Danny’s POV
The intake officer has the enthusiasm of a man who processes human misery on a shift rotation and stopped pretending to care about it sometime during the second Bush administration.
"Face forward. Chin up." The camera clicks. "Turn left." Click. "Turn right." Click. Three angles of a man in a destroyed Italian suit with a bruise blooming across his cheekbone and the specific expression of someone who has recently been dragged out of a basement by men whose necks are wider than their heads. My mother is going to frame this somewhere.
"Hands flat on the scanner." I press my fingers against the glass and watch the green light sweep beneath them — capturing the prints of a mechanic, not a criminal, though the distinction is apparently up for debate.
"Name?"
"Daniel Vega."
"Charges—" He reads from a screen without inflection, the way you'd read a grocery list if the groceries were federal offenses.
"Unauthorized access to a secured computer system. Willful destruction of corporate data. Criminal trespass." He looks up. "Phone call?"
He slides a phone across the counter — ancient, corded, the kind of phone that suggests the precinct's technology budget peaked around 1997.
I dial Raf's number from memory because my cell is in an evidence bag along with the bump key, the cloned keycard, and whatever dignity I walked in with.
Three rings. Four. I'm about to hang up when his voice cuts through.
"Danny." Not a question. He's been waiting for this call the way I'd wait for an engine to turn over after a rebuild — knowing the math is right, not knowing if the math is enough.
"I'm at the downtown precinct. Charges filed — Arthur's team had the paperwork ready before I touched the server rack." I keep my voice flat because the intake officer is six feet away. "The complaint was pre-written. They knew."
"They knew someone might try. That's not the same as knowing you specifically—"
"It's close enough. The paperwork was timestamped before I entered the building."
Silence. The sound of Raf recalculating, which I've learned to recognize by the specific quality of his breathing — shorter, faster, the rhythm of a brain that runs on caffeine and pattern recognition.
"The device," I say. "Did it finish?"
"Stage one confirmed. The rootkit kill signal propagated across the entire network — every phone running Echo Link got cleaned. I watched it happen from the traffic monitor. Thousands of devices, simultaneously scrubbed."
A pause that lasts long enough to tell me everything the next sentence won't. "Stage two — the Love Room hunt — I can't confirm from the outside. The server was air-gapped. The only way to know if it completed is the device itself."
"Which is still in the building."
"Which is still in the building." I lower my voice. "I wedged it behind the primary rack during the struggle. Before they pinned me — I slipped it between the rack housing and the wall."
"Tell me you dropped it on purpose."
"Of course I dropped it on purpose. If the connection held—"
"Then it's either still running or it's finished and the activity log has everything. Every file the virus found, targeted, and overwrote. Every Love Room recording that existed on that server — documented, timestamped, and destroyed."
Another pause. "Or the connection broke when you knocked it loose, and it's sitting there at ninety-nine percent doing nothing."
"Fifty-fifty."
"I'd say sixty-forty. The USB ports on that rack model have a retention clip — it would take more than a bump to disconnect." He exhales. "But sixty-forty isn't a hundred, Danny."
"I know." The intake officer taps the counter twice — the universal precinct signal to wrap it up, your civil liberties have a time limit. "I need you to do something."
"Name it."
"Nora blinked twice. In the server room, before they took her. Twice."
The silence on Raf's end changes quality — from calculating to still.
"Plan B," he says.
"She's inside. She went back with Arthur. She's doing it." My throat works around the next words and they come out anyway. "I need to know she's safe, and I can't — the charges, the bail, I can't get to her from here."
"I'll find a way to confirm. Maren, maybe. Or—" He stops himself before saying something we both know shouldn't travel through a precinct phone line. "I'll handle it. You focus on not getting yourself convicted."
"There's bail," I say.
Raf's voice sharpens. "How much?"
"Seventy-five thousand."
The silence that follows is the sound of a man doing math he doesn't like. Raf's savings, the club's resources, every dollar we've scraped together over years of garage work and side jobs — seventy-five thousand is a number that exists in a different economic zip code than anything we've ever touched.
"I'll figure it out," he says, and the certainty in his voice doesn't match the math, which means he's already calculating which parts of his life he's willing to liquidate.
"Raf—"
"Don't. Don't do the thing where you tell me it's too much. She's in that house right now doing the hardest thing any of us has ever done, and she did it so you wouldn't rot in a cell while Arthur Wilson plays father of the year." His voice tightens. "So I'll figure out the bail. You figure out not losing your mind before I do."
The officer takes the phone. I let him, because my thirty seconds of connection to the outside world just ended and the next sound I hear is the mechanical clang of a holding cell door opening — a sound that rhymes, in my body's memory, with every door that's ever closed between me and the people I need.
The cell is concrete and fluorescent. A bench bolted to the wall. A toilet with no seat.
The light overhead hums at a frequency designed to prevent sleep or sanity — a bureaucratic cousin of the radiator in our apartment, except the radiator was trying to heat us and this light is trying to dissolve me.
I lie on the bench. The concrete is cold through the ruined jacket. Above me, thirty-seven ceiling tiles arranged in a grid that my brain maps automatically because my brain maps everything when it can't solve the actual problem.
Nora's face in the server room. The calculation running behind her eyes, faster than mine, sharper than mine, arriving at the answer I couldn't reach because the answer required sacrificing the one person I can't sacrifice.
She opened her mouth and Eleanor Wilson came out, and the woman I love disappeared behind a mask she'd spent months burning.
The blink. Twice. ‘Plan B is active. I'm going in.’
She's inside that house right now. Performing for a man who spent four million dollars building a cage, sitting across a table from the ex who weaponized her intimacy.
And I'm on a concrete bench counting ceiling tiles because the justice system moves at the speed of paperwork and Arthur Wilson's lawyers move at the speed of money.
Thirty-seven tiles. I count them twice, and then thrice. The fluorescent light hums its empty hymn.
I close my eyes and don't sleep and wait for the morning to bring something I can actually hold.