POV Mara
Security tightens the way water tightens around a drowning girl—quietly, everywhere.
By morning, the Research floor has new rules that no one wrote down. Doors that used to sigh open now hesitate for a second like they’ve learned to ask permission. Cameras blink more often. Screens time out faster, passwords expire, printers refuse to cough unless you ask twice.
Rafe Ortiz appears at my pod at 8:01 with a bodyguard’s posture and a cop’s eyes. Scar through his eyebrow, voice like gravel went to boarding school. “Ms. Hart,” he says, neutral as a contract. “With me.”
“For what?” I keep typing, not because I’m brave, but because it makes me feel like I am.
“Protocol.”
That’s how they say leash in this building.
Tess swivels in her chair like she wants to smack protocol with a coffee mug. “She has onboarding tasks,” she says, too bright. “We could die if Lena doesn’t reclassify those DOT bid files by lunch.”
“Onboarding can walk,” Rafe replies. To me: “Let’s go.”
I lock my terminal. He walks me to the elevator like I might sprint if he blinks. The car is empty, the mirrored walls reminding me I don’t have wings.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Attempted probe,” he says. “External actor.”
“On the servers?” My palm is suddenly damp against the badge under my sweater.
“On the perimeter. They didn’t get in.” He glances at me. “We tightened anyway.”
“‘Actor’ as in—”
“As in someone using tools they know how to use,” he says, shutting it down. “Until further notice, you don’t move alone.”
“Am I a flight risk?”
He doesn’t smile. “You’re an asset.”
“Ow,” I say, because the truth can bruise.
On eighteen he marches me past the compliance bullpen—their heads bent like priests—and into a small glass meeting room with a view of the river. He positions himself in the doorway, feet planted, human threshold.
“You’ll escort me to the bathroom now?” I ask.
“If you ask nicely.”
“Nicely implies consent.”
“You can call it whatever helps you cope.”
“You’re charming,” I tell him.
“I’m awake,” he answers.
We stare each other down until the glass learns something new about condensation. He looks away first, not because I win, but because his radio whispers and he belongs to the whisper.
“Stay put,” he says, stepping out. “Protocol.”
The door whispers closed. I can feel the leash cinch from a floor above—Cyrus’s invisible will tightening, tidy as a noose. He’s not here, but this is how he speaks when he doesn’t want to: doors that hesitate, guards that shadow, Rafe’s presence like a hand at my nape. Safer, he would call it. Contained, I call it. A kindness with bars.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with exactly three vibrations—the pattern I set when I still believed planning could outpace fate.
I pull it out under the table. A white flower icon blossoms on the screen: Thistle—the encrypted app Poppy insisted on the night I drove into rain and men who wanted me gone.
Poppy: you alive?
Me: define
Poppy: do you have blood in your body and a heartbeat you didn’t have to steal? then yes
A picture of her coffee mug arrives, chipped lip, terrible slogan. My throat does a trick I didn’t authorize.
Me: why thistle?
Poppy: Because Signal got friendlier than I like and I don’t trust anything that doesn’t shed. Listen, Manhattan is doing a weird thing.
Me: be specific
Poppy: Harrington Capital’s threat intel vendor just spun up a new watchlist task: “Legacy Entities—Sterling/Blackwell.” Your name is a scraped keyword across four feeds. They’re hunting your digital trail. And someone is pulling traffic-cam frames within three blocks of the crash.
For a second, the room tilts. I grip the edge of the table and inventory the exits because panic is a luxury I can’t spend. Outside the glass, a barge nudges the river open and keeps going like water doesn’t argue.
Me: how do you know?
Poppy: because your best friend sometimes dates men who talk in their sleep and leave laptops unlocked
Me: you’re impossible
Poppy: and yet. Princess, they think you’re a ghost who forgot to be dead. If they get lucky, they’ll turn you into a headline again. You need new skin. New IDs. Yesterday.
I look at the door. It looks back. Rafe’s shadow shifts on the frosted panel, a continental drift. Stay inside, Cyrus had said last night, in that tone that mixes certainty and possession and expects the room to obey.
I open my mouth anyway. “I need to leave the building,” I say when Rafe returns.
“No,” he says, not unkindly.
“I need a walk.”
“Walk on the treadmill upstairs.”
“I need air that knows how to move sideways.”
“Poetry is not protocol.”
“I’m not property.”
He grazes a look across my face like a hand. “You’re not a prisoner. You’re a target.”
“My favorite kind,” I say. “You see the problem.”
He doesn’t blink. “You’re safer here.”
“Define safe.”
“Not in a morgue.”
“Ow,” I say again, because he keeps aiming at bone. “Then escort me downstairs.”
“No.”
“How long?”
“Until I say otherwise.”
“Is that contagious? Did you all catch it from him?”
Rafe’s mouth almost moves. “I don’t care about him. I care about the job.”
“And the job is me.”
“The job is keeping the job,” he says. Then, softer: “Which today is you.”
I sit back. The city keeps being alive. The glass keeps being glass. The leash keeps being invisible.
Fine.
If I can’t move my body, I’ll move my name.
I open my laptop with my hands under the table and launch a browser that isn’t supposed to exist on this machine. It does, because I made friends with a janitor of code three years ago and paid him in cash and chocolate to teach me persistence. The window blooms blank, then opens to a page that looks like a recipe blog written by someone with a grudge against adjectives. I type in the comments section:
Looking for saffron. Good price, clean threads.
