The storm spits us out at the curb like it’s done with us. I smell iodine and old pennies and the sweet-copper tang lightning leaves in the nose. Drones hang near the tower entrance—two, maybe three—hovering at head height the way gnats get brave when the wind drops. Their rotors thrum quick, a nervous heartbeat I don’t want near his face.
“They’re early,” I say, stepping ahead to take the door handle. The metal is wet and cold, rain-washed, slick under my palm. The lobby beyond glows with algae-lit panels that breathe teal across the marble, trying to teach the building how to calm down.
“We’re late,” Elias says, breath fogging. His tie has surrendered to the weather, a diagonal slash damp against his shirt. From across the entry, a concierge pretends to polish a bowl of key fobs, eyes cutting to the drones, then back to us.
I tilt my head toward Elias’s left shoulder—our signal for a lens at nine o’clock—and lean in. “Smile for your public,” I murmur, the shape of the words lost against his collarbone.
He starts to answer. I kiss him instead.
I make it look soft and make it be useful. My right hand lifts to his jaw, fingers under the hinge like I’m steadying him; my left slides to the doorframe where the trim doesn’t quite sit flush. I feel for the notch with the edge of my nail. There. A looped wire, black against black. The nearest drone dips, greedy for the shot. I angle my body to give it a canvas—rain in my hair, his lashes wet, two profiles meeting—and with my fingers I hook and yank.
The wire comes free with a tiny elastic snap. The drone jitters, lens adjusting to the sudden shift in contrast as the entry sensor blinks dumb for a breath. I count a beat—one, two—then break the kiss and tuck the wire into my jacket cuff like it’s mine to keep.
“Blue?” he whispers, testing the safe word, not quite on a laugh.
“Green,” I say, because that’s the color the algae panel throws when my pulse steadies. “We’re clear at the door.”
The concierge’s mouth does a shape that could be impressed, or bored, or both. We cross the lobby, our shoes squeaking on stone. I taste rain on my lips and the faint bitterness of his aftershave, citrus made machine-clean. Cameras nested in the soffits blink languidly; the algae wall shifts toward calm, believing.
“June, you up?” I murmur, running my thumb along the edge of my earpiece quick as a scratch.
“I never left,” June says in my ear, voice tinny under drone hum. “Nice kiss choreography. Tell Prince Eligible to breathe slower. The drones just adjusted white balance. I’m seeing packet traffic riding piggyback on their telemetry.”
“Source?” I ask, as the elevator doors slide us into a hush of mint-ozone air.
“Tracing,” she says. “Your wire pop killed a hallway micro. Cute. But the big eyes are still outside. I’ve got hops through a boutique subnet that screams Palmetto House. They’re laundering signal from somewhere with worse manners.”
“Which means the eyes belong to someone who likes their phones asleep in lockers,” I say.
Elias glances at me. His shoulders ride a fraction higher. “You two always talk about people like weather systems?”
“You hire a barometer, you get forecasts,” I say. “Tonight the wind says: don’t wave at cameras.”
The elevator rises with the serene speed money buys. My reflection ghosts next to his in the mirror-polished steel: jacket dark with rain, hair pulled taut, mouth exposing too much truth. He watches me in the reflection, rather than straight on. Smart man; reflections show more if you know where to look.
“I booked a table at Arches,” he says, naming the restaurant under the hurricane barrier where couples lean into blind CCTV zones, pretending they came for bivalves and not privacy. “We can be seen. Then we can not be seen.”
“We’ll do ten minutes of being seen,” I say. “Fifteen if the drones behave. But we sweep your apartment first.”
“You really think they got inside?” he asks, trying and failing to tame his tie.
“I think they tried,” I say, and hook a finger under the knot to set it straight. He goes still at the touch, not flinching, not leaning in either. The algae-lamp glow triggers when the elevator opens and our faces wash in a softer teal. The hallway smells like clean linen and static.
