Danny’s POV
The visitation room smells like vending machine coffee and institutional regret — two substances I'm learning are chemically indistinguishable.
Gray walls, gray table, gray light from a window that faces a parking lot designed by someone who considers concrete a decorative choice.
Raf sits across the table looking like he hasn't slept since the phone call. His jacket is wrinkled, his hair is doing something unfortunate, and his knee is bouncing under the table at a frequency that suggests his caffeine intake has crossed into medical territory.
He's got the expression of a man holding six things he needs to say and a thirty-minute window to say them in.
I speak first, because one of us has to and he's going to start with bail, and bail isn't the priority. "The USB drive. Any way to confirm the connection held?"
Raf's knee stops bouncing. He leans forward, keeping his voice below the guard's hearing.
"I've been thinking about nothing else for forty-eight hours. If the connection held and the virus didn't finish stage two before the server powered down for investigation — then the device is dormant. The moment that server comes back online with the USB still attached, the virus reactivates and finishes the hunt."
"And if it already finished?" I watch his face change — the shift from calculating to certain.
"Then the activity log on the device is the most important piece of hardware in this entire case." He looks up at me.
"Every file the virus found, targeted, and overwrote — timestamped, cataloged, documented. Every Love Room recording that existed on that server, destroyed by a tool that kept a receipt of everything it killed."
The implications settle between us. That USB drive, three inches of plastic wedged behind a server rack in a building I can't go near, either proves Tristan's leverage is gone or proves it never finished dying.
"The problem is getting to it," Raf says. "NeuraLink's building is a federal interest now. The FTC flagged the network anomaly from the rootkit kill — thousands of devices simultaneously scrubbed doesn't exactly whisper. They'll send forensic teams. If investigators access that server room and find our device—"
"Then they find it before we do. And either it becomes evidence in their case, which might help us, or it becomes evidence against us, which definitely doesn't."
Raf rubs his face with both hands. "There might be a third option. If the FTC investigation moves fast, their forensic team images the servers as evidence. The USB gets cataloged along with everything else — discoverable. A lawyer with the right subpoena could access the activity log through the federal case file."
"You're saying we let the feds find it." The idea tastes wrong, but Raf's already shaking his head.
"I'm saying we might not have a choice, and if we don't have a choice, we make the choice work for us." He drops his hands.
"The activity log doesn't incriminate you — it documents what the virus found. The recordings it targeted. The scope of surveillance it uncovered. That's whistleblower evidence, Danny. That's the thing that turns your charges from corporate sabotage into justified exposure."
"That's a lot of 'ifs' balanced on a USB drive that might have disconnected when a security guard body-checked me into a server rack."
"Sixty-forty it held. The retention clips on that model—"
"You already gave me the sixty-forty speech." I lean back, and the chair creaks like it's been absorbing institutional despair for decades.
"Because it's the best number I've got and I need you to hold onto it." His voice tightens in a way that tells me the next thing he says is the thing he's been holding since he sat down. "Have you heard from her?"
My jaw locks. "No. Her old number is dead. Accounts dark. Probably a new phone Arthur set up which won't have my number on the approved list."
My voice catches on something structural. I press my palms flat against the table and breathe through it. "She's inside that house and I've got no way to confirm she's okay."
"She blinked twice." Raf says it with the steady certainty of a man stating a law of physics.
"Plan B is active. Nora is inside because the plan is working, and the reason you can't reach her is because Arthur believes she came home."
"And if he didn't believe it?" My knuckles whiten against the table edge.
"Then we'd know. Arthur Wilson isn't quiet when he wins — he's theatrical. The silence means she's in."
He holds my gaze. "The silence is the plan working, Danny. Not the plan failing."
‘The silence is the plan working.’ The most comforting interpretation of the worst thing I've ever felt — the specific torture of not knowing, which isn't heartbreak or grief, isn't any emotion with a name and a trajectory.
It's the space between the question and the answer where your entire nervous system lives at full voltage with nowhere to discharge.
"Now." Raf straightens, rolling his shoulders like he's physically shifting from one problem to the next. "Bail."
"Seventy-five thousand." He doesn't flinch — the number lands on the table between us and he absorbs it by refusing to acknowledge impossibility as a relevant variable. "I'll figure it out."
"Raf, the club doesn't have that kind of—"
"I said I'll figure it out." His jaw sets in a way that's familiar because I've seen it in my own mirror.
"Nora walked into her father's house and put on a mask she spent months tearing off, and she did it so you wouldn't rot in here while Arthur Wilson rewrites the narrative. So I'm going to figure out the bail. And you're going to figure out how to not lose your mind before I do."
He stands, and the chair scrapes against the floor with the sound of someone who's done talking and starting doing. "Sixty-forty, Danny. Hold onto it."
The guard opens the door. Raf walks out without looking back — the specific walk of a man who is already on the phone in his head, already calculating whose savings and whose truck title and whose side-job cash can be stacked into a number that has no business existing in our zip code.
The door closes. The lock engages. I press my palms flat against the gray table and breathe, because somewhere across the city a woman I love is performing the role of her life in a house that was always a cage, and the only thing connecting us is a double blink and a sixty-forty chance wedged behind a server rack in a building neither of us can enter.