Wind grabbed the words before I spoke them and salted them down. I tasted iodine and garden grit and the metallic tang of the parapet when I touched it with my knuckles to ground my pulse. The rooftop garden glowed with algae panels tuned to calm executives; the light made my skin look like forgiveness I hadn’t earned.
“We rehearse on three,” I said. “We give them the public rupture and the private route.”
Elias nodded, hood up against the sting, eyes on mine, not on the skyline that kept begging for attention. Below us, the marina’s tide clock burned three minutes fast, telling everyone a story they were happy to believe.
“You want me angry,” he said, voice low. “Or hurt?”
“Start with angry,” I said. “They track patterns, not feelings. Anger prints bigger.”
We had the choreography: step into the camera’s cone, break the frame, let words be knives dull enough to leave believable bruises. I breathed in the city’s fried batter, diesel breath, the sweetness of a rooftop herb bed designed to make wealthy guilt taste like basil. Drone rotors thrummed like anxious cicadas at the edge of hearing.
“Ready,” I said, and I walked into the main camera’s eye.
“You don’t get to manage me,” I threw, volume up for the lens, cadence snapped. “You don’t get to make me your conscience when you’ve never earned my trust.”
He opened his mouth, but the second half of my line was already loaded and I fired it because spectacle needs a spark: “Tell me why you offered my sister a job and then let her walk into a machine that eats people.”
He flinched. Not the light, not the wind. He flinched in the small muscles near his mouth, the place where I had seen softness once and told myself it was a tactical asset. He went white, then heat flushed high across his cheekbones, and for a second his hood lifted the way it had under the arches when he decided to be brave with me. This was not rehearsal; this was blood drawn by blunt force.
“Mara,” he said, and he said my name like he had set it on a shelf and watched me knock it off. “Don’t use her to stage this.”
I should have pivoted, softened the blow, switched scripts. The camera light blinked red in the corner of my eye, hungry. I kept the line rolling, trying to fold apology into fury and failing. “If you wanted trust,” I said, “you should have told me all the meetings with her, not just the ones HR sanctioned.”
“I did,” he said, hands out, fingers opening and closing like he was catching proofs and missing. “I gave you the thing that can end me. What else do you want—”
“A world where I don’t have to run recon on the person I’m supposed to protect,” I cut in. That was too true, and the truth has an accent you can’t fake.
He stared. The algae light painted him saintly and sick. I watched the tremor in his wrist and knew the adrenaline would write its own entry in the building’s biometrics. He took a step back into the camera’s clean view, the good angle, the one PR had designed for proposal shots. We were ruining architecture with honesty.
“Fine,” he said, louder, finding the performance because pain needs cover. “Then go. Go do your job for whoever signs your contract next. There are a hundred harbor princes happy to hire a woman who bites.”
“There aren’t a hundred harbor princes,” I said, and the bitter in my mouth tasted like Dockyard K coffee. “There are three, and two of them think resilience festivals are a personality.”
The wind shoved at us. The city listened. Somewhere to our left, a security kiosk’s tiny icon winked, switching angles to catch my profile. I drifted two steps, enough to make the camera compensate and reveal what lived behind its cone. My pulse counted: one, two—
A shape moved on the lower terrace—a man in company gray with a gimbal on his shoulder and earbuds in. Tail One. He shifted to our ten o’clock to catch Elias’s side and my expression in the same frame.
Tail Two, the woman with an influencer’s gait and a tote bag full of sensors, took the opposite rail, pretending to shoot the skyline, phone angled to the reflection to steal us twice. They were Vance PR, overly perfumed with legal prophylaxis and good intentions, and they ate the fight like it was clean media calories.
“Eyes,” I said, not to Elias but just above his shoulder, so he’d know where to put his gaze if this had been real. He followed, obedient to a choreography that had just turned into triage. The two tails had repositioned, just like we’d planned, and their triangulation left a blind seam that ran straight to a maintenance hatch.
A second team slid through it: three figures in work blues, backs bent in the way of people paid hourly and punished for posture. They didn’t look at us; they never do when they’re professionals. They moved behind planters, past the herb bed that taught guilt to smell like basil, and one brushed a hand against the service mast like it was a friend that remembered favors.
“Do you see them?” I asked, barely moving my lips.
“No,” he said. “And that’s the point.”
“Good,” I said, and I wanted to reach for his hand, to press three small squeezes into skin the cameras wouldn’t understand. I kept my hands where the story wanted them: crossed, defensive, ready to strike.
“You always choose the mission over me,” he said, and even if that was a line, it landed like gravity.
“I choose the mission to keep you whole,” I said. “Those aren’t opposite choices until someone decides to make them.”
A drone buzz crept closer, a higher pitch, unfamiliar. I scanned the lip of the roof and found a maintenance unit hovering near the service mast, a modest drum of matte composite with scuffed prop guards and a sticker that said CITY ASSET in the bureaucrat font that never once comforted a single citizen. Something gleamed at its belly where no city tech belonged: a third camera eye, not municipal, not ours.
“Heads-up,” I said. “Third camera, maintenance drone, mast height.”
He didn’t look; he knew better. “Sable?”
“No,” I said, watching the way the camera panned—patient, curious, not greedy. “And not PR.”
I tasted copper. The camera lens had a micro-iris that breathed rather than clicked, a luxury purchase with provenance in a catalog that sold to tabloids, rivals, and private security with flexible ethics. The drone’s ID ping kissed my phone with a handshake it shouldn’t have known, then withdrew before I could hold it. Whoever flew it had done this before.
“We keep the show,” I said, voice bright and brittle. “Give them what they came for.”
