They're looking at me the way he looked at his code when I pointed out the blind spot: like I'm something he built without realizing it, something he doesn't know how to protect and can't afford to lose. The server room. The diagnostic cable. The Mountain Dew placed at the edge of my workstation with the precision of someone who's already memorized my patterns.
All of it was leading here, and I knew it, and I came to the gym anyway.
He sees me. The woman who sent a warning into the dark because she couldn't watch something elegant get destroyed, and the recognition in his gaze is the most unnerving thing I've encountered inside this mountain.
The space between us has narrowed to inches. His knee is almost touching mine.
His hands are on the bench beside his thighs, and my hands are on the bench beside mine, and the distance between his fingers and mine is close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off his skin without contact, and the absence of contact is louder than anything either of us has said.
"I should go back to my quarters." My voice is steady. My hands aren't. My fingers are tapping a sequence against the bench surface, rapid and involuntary, the tell that means I'm processing too much data and the system is overwhelmed. He tracks the movement with the focus of a man who reads patterns for a living and has just recognized one that matters.
"You should." He puts his glasses back on. The barrier returns. The humor surfaces, worn and thin but functional. "The scenic tour continues tomorrow. I hear the server room is lovely this time of year."
I stand. My legs are steady. The rest of me isn't. The image of him at the pull-up bar has written itself into permanent memory, and no amount of overwriting is going to erase it because my brain has classified it as essential and essential data gets redundant storage. I'm going to see Tommy's back muscles moving under wet cotton every time I close my eyes for the foreseeable future and there's nothing I can do about it.
"Tommy."
He looks up.
"Your blind spot at the tertiary relay wasn't just a design trade-off. It was a philosophical choice. You prioritized throughput over security because you believed the system's primary function was communication, not protection. You chose connection over defense." I pause. "That's not a flaw. That's a signature."
The gym is quiet. The server hum vibrates through the floor. Tommy sits on a weight bench with sweat drying on his face and his glasses reflecting the harsh light, and he looks at me with the expression of a man who's just been read at a depth he didn't consent to and doesn't want to look away from.
"Good night, Dar."
"Good night."
The corridor is cold against my back. The stone wall presses through my hoodie, solid and ancient and indifferent to the fact that my pulse is elevated and my skin is flushed. My hands are shaking, and the shaking has nothing to do with fear or cold and everything to do with recognition. I've met someone who thinks the way I think, hides the way I hide, and hurts the way I hurt, and the recognition is a vulnerability I don't have a patch for.
Underneath the recognition, underneath the intellectual connection and the shared wounds and the way his mind mirrors mine: I want him.
Physically, in a way that has nothing to do with code and everything to do with the body he hides and the hands that held mine in the server room and the sound of his laugh bouncing off equipment.
My fingers are still against the stone wall, motionless, the tell screaming into an empty corridor where nobody's here to read it. I lean against the cold rock and breathe and let the mountain hold the weight of what I'm not ready to carry.
9
TOMMY
Something changed after the gym. The shift is small enough that someone who doesn't monitor behavioral data for a living would miss it entirely. I do monitor behavioral data for a living. The delta between pre-gym Dar and post-gym Dar is registering across every sensor I have.
She started using my coffee mug. Not asking. Not acknowledging. Just picking it up from my workstation, refilling it from the pot, and drinking from it while she works. The mug is ceramic, dark blue, with a ring stain that has become permanent through years of neglect, and it is mine in the way that objects in a shared space become proprietary through sustained use. She knows it's mine.
She uses it anyway.
The transgression is so small, so deliberately casual, that calling attention to it would reveal more about my reaction than her intention.
The vulnerability she exploited to deliver the warning is now sealed, reinforced with a verification layer that accounts for the exact load distribution technique she used. The new protocol is better, tighter, more resilient, and if I'm honest about the design process, which I should be given that honesty is apparently thecurrency of 1 AM gym conversations, the protocol is built to withstand the way Dar approaches a system.
I'm designing against her mind. Learning the shape of her thought process and building defenses calibrated to it, which means I'm learning her, and the learning is happening through the medium I understand best, and the intimacy of studying someone through their code is something I should probably examine more carefully and absolutely will not.
The banter has sharpened. Where the first days were adversarial, all sharp edges and territorial markers, the verbal sparring has developed texture.
Dar's humor surfaces more frequently now, dry and unexpected and usually aimed at herself, and when it meets mine at speed, the collision produces something that makes Sarah glance sideways and pretend she didn't hear.
She's been at her station since before I arrived this morning, and the evidence is written in the details. Three empty Mountain Dew cans lined up with military precision. A hoodie sleeve pushed to her elbow, exposing the tendons in her forearm. The faint indentation on her cheek from resting it against her fist while she worked through a problem.
I cataloged each detail as I sat down, the same way I catalog environmental variables during a systems check, automatic and thorough. The warmth that accompanied the cataloging was neither automatic nor thorough. It was specific and inconvenient and aimed entirely at the woman drinking from my coffee mug.