovely beige room."
"You sign the NDA," he said. "You hand over any copies of the data. You do not contact Kovács or anyone like her. You finish your engagement with Aegis, take your fee, and you walk away from any future contracts that smell like this."
"And that's it?" she asked.
"No," he said. "You also live with knowing you stepped back from the line."
She stared at him.
"Is this supposed to be mercy?" she asked.
"It's math," he said.
"Math that leaves the people behind those tags in the same place they were yesterday," she said. "You're not fixing anything. You're just…retacking the carpet over the hole."
"Yes," he said.
"No hesitation," she said.
"Hesitation gets people like you killed," he said.
"And people like you?" she asked.
"People like me are already dead," he said. "We're just still moving."
She flinched slightly at the flatness in his tone.
"Why did they send you?" she asked. "Someone like you. Not Darrow. Not legal. Not PR."
"Because my job is to see the worst-case scenarios before they happen," he said. "And to choose the ones that cost less."
"Less for who?" she asked.
"For the people who matter to them," he said.
She nodded slowly.
"Honest," she said. "I'll give you that."
On the rooftop, Jonas shifted.
"This is bleak," he muttered.
"Focus on the window," Noor said.
"I am," he said. "I'm also listening to you psychoanalyze my colleague in real time."
"He knew the categories we'd assigned her," Noor said quietly. "Ruiz, Kovács, middle. He turned them into a script."
"Or he saw the same pattern you did," Jonas said.
"Both can be true," she said.
---
In the room, Elise rubbed her hands over her face.
"If I sign," she said, "if I stay quiet, what happens to that room? To the servers they moved. To the people behind those tags."
"They get moved again," he said. "The labels change. The houses change. The numbers do not."
"You're saying it doesn't matter what I do," she said.
"I'm saying your choice won't free them," he said. "It will only decide whether you stand in front of the truck or step aside."
"Maybe if enough people stand," she said.
"Maybe," he said. "Not today."
She laughed again, but there was no humor in it.
"You sound like you've run this equation before," she said.
He thought of a little girl asleep in a hotel bed while her father died in another room.
Of a woman walking through a club's noise with his shadow on her neck.
"I've seen the answers," he said.
"And you keep doing their work," she said.
"If I stop, someone else will do it worse," he said.
"That's a pretty self-flattering story," she said.
"It's also true," he said.
She pushed up from the bed and walked to the desk.
Her fingers hovered over the touchpad.
"Say I sign," she said. "I delete everything. I pretend I never saw 'Forge' in a terminal window. What then? I go home, and what? Wait to see if my name ever shows up somewhere it shouldn't?"
"You change your specialization," he said. "You stop taking work that touches anything like this. You consult on cleaner systems. You teach. You bury this under other things you can live with."
"And the reason they're letting me live?" she asked.
"You haven't made them play offense yet," he said. "You're still in the space where threats and contracts work. Once you step out of that, they call people like me."
Her hand stilled over the trackpad.
She looked up at him.
"And what do people like you do," she asked, "when they don't want to do what they're told?"
He didn't answer.
She understood anyway.
"You're not just here for me," she said softly. "You're also here for you."
"I'm here because they're watching," he said. "And they want to see which way I jump when the ground moves."
"And which way is that?" she asked.
He thought of Elena saying do it on purpose, of Noor in the bar cataloguing his deviations, of Krell's thin smile.
"Toward the smaller pile of bodies," he said.
"You really think that's you?" she said.
"No," he said. "But for the moment, I'm what they have."
Silence settled between them.
The city's hum seeped through the window. Somewhere below, a truck's reverse alarm beeped steadily. A hotel TV two rooms over bled the muffled rhythm of a commercial through the wall.
She turned back to the laptop.
Her finger slid the cursor to the bottom of the NDA.
"Do I get to negotiate the conditions?" she asked.
"No," he said.
"I'll do it anyway," she said.
She opened the annotation field.
"When I sign," she said, "I want three things. None of them change your math. All of them will irritate someone on your side."
"Ambitious," he said.
"First," she said, typing as she spoke. "I want a clause that explicitly limits the NDA to this incident, this datacenter, these tags. They don't get to use it later to muzzle me on unrelated contracts."
"They will try," he said.
"They always do," she said. "But this gives me a foothold."
"Second?" he asked.
"I want out of any future work with 'non-attributed partners,'" she said. "If they subcontract me to anyone who touches this Forge business, they breach the agreement themselves."
"That's not how they see it," he said.
