The ribbon parts with a whisper that feels practiced on other wrists. I let the velvet box breathe open in the elevator’s hush and look delighted enough to sell a billboard. The bracelet inside flashes a shy pulse, champagne-gold over black ceramic, light winking like it already knows my rhythms. I slip it onto my wrist and make a pleased sound for the camera in the ceiling, for the footman still in earshot, for any algorithm grading gratitude.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, because performance buys me privacy later. The clasp clicks, clean as a trigger in a well-oiled room. I turn a fraction to “admire the finish,” plant my thumbnail under the micro-screw at the hinge, and work it loose with the familiarity of a locksmith’s daughter. When it lifts, cold and small as a seed, I cough into my fist and tuck the screw under my tongue. Tastes metallic, like the day I learned to pick cuffs behind a police station.
The elevator opens on the algae-lit lobby, green glow swaddling glass in the kind of health you can rent by the hour. I wave at the receptionist, let the bracelet kiss the reader paddle—everybody loves onboarding—and watch the desk light go from blue to a satisfied white. The tide clock reflected in the revolving door smiles three minutes ahead, a smug proctor I want to fail on purpose.
“You’ll get used to it,” the receptionist chirps. “It learns you.”
“We all do,” I say. Outside, iodine wind cuts through my dress like an accurate insult. Distant drones thrum—cicadas with propellers—keeping the city’s metronome. I spit the screw into my palm behind my phone, slide it into the case groove where I hide single-use blades and single-use lies, and head toward the arches where the cameras nap.
June’s van waits under the concrete ribcage, warm light fogging the windows. The barrier above roars faintly with the ocean’s impatience, a stadium’s crowd holding its breath. I knock twice, pause, then once—our tiny doorbell invented in a storm.
“Bring me something nice?” June calls as she opens up, hair in a loop, soldering iron already hot enough to scent the air with flux and expectation.
“A friendship bracelet,” I say, stepping in. The van smells like coffee, sea salt, and burnt resin—the perfume of our evenings. Rain freckles the open door, cold on the back of my neck where the Spire’s climate control left a fake winter.
I lay the velvet box in the pool of light. June whistles. “Corporate loves a storybook.”
“Corporate loves a leash that looks like lace.” I hold out my wrist. The ceramic is warmer now, a polite animal adjusting to a new handler. “I faked the squeal. I kept a screw.”
June lifts a magnifier and grins into it. “You’re my favorite magpie.” She tilts my hand, fingernail tapping the seam. “Feel that buzz earlier?”
“Twice,” I say. “Once in the elevator when nobody spoke, once at the revolving door when I looked at the algae wall too long.”
“Pavlov, but make it couture.” She presses her thumb to the clasp, breathes out on the ceramic, and the condensation halos the join. “Exhale gets you everywhere. Okay, hold steady.”
The soldering iron kisses the hinge and the bracelet answers with a delicate complaint through my bones. I don’t flinch. June slides a spudger thin as a prayer into the softened seam and works it open, slow as truth. When the cap lifts, she hums at the sight: a stack of boards thinner than foil, a battery the size of a raindrop, a loop of metal like a saint’s halo if saints had NDAs.
“Antenna,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “And friends.” She points with the iron’s cool end—a row of microcaps painted like candy, a quartz fleck that probably sings time, a dot of epoxy hiding a heartbeat. “There’s the BLE, there’s the UWB. And… hello, inductive coil. That’s how it charges on your skin without asking permission.”
The bracelet trembles against my wrist, a sub-heard murmur like a cat testing whether it’s allowed on the counter. “You feel that?” I ask.
“It’s handshaking,” June says. “Saying, ‘I made a new friend.’” She opens a drawer with her knee and pulls out a flexible mat antenna, a USB sniffer, a coil of coax that remembers better days. “Let’s crash the party.”
She slides the cap all the way off and I watch the micro-antenna ride up with the casing like a gull lifting into wind. The iron returns, this time to a solder point near the coil; she lets the heat blush the joint without fully melting it, plucks up the wire with tweezers, and the antenna separates from its bed. The smell of flux is sweet and chemical; my tongue catalogs it next to gun oil and citrus and whatever Elias’s soap tries to be.
“Don’t kill it,” I say. “Yet.”
“I’ll just lift the lid and look at the soup,” she answers. “I won’t spill it.” She drags jumper leads from the board to her sniffer, clicks her screen awake, and the van’s monitor populates with glyphs that used to feel like magic before grief taught me how to read. “Okay,” she murmurs. “Broadcasting on BLE, chirps every one second, advertising UUIDs I’d only expect on a health band if the health band cared about your employer’s mood.”
“Define mood.”
