Ten thousand dollars.
I read it three times.
Then I read it a fourth time because I thought maybe sleep deprivation was finally doing something permanent to my brain and I was hallucinating numbers.
I was not hallucinating.
Ten thousand. For three firewalls. One hour, maybe two if I'm being lazy about it.
I typed back before I'd even fully decided to.
Z: I can do it in one.
Cocky. I know. But it was also just true, and I've never seen the point in lying about what I'm capable of when what I'm capable of is the only thing I'm selling.
The reply came in under a minute.
Client: Deal. 3 AM. Half upfront, half on delivery.
Five thousand dollars landed in my account eleven minutes later. I stared at the notification. Then I made myself a coffee I didn't need — I was already wired, had been since noon — and I sat down at my desk and told myself to wait until three like a normal professional and not start early just because I was excited.
I started at 2:47.
Close enough.
The thing about 3 AM is that it's the hour everything gets tired.
Security systems don't sleep but the people monitoring them do, or they're on their third cup of bad break room coffee and thinking about literally anything else. There's a looseness to the world at 3 AM that doesn't exist at any other time. I'd built my entire career on it.
I have a perfectly normal LinkedIn that says I do freelance cybersecurity consulting, which is true in the same way that a locksmith who occasionally breaks into houses is technically in the security industry. I have two degrees I never use, a plant named Gerald who has survived three years on neglect and spite, and approximately four friends, one of whom is a cat.
I find systems. I get inside them. I leave no trace.
That's it. That's the whole job.
I don't ask who's hiring me or why. I don't read the files I'm not paid to read. I take the money, I do the work, I close my laptop and I sleep like a person who has made peace with her life choices.
Usually.
The first firewall was almost embarrassing.
I got through it in eight minutes and genuinely felt bad for whoever had built it. Like — buddy. Come on. There was an unpatched vulnerability in the authentication layer that had probably been sitting there for months, just waiting, lonely, hoping someone would notice it.
I noticed it.
The second one was better. Trickier routing, layered encryption, someone had actually put effort in. I spent twenty minutes on it, which for me was practically a coffee break, but I appreciated the attempt. I almost said good job out loud to nobody.
Then I hit the third wall.
And I stopped.
Something was wrong with it.
Not wrong like broken. Wrong like — designed. There was a pattern in the way it was structured that felt too deliberate, too clean, a specific kind of architecture that I'd seen exactly once before in my career, in a forum post written by someone who turned out to be ex-military intelligence.
It was a trap.
Not for data. For people. For whoever tried to get through it.
Huh.
I sat back. Looked at it for a long moment. Gerald the plant sat in my peripheral vision being useless and green.
Okay. So this is not a normal corporate server.
A normal person would have logged off right then. A smart person. A person with any self-preservation instinct whatsoever.
I went around it.
It took me forty minutes and it was genuinely the most fun I'd had in months, and that probably says something about my social life but I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the way the trap was structured, what it told me about whoever built it, the fact that they were good — better than good — and that I had just outsmarted them, which felt incredible in the specific way that things feel incredible at 3 AM when you're running on caffeine and stubbornness.
I got through.
And then I opened the files.
I don't know how long I sat there.
Long enough for my coffee to go cold. Long enough for the sky outside my window to shift from black to the particular dark blue that comes just before the city remembers it exists.
Names. Dates. Evidence.
Not financial records. Not corporate data. People — real, powerful, publicly respected people — with documentation of things they had done that would end their careers, their freedom, possibly their lives depending on who got hold of it first. Politicians. Executives. Two names I recognized from the news last week.
What is this.
My hands were still on the keyboard. I became aware of that distantly, the way you become aware of your own heartbeat when the room gets too quiet.
I should close it. Log off. Tell the client the job is done and pretend I hadn't seen any of this.
I downloaded everything.
All of it. Every file, every document, every piece of evidence in that archive. Moved it through three different tunnels, buried it in encrypted storage, made absolutely sure — triple sure — that I had left nothing behind. No fingerprints. No trace. No indication that anyone had ever been here at all.
Then I sent one message.
Z: Done.
The remaining five thousand hit my account four minutes later.
I stared at my screen for a while after that.
Ten thousand dollars and a file that could probably burn half the country's power structure to the ground. Just a normal Tuesday.
I closed my laptop and watched the city go blue outside my window and felt pretty good about myself, honestly.
The doorbell rang at 6:04 AM.
I already knew who it was. Only one person on earth rang my doorbell like that — three short, one long, then immediately again because she had the patience of a golden retriever that had been given espresso.
I opened the door.
Jennifer looked incredible, which was genuinely offensive at 6 AM. She was still in last night's outfit — a green dress she'd apparently decided was also appropriate for dawn — mascara slightly smudged, heels in her hand, and the specific expression of someone who had things to say and had been saving them for the entire Uber ride home.