"It's how my lawyer will," she said. "If he lives that long."
"And the third?" he asked.
She hesitated.
"The third is a name," she said.
He went very still.
"A name for what?" he asked.
"For what I saw," she said. "For the pattern behind those tags. For the thing we're both dancing around like it doesn't already exist."
"You think a name will help," he said.
"It'll help me sleep," she said. "Sometimes that's all you get."
He considered her for a long moment.
"That's not a cost-free request," he said.
"You've already decided you're not going to kill me today," she said. "If you hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"You're sure?" he asked.
"I'm not a field operator," she said. "But I read people for a living. You didn't come here for a messy scene. You came here for a tidy checkbox."
"Don't be too sure," Noor murmured in Jonas's ear. "He still has both options."
"He's not drawing his gun," Jonas said.
"Not yet," she said.
In the room, he said, "If I give you a name, it won't change the outcome."
"I know," she said. "Give it to me anyway."
He looked out the window, at the slice of city visible between two buildings. The reflection of his own face stared back faintly in the glass.
"The people behind those tags call it the Forge network," he said. "Plural. Forges. Places where raw material is broken and reshaped."
"Children as raw material," she said. "Your employers have a talent for metaphors."
"They don't see them as children," he said.
"How do they see them?" she asked.
"As numbers," he said. "Units. Potential yield."
"And you?" she asked.
"I see them as ghosts," he said.
Her fingers tightened on the edge of the desk.
"Thank you," she said. "For the honesty. It's…horrifying. But honest."
He nodded once.
"Sign," he said.
She scrolled, read the clauses one last time, the amendments she'd added like thin sandbags in front of a flood.
Then she typed her name.
ELISABETH MARROW.
The system timestamped it.
"Copies," he said.
She ejected the external drive from the port.
"Two local," she said. "One on this, one in a hidden partition. One remote checksum. No raw data off-site."
"Drive," he said.
She handed it over.
He slipped it into his jacket.
"Local hidden partition," he said.
She sighed.
"Of course," she said.
It took her two minutes to show him, to watch him watch her shred her own insurance.
Once the sectors were overwritten, there would be nothing left but zeros and the knowledge that zeros had replaced something.
"The checksum," he said.
Stubbornness flashed in her eyes.
"Checksum isn't data," she said.
"It's evidence that data existed," he said. "If someone ever gets hold of it, it becomes leverage."
She sat back down.
Deleted the checksum from her cloud storage, then from the local cache.
"You know they can still dig through forensic leftovers if they want," she said. "No deletion is truly clean."
"They know that," he said. "So do you. This isn't about absolute erasure. It's about showing that you're willing to cut your own rope."
She rubbed her hands together once, as if they'd gone cold.
"Am I...Ruiz?" she asked quietly. "In your categories."
"No," he said.
"Kovács, then," she said.
"Not yet," he said.
"Then what?" she asked.
"An engineer who got too close to the blueprint," he said. "You stepped back in time. Ruiz didn't. Kovács won't."
"And you?" she asked. "Where are you on that spectrum?"
"Off the chart," he said.
She huffed another ghost of a laugh.
"You should know," she said, "if they come for me later, the fact that you talked me into this isn't going to make me like you any more."
"I'm not here to be liked," he said.
"Then we're aligned," she said.
He moved toward the door.
Hand on the handle, he paused.
"Don't contact Kovács," he said.
"You keep saying that," she said.
"Because if you do," he said, "she dies faster. And so do you. Quiet doesn't mean safe. It just means not today."
"Is that supposed to be reassuring?" she asked.
"No," he said. "It's supposed to be clear."
He opened the door.
"Holt," she said.
He stopped.
"If I walk away," she said, "if I keep my head down, change my specialization, pretend this was just…corrupted test data… Do I get to believe I'm not a bad person?"
He didn't turn.
"No," he said. "But you get to keep being a person at all."
He left.
The door closed behind him with a soft, final click.
Elisabeth sat very still in the silence that followed.
On the laptop screen, the signed NDA glowed at her like a verdict.
After a long time, she opened a new, empty file.
In the subject line, she typed two words and nothing else.
> Forge network.
She didn't save it.
Not yet.
She just left the cursor blinking.
Proof, at least, that she hadn't lied to herself entirely.
---
Outside, in the corridor, Kieran walked toward the elevator.
Internal's channel lit up in his ear.
"Report," Noor said.
"Subject signed," he said. "Local copies destroyed. No external distribution of raw content. She's flagged, but quiet."