“Pressure. Distance. Laughable claims about wellness.” Her grin tilts. “And hey—UWB pings when a certain device is nearby. Guess the make.”
I don’t say his name out loud. I don’t have to. The line on her screen thickens when I lean forward, then thins when I lean back, as if the bracelet knows where my breath belongs.
“Keyed to him,” I say. “Proximity recorder.”
“Yep.” June taps keys and spools the raw into a map overlay she wrote for a hospital that forgot who owned its data. “Give me your last forty-eight.”
I hand her my phone. She doesn’t need it for the map, but it feeds her timestamps: stairs climbed, doors that watched me pass, the blind spaces under the arches where I steal minutes from recorded time. She nods at the screw I lodged into the phone’s case. “You keep souvenirs like a thief in a fairy tale.”
“I like proof,” I say. “It likes me back.”
The monitor blooms. My days unfurl as heat—amber on the waterfront, orange where I lingered at the fish market’s new grease trap, a red arterial glare where the panic-shaft swallowed us and spit us out ahead of sirens. The boardroom wing is pale yellow; the lobby is a sprig of mint in their color scheme, soothing us into bad decisions. Two nodes pulse brighter than the rest, paired beats—his office and his private lab—where my bracelet’s signal fattened into crimson. June zooms and the crimson resolves into a flock of smaller points, beads along a path. Each spike climbs when he and I close by instinct: shoulder-to-shoulder at the elevator, a shared laugh that didn’t feel like a tactic, me catching his wrist when a door tried to bite.
“This is intimacy as telemetry,” I say softly. The words make my jaw hard.
“And closeness as compliance,” she replies. Her tone is kind; our cruelty is for the system, not each other. “The bracelet writes your heat next to his presence. Somebody upstairs gets a chart that says when you’re near. Somebody downstairs gets a bonus if that line stays high.”
“Someone inside Vance is watching who I’ve become,” I say. “And whether I stay it.”
The van’s coils hum, sympathetic, or that’s just the wind shouldering the arches. Outside, a runner’s shoes slap wet pavement—two arcs, a turn, gone. Harbor Eleven’s public park pretending to be a fortress, again. I pull my wrist free from the bracelet, feeling the brief stick of adhesive compounds and skin chemistry. I set the ceramic on the bench like a sleeping thing.
“You want me to smash it,” June says, eyes on me, not the board.
“Not yet.” I point to the map. “Log shows blind zones are shrinking. The arches used to be safe. Look—” I trace where my paths used to fade; now faint dots fill the gaps. “They’re triangulating with drones.”
June zooms, swears beautifully. “New waveform in the past twelve hours. Somebody dialed up the UWB power. That eats battery unless someone wants better indoor position.”
“Like right after a fire,” I say. Smoke taste lives in my hair; it joins the catalog of things I can’t shampoo away. “They don’t want me slipping the way I did. They want a leash with teeth.”
“We can bite back.” June’s thumb dances. “I can spoof the proximity, make it look like you’re cuddling a coat rack in HR. Or glued to a janitor cart. Or sitting on the Palmetto House concierge’s lap.”
“Tempting,” I say, and I mean it. The map throbs with our bad options. “But if we flood it with noise, they might yank me into a friendly interrogation. If we go dark, they’ll panic. If we do nothing, they learn me day by day until I’m a pattern they own.”
June lifts the micro-antenna with tweezers, delicate as a surgeon with a filament nerve. The solder joint sighs and releases cable; she floats the wire to a clamp. “We can cut the broadcast, leave the local logging. Looks like it hoards data until it meets the right handshake—hello, elevator, hello, reader paddle. If we starve the BLE of its outbound, we can trick their dashboards into lag while we rewrite the story.”
“Do it,” I say. The word tastes like a command I’m finally allowed to give after a day of pretending to be grateful.
She nods, tin-soldiers her focus, and touches iron to a single gleaming point. The station’s fan spins up, carrying resin sweetness through the van until it’s a fog I could live in. The solder wicks, the joint breaks, and the micro-antenna rises like a severed whisker. The bracelet stops humming. Silence arrives in my bones, honest as a cliff.
“There,” June says. “Outbound’s a dead star. We can reattach it with a heartbeat if we need to.”
“What about local?” I ask.
She taps; the sniffer still hears mites of life—accelerometer jitter, heat variance when I breathe in its face, a hungry little log swallowing details for later. “Memory’s rolling. When it docks to a reader, it’ll want to burst. We can corrupt the burst, or ride it.”
I lean closer and the screen’s light turns my skin to paper. “Ride it,” I decide. “Feed it something useful. I want them to think I spend my nights in places that make their models complacent.”
“Like?” Her tone is threadbare casual—the way she asks when she knows my answers will bruise us both.
