Chapter 83 The drag—Matt

Chapter 83 The drag—Matt

I was sitting in my room going through security schematics I wasn't supposed to have access to when Sera called.

That was the thing about being a hacker. You always had access to things you weren't supposed to have access to.

Suddenly, my eye–ring lit up. I answered the call and Sera's face filled the screen and she was smiling, which was already suspicious because Sera never smiled.

"Matt," she said.

"Sera."

"How are you holding up?"

I looked at the screen for a moment. In a few months of working with Sera I could count on one hand the number of times she'd asked how I was holding up. I'd have fingers left over.

"Fine I guess," I said carefully.

"You've been through a lot recently," she said. "Ganymide, the protests. Da Vinci." A pause. "Sable..."

There it was. She knew exactly which door to knock on.

"I'm fine," I said again.

"You don't have to be fine, Matt." Her voice dropped slightly, softer than I'd ever heard it. "You've given everything to this organization. More than most people ever do. That deserves to be acknowledged."

I should have said thank you and ended the call but I didn't.

She came to my room an hour later.

Sera in a room that wasn't an office or a briefing space felt like seeing a word spelled wrong. Everything about her was calibrated for control and she brought that calibration with her everywhere she went, but standing in my doorway in something other than her usual jacket she looked a little more human.

She put her hand against my jaw and I let her.

She was warm in a way I hadn't expected.

All I can say was she sat on top of me while I lay down in bed and we fucked like there was no tomorrow. I held my hands on her waste while she bounced quicker and quicker. We were going at incredible speed. Breathing heavily as we did it.

Afterward she lay beside me looking at the ceiling, her breathing settled, and I stared at the same ceiling thinking about absolutely nothing useful.

"Well," I said. "Maybe we should do that more often. You seem considerably kinder after sex."

She sat up.

"Shut up, Matt."

"Yes ma'am!"

She was already reaching for her jacket.

I watched her pull herself back together in about forty five seconds flat, every trace of the last hour disappearing behind the version of Sera that ran operations and made people disappear. It was genuinely impressive in a deeply unsettling way.

"I need you to do something," she said.

"Of course you do."

She looked at me. "Rusk is being held in Hulon. Grandisfield's people have him in a secure facility near the outer district. I need him out."

"And you're asking me because?"

"Because you're the best I have and because Da Vinci just burned everything down on live television and I'm running low on people I can actually trust right now." She paused. "And because I just gave you something I don't give anyone."

I sat up. "Was that a manipulation tactic or a genuine moment of vulnerability."

"Does it matter?"

Honestly, I wasn't sure it did.,,

"Send me the facility schematics," I said.

"Already done," she said. "Matt." She stopped at the door. "Bring him back. Rusk is important to what comes next."

She left without explaining what that meant, which was very on brand for her.

Hulon looked worse than the last time I'd been through it, the streets still carrying the weight of the Breathless Dome in the way people walked and the way they didn't make eye contact.

I took three different transits to get there, switching lines twice for no reason except that I'd learned from Da Vinci that the most dangerous thing you could do was move in a straight line when people might be watching.

I hated that I'd learned that from him. I hate Da Vinci!

The facility sat in the outer district behind a wall of smooth paneling that looked like an administrative building from the outside, which was exactly the point. Two guards were at the main entrance doing a convincing impression of maintenance workers.

I found a utility access panel around the eastern side and pulled up the facility's network on my wrist unit.

Grandisfield's people ran good security. Better than most. Three separate encryption layers on the door systems, biometric locks on the interior cells, It was somewhat normal for security.

I'd cracked worse sitting in a transit with nothing but time and bad coffee.

The first layer took four minutes. I found a maintenance override protocol buried in the secondary system. I slipped through it like it had been left open for me.

The second layer was trickier, a rolling cipher that updated every ninety seconds. I watched it cycle three times before I found the pattern.

The third layer was biometric, which should have been the hard part.

The interior door finally clicked open and I went in.

The corridor inside ran dim and narrow, emergency lighting only. Four cells along the left wall, three of them empty. Rusk sat in the fourth one.

Bruising along one side of his jaw. Shirt torn at the shoulder. Sitting with his back straight against the wall like he was waiting for a meeting rather than locked in a cell.

He looked up when I reached the door.

"Matt," he said.

"Don't make this weird," I said, and pulled up the cell lock on my wrist unit.

It took forty seconds. I was rusty on the cell-specific systems.

Suddenly, I heard footsteps in the corridor behind me. I pressed myself against the wall beside the cell door, pulling the wrist unit against my chest to kill the screen glow, and didn't breathe.

Two guards came around the corner, mid-conversation, one of them holding a tablet and pointing at something on it while the other nodded. They walked slowly.

They were going to walk directly past me. Eight feet away. Six.

The one with the tablet stopped and held it up toward the other one, tapping the screen with one finger, showing him something, both of them looking at it together.

Four feet away now.

I could see the texture of the guard's jacket from where I was standing. Could hear him breathing. Could hear myself not breathing and hoped the difference wasn't audible.

The guard with the tablet said something I couldn't make out and the other one laughed, and they kept walking past me around the far corner before they were gone.

I let out a breath so slow it barely made a sound and went back to the lock. Thirty seconds later the cell door slid open.

Rusk stood up and walked out into the corridor.

"This way," I said.

We came out through the utility access on the eastern side and kept moving without running, because running drew attention and we'd had enough attention for one week.

The transit platform three blocks over was half empty at this hour, a handful of workers and nobody who looked like they were paying attention to two men who'd just walked out of a wall.

We got on the first car heading away from the outer district.

Rusk reached into his jacket and pulled out a cigarette that I had no idea where he'd been hiding given that he'd just come out of a cell, and lit it.

The smell hit me immediately as I looked at him sitting there in the transit seat, bruised and dirty, drawing on that cigarette like the last few hours hadn't happened.

"I hate Da Vinci," I said. "But if he's said one true thing about you, it's that you're a piece of shit." I waved the smoke away from my face. "And that cigarette smells like absolute garbage."

Rusk looked at me sideways and took another long drag.