“You want a break-up,” he said, too quiet for the drone, perfect for my spine. “I can give you an ending.”
“Don’t,” I said, and the word cost. “Don’t give me anything you can’t take back.”
I walked away from him, toward the camera cone, then snapped back with a pivot that made my boot scuff spark against the stone. “You hid meetings,” I said, louder, because a lie wrapped around a small truth looks like sincerity on camera. “You hid choices. You hide behind ethics like they’re a scaffold and not a mask.”
He inhaled carefully, like he was measuring his lungs for damage. “You weaponize kindness,” he said, and the rotors cheered because they loved cruelty phrased clean. “You kiss like a lockpick.”
I deserved that. The algae light hummed. The garden smelled of rosemary and regret. The wind tasted like a storm rehearsing speeches.
Below us, the hurricane barrier’s arches cut the dark water into tame slabs, a park by day and a map of blind zones by night. I counted the beat between Tail One’s angle change and Tail Two’s pivot; the seam widened, the second team slid again, and the maintenance drone drifted to keep them in peripheral suspicion.
The new camera didn’t care about our performance; it cared about the seam. Whoever hired it wanted operations, not scandal. That was a different hunger, one that ate quietly and left bones in neat stacks.
“We need a stronger ending,” I said, hating the practicality of the sentence. “Something that justifies your rapid exit down the B stair, not the A elevator.”
“Tell me what to say,” he said, and I heard the tired behind it, the tired I had built with my hands.
“Tell me you never asked me to care,” I said. “Make it ugly.”
He took a beat, and in that beat I watched the drone irises breathe again, watched its micro-antenna pivot for a handshake with a receiver outside the Spire’s whitelist. I caught the frequency in my earbud—an offset variant used by a tabloid-stringer network and two off-shore security contractors who had learned their manners badly. The signature narrowed when the drone drew a lazy circle over the mast.
“I never asked you to care,” he said, and he didn’t pretend. He said it with the weight of someone who knows the worst part is that he did ask, in silences and in shots of heat on rooftops where the air smelled like sea and compromise.
The words hit my sternum and bounced to my throat, where they lodged. The camera feasted. Tail One nodded to himself, calculating where to sell this later if he needed collateral. Tail Two swallowed and widened her stance to get steadier footage. I stared at Elias long enough to write it into the logs: how the hood shadow cut his eyes, how his mouth worked around the sharp corners of everything we weren’t saying.
“Great,” I said, and my voice didn’t crack. “Then we’re done.”
He turned, precisely the way we had planned, and walked toward the B stairwell where the blind wedge would hide his exit. The second team adjusted; one peeled off, not after him, but toward the service mast. I watched the glance they tossed the drone—respectful, wary, collaborative. Not Sable’s posture. Not PR’s choreo. New hands.
“I see you,” I whispered to the drone. It dipped, almost like it nodded, and my ear filled with a soft blip as the frequency hopped to avoid the handshake I tried to force. I needed three more seconds; the tide clock below gave me none.
“Mara,” Elias said. He had stopped at the door he was supposed to take. His hand hovered over the bar like a man on a cliff deciding whether the rocks below counted as landing or loss. “Do I go?”
The question hit the fault line I had opened in him and widened it. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. I had used both like tools; now I felt the handle break in my palm.
“Go,” I said, because the mission said so. “And don’t look back.”
He nodded once—obedience or surrender, I couldn’t tell—and pushed through. The second team melted again, adjusting to a gap I was no longer sure I had designed. Tail One muttered something into his sleeve. Tail Two texted with one hand and steadied her shot with the other, ritual fluent.
I stepped toward the maintenance drone, into the little pool of air its rotors churned. “You’re not city,” I said, soft. “You’re not ours. Who owns your hunger?”
The iris tightened, a cat eye in a storm. My phone pulsed with a new ping from a relay registered to a gossip outlet with defense donors—a familiar stink from a job I shouldn’t have taken three years ago. A tag attached itself to the drone’s handshake like barnacle: LEVERAGE_FEED—LIVE.
“And there you are,” I said. “Third actor.”
The drone lifted, no hurry, and slid toward the edge where the arches made the horizon look honest. I had a line to throw at it, a hook I could sink into the frequency with a brute-force wedge that would fry the uplink and maybe the drone. The cost: noise, security responses, headlines written by people who mistake smoke for story.
My earbud gave me June’s old advice without her voice: if you kill their camera, you tell them they’re over the target. If you let it watch, you learn what it wants.
I stood in the algae light and the basil breath and the wind that smelled like storm ambitions, and I watched Elias disappear down the stair I’d chosen for him with words I’d chosen to hurt him. The second team’s shadow slipped where shadows shouldn’t be. The drone cleared the parapet and headed toward the hurricane barrier, where the arches kept their secrets and the cameras slept.
I lifted my hand, palm open, to the maintenance mast, the way I would to a skittish animal. “Follow,” I whispered to the code riding my phone. “But don’t bite.”
The frequency echoed once, coy. The drone blinked its belly eye at me like a dare and kept going.
I turned back to the empty space where Elias had stood. The camera still watched me because pain plays better than strategy. I let my face be unreadable and my hands be useless for a full count of five, then I walked toward the stairwell spill of warm light that didn’t reach me.
At the threshold, I stopped. I could chase the new actor’s signal now and maybe learn who wanted our seam more than our scandal. Or I could go after Elias and try to patch the cut I’d made before it started to bleed into choices we couldn’t afford.
The tide clock winked its lie at me from below. The drones hummed like a chorus that had practiced this moment for weeks. I tightened my fingers around the cold bar of the door and asked the question the city never answers: which loss buys the other one time?