“Like by his side in public rooms and nowhere near him where it matters.” I glance at the crimson flock around his lab. “Give them dates in lobbies, arguments in elevators, doors that don’t bite. Hide the arches and the van beneath something boring.”
“Already patching.” She drags a local overlay over the blind zone and paints it with a nondrunk loop of steps around the seawall’s benches. “Jogger’s path,” she says, satisfied. “You love cardio.”
“I love not being owned.” I breathe through my teeth, let my shoulders loosen one vertebra at a time. “Who inside Vance pulls this feed?”
June doesn’t answer in words; she routes the UWB’s handshake to a DNS trick she keeps for jealous machines. Labels bloom in a corner of the screen—aliases, subnets, a silly internal name for serious surveillance. Three hops later, the requests route through a suite on the fortieth floor. A familiar tag sticks to the request like perfume.
“Comms,” I say. “PR.”
“And Security,” she adds, tapping a second tail. “They mirrored the stream to their own sandbox yesterday. After the fire.”
“Mother’s two hands,” I say. The van feels smaller, the arches wider. Outside, laughter skids off the barrier—late-night teenagers trying out adulthood in a windbreak. I watch their shadows slip along concrete. “And the concierge?”
“Same subnet family,” June says. “Different user agent, mobile, sometimes desktop. The number you pulled from the boardroom gloss is a frequent flyer.”
I roll that into my throat like a pill I can’t swallow. “So they’re not just watching me. They’re measuring me against him.”
June zooms the heatmap into a graph that would look beautiful on a quarterly deck if it weren’t so ugly. Peaks label themselves with times—my hand on his sleeve when he flinched from a congested doorway, his palm to my back when the fire door stuck, my breath closer to his laugh than a bodyguard’s manual considers professional. The line makes meaning from tenderness and calls it a KPI.
“Closeness destroys cover,” I say, quiet. “But it also keeps him alive.”
“We game it,” June says. “We give them closeness on camera and separate gravity under the arches. We pace the line so they think they’re winning.”
“Until we are,” I say.
The bracelet, gutted and pretty, lies between us like a ring that tells the wrong story. The van’s monitor hiccups—a new notification sliding into the corner like a snake under a door. June’s eyebrows hitch.
“Tamper alert?” I ask.
She flicks a key. The alert expands: a heartbeat marker the bracelet sent as the solder joint cooled—a last chirp, or a built-in narc. The packet rode the airwaves before our clamp fully cut. Timestamp: now. Destination: same fortieth floor, then a mirror out to two mobiles. One of them belongs to a device with a MAC address that wears the Palmetto House’s smell like cologne.
“They know you opened the present,” June says softly.
I look down at the ceramic curve and think of crystal bells and velvet boxes and women who hold charity like a leash. The arches collect a new sound—a footfall that doesn’t belong to teenagers or runners. Slower. Heavier. Not trying to be quiet, just early.
The live map blips. A dot separate from my history blooms at the edge—new, purposeful. June zooms and it’s a location pinched between two blind CCTV ellipses leading straight toward our van, moving with the confidence of someone who got a ping and trusts it.
“How long?” I ask.
“Ninety seconds if they keep that pace,” June says. She is already tidying, laying the micro-antenna back where it can reattach fast, spooling wires into order so chaos looks like a choice. She tosses me a hoodie that smells like solder and soap. “You want to be found, or do we ghost?”
I slide the hoodie on, peel my hair up, and feel the ash come loose like old grief. “If I let them catch me, they learn which door to knock next. If I run, they learn where I value.”
Outside, drone rotors tick higher, curious. The tide clock in the marina kiosk across the park winks three minutes fast, happy to be wrong while everyone plans around it. I lift the bracelet and press its cold back to my wrist without fastening it, feeling the not-quite weight of what I’m supposed to be.
“Open the rear,” I say. “I’ll step out into the wind and wave, like a girl grateful for a gift. You stay low. If they bring a smile, I’ll give them a story. If they bring a hand, you cut power to the park cameras and we jog.”
June nods and flashes me a coin of gold—a spare screw that matches the one I stole. “For luck,” she says.
“For leverage,” I answer, palming it, and drop to the ground. The iodine air bites my tongue. The arches throw my shadow tall and harmless. A figure rounds the concrete pillar, phone in one hand, welcome-smile zipped on like a uniform.
“Ms. Quill?” they call, warm like scripted tea. “Quick check-in on your onboarding experience.”
The bracelet buzzes once in my palm, eager to report. I smile back like a door I might close or open, and I ask myself the only question that matters before anyone else asks it: do I move toward the watcher and sell them a version of me they want to buy—or do I keep the real me three minutes ahead where their clocks don’t reach?