Chapter 25 Someone Was Inside

Chapter 25 Someone Was Inside
POV: Wren

I was through the apartment door before Priya finished the sentence on the phone.
Forty minutes of highway and I had spent none of it on the radio, just the road and the drive and the specific kind of focus that kicked in when something needed to be confirmed before it could be dealt with. Priya was in the hallway when I got in, arms crossed, watching me come through the door with the expression she used when she was scared and had decided that being useful was the better response to it.
"Walk me through it," I said.
We went room by room. Kitchen first, nothing disturbed, the same unwashed mug from this morning still in the sink. Priya's room, door open the way she left it, nothing touched. Bathroom, same. I checked the cabinet under the sink because it was deep enough to hide something small and I was past the point of being embarrassed about checking things like that.
Nothing.
My room last.
The desk was the same. Papers in the same positions, notebook closed the way I left it, pen parallel to the notebook edge the way I always left it. The bottom drawer was closed.
I opened it.
The hard drive was on top of everything, sitting flush against the front of the drawer, cable attached, the other end of the cable running up to the laptop port. The laptop was closed. The hard drive light was off. But the cable was in the port and the drive was positioned at the front of the drawer and I kept it at the back, always at the back, behind the folders, not because it mattered logistically but because back meant an extra second of access time and extra seconds mattered.
Someone had plugged it in, run whatever process they ran, and put it back. Not exactly back. Close to back. Close enough that someone who didn't know their own habits wouldn't notice.
I knew my habits.
I pulled the cable out. Put the drive on the desk. Opened the laptop.
The encryption software showed the last access attempt on the external drive: today, 14:37. Forty-three minutes before Priya called me. The attempt had run for eleven minutes and returned an access denied log because the encryption was set to a key that existed only in an offsite account under a name that was not my name and had never been connected to any device in this apartment.
Eleven minutes of trying and getting nothing.
I sat down on the floor beside the desk because the chair felt too far up and the floor felt like the right place to be for thirty seconds while I ran through everything on that drive. Two years of backups. Every draft, every source note, every version of the developing piece including the legal version and the complete version and the notes from Jamie's emails. All of it encrypted. All of it inaccessible without the key.
They had the drive in their hands for eleven minutes and walked away with nothing.
I got up.
I opened the offsite account on the laptop through a browser with no history, logged in with the credentials that existed nowhere physical, and transferred everything from the encrypted drive to the cloud account in a second layer. Belt and suspenders. If they came back with better tools the drive would give them nothing because by then the drive would have nothing on it.
The transfer took six minutes. When it finished I opened the drive management software and wiped it. Full overwrite, seven passes, the kind that took time and was worth taking time for. I set it running and stood up and looked at Priya in the doorway and she looked back at me and neither of us said anything while the progress bar moved.
Forty percent. Fifty.
She handed me a glass of water. I drank it. Put the glass on the desk.
Seventy percent.
I thought about the badge number Marcus had photographed at breakfast. The press registration number that linked to my full staff profile in the university media system. A staff profile that listed my faculty advisor, my current story registrations, my contact details. My address.
My address.
Eighty-five percent.
They had come here with the address from the badge number and a tool for cracking encrypted drives and eleven minutes of access and they had gotten nothing. That was the only part of this that was working correctly. Everything else, the apartment, the window, the drive sitting plugged into my laptop like a flag, all of that was wrong.
Ninety-five percent.
The wipe finished. The drive was clean. I unplugged it and put it back in the drawer and closed the drawer and stood at the desk and looked at the room and thought about everything that had been in here today that wasn't me and wasn't Priya.
I was very steady doing all of it.
I noticed that I was steady and held onto it because the steadiness was the only thing I had full control over right now and I was not going to let it go.
Priya had been in the doorway the whole time. Not asking questions, not filling the silence, just there, which was the thing about Priya that two years had taught me to rely on without saying I relied on it.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," she said back, which was her version of asking if I was actually okay.
"I'm fine."
She nodded and pushed off the doorframe and then stopped. Looked at the window above my desk. The one that faced the narrow gap between our building and the next one, the one I kept locked because it opened onto a ledge that a person could stand on if they needed to.
She looked at it for a second.
Then she looked at me.
"Wren," she said. Her voice had gone back to the flat careful register from the phone call, the one she used when she had a piece of information she didn't want to deliver wrong. "Your window."
I looked at the window.
The latch was in the unlocked position. Horizontal, not vertical. I locked it every morning without thinking, the same way I locked everything, automatic and absolute.
"It's unlocked," I said.
"From the outside," Priya said. "The latch is turned the wrong way. You can only get it to that position from outside the glass."