A reply appears faster than is natural for cooking enthusiasts.
Need the glass jar or the tin?
Tin. Three. Discreet delivery.
Same drop as last time?
No. River changes.
Confirm voice.
I plug in a discreet microphone disguised as a pen cap and lean toward the keyboard. “Juniper,” I say—the contact name I haven’t used in a year. “It’s Mara. I need a new skin.”
Rafe’s phone crackles. He turns away to answer. I type another line.
Where do you want the tin?
There’s a delay. Longer than comfort. I can feel the app thinking, someone tracing the edges of a familiar photograph.
Juniper: You picked a bad day to be rare.
Me: I was always rare
Juniper: 24 hours. You’ll get two names. One for travel, one for sleep.
Me: price?
Juniper: a truth. you owe me one. bring it when the river is loud.
The back of my neck prickles. Juniper never asks for poetry. Juniper asks for numbers.
Me: who is this?
Juniper: friend. check your old locker at the pool. third tile from the left.
Cold drives its thumb under my ribs. Poppy and I used to swim three mornings a week at the Y on Fulton; we kept an extra key behind the third tile when we were twenty-five and stupid enough to think rituals made us safe. No one knew that. Except Juniper. Except Poppy. Except—
“Everything okay?” Rafe asks, pivoting back.
“Yes,” I say, my voice the kind of steady that sweats.
Thistle blinks again.
Poppy: change your phone. now. they’re triangulating app patterns. I just got a ping that made my hair do something illegal.
I slide my phone facedown. My lungs move carefully.
“Ortiz,” a voice barks on his radio. “Need you in Control. Now.”
“Copy,” he replies, and then to me: “Stay here. Don’t touch anything. I’ll be back in five.”
“Take your time,” I say, already touching everything.
The second he’s gone, I yank the lanyard from my neck and shove the badge into my pocket so it stops blinking my location like a lighthouse for men who eat ghosts. I open Thistle, start a new chat, and search a contact I swore I wouldn’t use unless I was bleeding out.
Noor: later, babe. in a meeting.
Me: it’s Mara
The typing bubble becomes a heartbeat.
Noor: you died
Me: apparently not. I need a passport kit. Two. Tonight.
Noor: you don’t ask small
Me: I don’t have time to be small
Noor: I moved cities. New rules. Same price.
Me: I don’t care about your new rules
Noor: someone got brave today. cyber traffic smells like a war. you in it?
Me: I’m the cause of it
Noor: of course you are. send me a dead drop. don’t text again.
I send a location no one knows—an old storage unit I once used to keep my mother’s winter coats because grief made me believe wool could anchor the dead. My hands shake when I hit send. Not because I’m afraid of Noor. Because I’m defying Cyrus the way you defy weather: privately, violently, and with all your teeth.
The door hisses. I shove the phone into my jacket and paste boredom on my face like foundation. Rafe returns with a frown that would make elevators climb out of spite.
“Change of plan,” he says. “We’re tightening another ring. Your access points are restricted to this floor and the staff wing until further notice.”
“You mean I can’t pee unless you supervise?”
“I mean you can pee on this floor,” he says, unruffled. “Don’t make me regret not being specific.”
“Too late.”
He doesn’t smile. I don’t either. We stand in a glass room with a view of a river that refuses to stop and pretend we are not animals in adjacent cages.
Back at my pod, Tess leans in so close our hair almost argues. “Rumor says an army of nerds just tried to open our servers like a can of beans. Also rumor says you get a security guard now. Do I get one if I act mysterious?”
“Acting requires intent,” I say. “You’re pure chaos.”
She beams. Then lowers her voice. “Want me to smuggle you a croissant? Or a hacksaw?”
“A spine would be nice,” I say. “But I’ll settle for the croissant.”
She disappears to steal pastry. Pri pops her head over the partition. “Why is Ortiz circling you like you’re a crime scene?”
“Because I’m a masterpiece,” I say.
“Obviously,” Pri replies, winking.
I open a blank note and start building a list: things I can carry if I have to run fast, places to sleep where cameras forget to look, names I can borrow until my own is safe enough to wear again. Poppy would yell. Cyrus would command. Rafe would shadow. None of that changes the math: If they can find your face, they can end your story.
The badge throbs in my pocket like a pulse that isn’t mine.
Tess returns with a croissant and the kind of look you give a person you love when you’re telling yourself you don’t. “Don’t do anything reckless,” she says, handing me butter and sin. “At least take carbs with you.”
“Yes, Mom,” I say, and tuck the pastry into my bag like it’s a spell.
That night, after Rafe delivers me to the staff wing like a parcel and Maeve rolls her eyes at the escort but says nothing because she knows war when she smells it, I lock my door, pull the shades, and crouch with my back against the tub like the old days. The burner phone Poppy gave me after the gala clicks awake in my palm. Two bars. One promise.
Me (to Noor): midnight. gate 17. bring the tin.
The message flickers out into the dark, a small thing with teeth.
I don’t know—can’t know—that Noor moved apartments last month; that she set her forwarding rules to keep old clients at arm’s length; that her new landlord’s son runs a side hustle that looks like tech support and smells like extortion.
I don’t know—can’t know—that the message didn’t land in Noor’s lap at all.
That contact is already compromised—her message has been rerouted straight to Beck Cross.