The Committee is building a target profile. The same way someone scouts a building before they breach it.
What catches my attention is the exit pattern. The probe withdrew cleanly, which means it wasn't interrupted by our countermeasures. It completed its reconnaissance cycle and left on its own schedule. That's discipline. That's an operator who isn't rattled by detection, who expected to be seen and factored our response into the data collection. The Committee learned something last night about how fast we react, and the knowledge sits in my gut like cold coffee.
My fingers move across the keyboard with the steady cadence that's been my baseline for years, but underneath themuscle memory, every synapse keeps catching on her. Phantom traces of her scent, coffee and something faintly sweet, like sugar dissolving in hot water. I didn't store it deliberately. My mind just decided it was critical data and filed it without my consent.
Dar arrives at the workspace well after I do, which is unusual. She's typically here first, headphones on, Mountain Dew already half-empty before I've finished my first coffee.
Today she walks in, sits down, opens her laptop, and starts typing without looking at me.
The message is clear. Last night didn't happen. Or if it happened, it happened in a partition she's already encrypted and archived.
Except her hair is still damp from the shower, and the scent of it carries across the distance between our stations, something clean and sharp.
My hands remember the texture of those rainbow strands between my fingers. I have to look at my screen because the alternative is looking at her neck and thinking about the mark I left just below her collar, the one her hoodie is very deliberately covering.
I watch her keyboard pattern from my peripheral vision. Rapid bursts, long pauses. But the bursts are shorter than usual. The pauses are longer.
She's thinking between keystrokes, and whatever she's thinking about is pulling processing power from her work.
I open a chat window and type:Perimeter logs are clean. Probe was reconnaissance. They're building a profile of our response capabilities.
She reads it. Types back:Already mapped three potential follow-up vectors based on what they learned. Sending analysis.
I type:You're here late.
A pause. Then:Didn't sleep well.
Weird. Me neither. Must be something in the recycled air.
Another pause, longer than the first. I can feel her deciding whether to engage, weighing the cost of acknowledging what happened against the cost of pretending it didn't. The calculation plays out in the silence between her keystrokes.
The air is fine. Your desk left a bruise on my hip.
My belly flip flops.
She's acknowledging what happened against my workstation in a sentence that's equal parts accusation and admission, and the image of Dar examining a bruise shaped like the edge of my desk is going to live rent-free in my skull for the foreseeable future.
Military surplus. I'll file a complaint with procurement.
Do that.
She doesn't look at me. I don't look at her. The chat window sits between us like a live wire, and the careful professionalism of the earlier messages has cracked open just enough to let something through that is decidedly un-professional.
I minimize the window before I type something I can't take back.
The morning passes. We work. The workspace hums with the server frequency underneath it all, steady and familiar.
Every time Dar shifts in her chair, I'm aware of it in my peripheral vision. Every time she reaches for her Mountain Dew, my eyes track the motion of her wrist, the fingerless gloves, the pale strip of skin between glove and sleeve.
I spent an unreasonable amount of last night memorizing the geography of that skin, and my hands are lobbying for a return visit.
At one point she leans across my station to grab a reference cable from the rack behind my monitors, her shoulder brushesmine, and the contact lasts maybe half a second but the warmth of it prints itself into my skin like a brand. She smells like her shampoo and Mountain Dew and something underneath both that is just her, and my jaw locks because if I open my mouth right now, what comes out will have nothing to do with reference cables.
She pulls back. Plugs the cable into her secondary terminal. Doesn't acknowledge the contact.
I don't either. But my shoulder hums where she touched it for the next twenty minutes, and I type slightly faster because the alternative is sitting still and feeling it.
Later, she reaches past me for a pen she left on the far side of my desk, and her hip grazes the edge of my chair, and the accidental geography of her body against my workspace is the most effective form of torture I've experienced since the time Stryker made me watch his attempt at network troubleshooting.