"He," she announced, walking past me without being invited because she had never once in six years waited to be invited, "is the most emotionally unavailable man on the planet."
"Good morning to you too."
"I'm serious, Zara. I asked him what we were and he said, and I quote —" she dropped her heels on my floor and turned to face me with the gravity of someone delivering a congressional hearing, "let's just see where things go."
"Devastating."
"It's been eight months."
"Still devastating."
She pointed at me. "Don't be funny right now. I need you to be outraged with me."
"I'm outraged." I was already moving to the kitchen. "Tea or coffee?"
"Coffee. Strong. Make it disrespectful." She threw herself onto my couch and stared at my ceiling with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who had been personally wronged by the universe. "What have you been doing all night? It smells like you've been awake since yesterday."
"Working."
"Zara." She lifted her head. Looked at me. Put it back down. "You need a boyfriend."
"I need sleep."
"You need human connection."
"I have you."
"I don't count, I'm going through something." She gestured vaguely at herself. "What was the job?"
I thought about the files. The names. The way my stomach had dropped, opening them, like missing a step in the dark.
"Boring," I said. "Firewall stuff. Easy money."
She accepted this because she always accepted this. Jennifer knew what I did in broad strokes and had made a deliberate choice years ago not to know the details, which was honestly the most loving thing anyone had ever done for me.
"Ten thousand dollars," I added, because I couldn't help it.
She sat up.
"What."
"Boring firewall stuff," I said, smiling into the coffee maker.
She stared at me. Then she flopped back down.
"I'm in the wrong profession," she said to my ceiling. "I have a master's degree."
"You chose marketing."
"Don't."
I laughed. Actually laughed, quiet and tired, the way you laugh at 6 AM when you're running on no sleep and ten thousand dollars and the distant, not-quite-uncomfortable feeling of having seen something you probably shouldn't have. But whatever. It was done. The money was in my account. The files were buried so deep no one was ever finding them.
I was fine.
We drank our coffee. Jennifer told me the full eight-month emotionally unavailable boyfriend breakdown in exhaustive detail, and I listened the way I always did — actually listening, not just waiting for my turn to talk, because Jennifer was the only person I knew how to do that for. The apartment got warmer as the sun came up. Gerald the plant sat on the windowsill looking smug.
By 7:45 I was horizontal on the couch with a throw blanket and Jennifer was cross-legged on the floor scrolling through her phone, and I was approximately forty-five seconds from sleep when—
A knock.
Not the doorbell. A knock. Deliberate. Three times, evenly spaced, the kind of knock that isn't asking.
My eyes opened.
Jennifer looked up from her phone. We looked at each other.
"You expecting someone?" she asked.
"No."
I was already sitting up.
The knock came again. Same rhythm. Same patience.
I went to the door and looked through the peephole and—
Nothing.
Dark.
Someone had put their finger over it.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up so fast it almost hurt.
I turned to Jennifer. Kept my voice low, even. "Get up," I said. "Go to my bedroom. Lock the door."
She stared at me. She'd known me long enough to know when I wasn't being dramatic. She got up without a word, which was probably the most serious thing she'd ever done.
I went to my desk drawer.
Taser. Black, compact, fully charged. I clicked it once to confirm — the little blue light blinked back at me — and I wrapped my hand around it and stood to the side of the door because I'd watched enough videos to know you don't stand directly in front of it.
I unlocked the deadbolt.
Opened the door.
Two men.
That was my first thought — just the simple, clinical observation of two men standing in my doorway at 8 AM, which was already a lot to process. The one slightly behind was built like someone whose entire personality was being large and unreadable, dark suit, eyes that moved over my apartment like he was cataloguing it.
And then there was the one in front.
My brain did something embarrassing.
It just — stopped. For a full second. Like a program that had been handed a file it didn't have software to open.
He was tall in a way that felt intentional, like even his height was a decision he'd made. Dark hair, slightly pushed back, the kind that looked like it fell that way naturally but probably didn't. Strong jaw with just enough shadow on it to be unfair. His features were sharp in that particular way that made you think of old paintings, the kind of face that had no business existing in a regular hallway under regular fluorescent light. Olive skin. Dark, dark eyes that were currently doing the same thing to me that I'd done to his apartment — cataloguing. Taking inventory.
He was wearing a black jacket over a simple shirt, nothing flashy, nothing that announced itself. He didn't need to announce himself. That much was immediately obvious.
He looked at me.
And then something shifted in his expression — small, almost nothing, gone before I could fully read it.
The silence stretched for what felt like a very long time but was probably three seconds.
Then he said, voice low and completely, almost insultingly calm:
"I thought you were a man."
I looked him dead in the eye.
Taser still in my hand. Heart doing something I was going to be annoyed about later.
"Who are you?" I said.