"You gave her a name," Noor said.
"She already had one," he said. "I just confirmed it."
"Unnecessary," Noor said.
"Efficient," he said. "Loose language leads to sloppy thinking. She needs to know exactly what she's avoiding if you want her to stay away from it."
"You believe she will?" Noor asked.
"For a while," he said. "She's not a crusader. She's cautious. She'll rationalize. That buys you time."
"And if she changes her mind?" Noor said.
"Then you'll write a new mission," he said. "Like you always do."
He stepped into the elevator, hit the button, watched the doors slide shut.
"Your deviation score is…moderate," Noor said. "You pushed hard for compliance, but you also offered unapproved context."
"I talked her out of contacting Kovács," he said. "That's worth more than a clean script."
"Debatable," she said.
"Not to Krell," Elena cut in. "He's satisfied. For now."
"For now," Noor echoed.
Jonas's voice came over the line.
"Roof clear. No external actors. Just one very nervous engineer and one very annoying evaluation," he said. "We're all going home, then?"
"For the moment," Elena said.
"Next time," Noor said, "we may not send you into the room alone, Holt."
"You send anyone else," he said, "they shoot first and ask less interesting questions."
"Don't flatter yourself," she said. "We have other tools."
"You don't have another me," he said.
She didn't answer.
The elevator doors opened onto the lobby.
Kieran stepped out into the bland, manufactured comfort of the hotel's ground floor. A family argued near the check-in desk. A businessman into his forties barked into a headset about deliverables. A child chased a suitcase on wheels like it was an animal.
The world carried on.
He walked outside.
The air had the thin, sharp edge of early afternoon. Traffic grumbled. A vendor on the corner set up a stall, arranging steaming trays of food.
His secure line buzzed again.
"Elena," he said.
"You made a mess and then cleaned it," she said. "They're grudgingly impressed."
"Tell them not to get used to it," he said.
"I already did," she said.
He turned down a side street.
"What happens to the Forge logs?" he asked.
"Same as Ruiz's drives," she said. "They go into a room with no windows, get chewed on by people who sleep fine, and come out as pressure on someone you'll never meet."
"And the children?" he asked.
"What do you think?" she said.
He didn't answer.
She sighed.
"Kieran," she said, "you can't carry all of them."
"I'm not carrying any," he said.
"You are," she said. "In that ridiculous head of yours. Stop pretending you're empty."
She cut the line before he could reply.
---
On a balcony across the city, Amelia Kovács watched intrusion attempts taper off and shift flavor.
First, they'd come like someone kicking every door at once.
Now they came like someone testing windows, checking if the frames were rotten.
She closed her laptop and leaned back in the chair.
Her phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number:
> YOU'RE KICKING A NEST YOU CAN'T SEE.
TREAD CAREFULLY.
She stared at it.
No signature.
No trace.
No way to tell if it was a warning, a threat, or both.
She deleted it.
Then opened a new document and wrote:
> Sometimes the most honest thing a system does is panic.
She sat with the sentence a while.
Then added:
> And sometimes the most dangerous thing you can meet is not the person who wants you dead, but the one who wants you quiet.
She saved that one.
---
Back on Holcomb Street, Lena Vos stood on a chair behind her bar, cursing under her breath as she tried to change a blown bulb that the landlord had promised to fix for a month.
The news murmured from the TV, the volume low.
"…investigation continues into the fire at an Aegis-affiliated datacenter in the North River district. Officials maintain there is no indication of—"
She clicked the TV off with a sharp jab of the remote.
The door opened.
Kieran walked in.
"You look like hell," she said.
"I've seen worse," he said.
"Any of it going to fall on my roof?" she asked.
"Not today," he said.
"Comforting," she said. "Beer?"
He hesitated a fraction of a second.
"Yes," he said.
As she reached for the bottle, she glanced at him.
"What do you do, exactly?" she asked. "In that classified job of yours."
He watched the beer foam in the glass.
"I make decisions," he said.
"Someone has to," she said. "You good at it?"
"No," he said. "But I'm fast."
She snorted.
"Cheers to that," she said, sliding the drink across.
He took it.
Outside, the city kept its own crooked balance, numbers moving in systems designed to never be fully seen, people making choices that mattered only to themselves until, suddenly, they mattered to everyone.
The Forge network hummed quietly in dark places.
And Kieran Holt, Veiled Blade, sat at a bar on Holcomb Street with a beer in his hand and blood on his ledger, choosing, again and again, the smaller of the piles only he could see.