His door unlocks with a soft chime. The apartment opens into a long room split by a credenza, water beyond, windows slick with rain. The city’s hurricane barrier makes a distant rib cage in the gloom. Lanterns swing under the arches where the park will fill after the next storm with resilience parades and inflatable hope. Inside, the air carries rosemary, a hint of coffee gone to cardboard, and the faint plastic tang of new electronics. Music hums low, something with cello, probably curated by a lifestyle AI that thinks the rich sound better with strings.
“Don’t touch anything,” I say, already touching. I slide my hand over the credenza edge, feel for grit where dust should be smooth. A small smear says fingers were here that weren’t his—no ring ridge, too light to be a heavy hand. Desktop: empty. Under the lip: a magnet no bigger than a seed.
“June, walk me through Wi-Fi,” I say.
“On it,” she says, keys clacking soft in my ear. “Your guy’s network just spiked then went shy. See that? Someone’s running a mesh from the balcony to a relay down on the promenade. And that drone cluster? It’s not hobbyist garbage. They’re overpowered for consumer. Ha. Okay. Triangulating… oh, you’re going to love this: packets bounce from the Palmetto House subnet to a node at Dockyard K.”
“Dockyard K?” Elias repeats, frowning. “Why would a society club talk to the piers?”
“Because money shops for muscle where working hands live,” I say. I pull a glove from my pocket, smooth it on, and slide under the console where a tangle of cords lives. One twist, one lift: a secondary power cube someone tried to color-match to the floor. I unplug it and listen to the apartment breathe differently. “You feel that?” I ask.
He blinks. “What?”
“The hum just dropped a tone. I pulled a parasite. June?”
“Yup,” she says. “Invisible guest just lost dinner. I’ve got a micro brownout reporting to—get this—a business account registered by a Palmetto House liaison. Fancy dishware for dirty hands.”
I move to the wall art—four frames on linen: three black-and-white city shots and one watercolor that doesn’t belong, a smear of green light and rain like the painter stood outside the Spire too long. The watercolor hangs a fraction low. I angle my head. The frame’s bottom left corner hosts a shiny that shouldn’t be shiny.
I ease the frame down with two fingers and catch it against my thigh. A pinhole glints from the backing, wired along the frame spine with transparent adhesive, clever and lazy at once. “Hello,” I say, and keep my voice flat for the mic to hear nothing useful. I peel the wire slow, listen for clicks on the line in June’s breathing.
“Hold,” she says. “Let me lock an IP. There. Got it. It’s triangulating clean to Dockyard K, warehouse row. And still bouncing through Palmetto House. Rich people outsourcing their peeping. Classic.”
I cut the wire with my teeth and spit insulation that tastes like petroleum and cheap sugar. I hand the mic to Elias. “Souvenir,” I say.
He turns it over in his palm, mouth tightening when it catches light. “My mother insisted I hire a more ‘discreet’ firm,” he says, voice dry. “They promised this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.”
I look at him. “Which firm?”
He names a security contractor with a good brochure and worse ethics. I’ve worked around them, never with them. Their guards like gloves more than they like thinking.
“She trusts appearances,” he adds. “She thinks your résumé reads… theatrical.”
“My résumé reads alive,” I say. I tuck the watercolor back, now honest. “Pretend less, you live longer.”
“That’s the problem,” he says. He crosses his arms and uncrosses them again, restless. “I almost canceled this. Tonight. The dinner, you. The pretending. It feels like feeding the machine that wants us to sell stories instead of truth.”
I pivot to the kitchen island where an bowl of fruit glistens too evenly. I lift a lemon; it’s waxed within an inch of forgery. “Truth needs a stage as much as lies do,” I say. “Difference is what it costs to stand on it.”
“And what it costs you?” he asks.
I inventory the room with my eyes to buy a second. “Everything,” I say. “Some days. Come on. Balcony next.”
We step through the sliding door. The wind grabs my jacket and shoves; rain needles my scalp. The balcony rail slicks with a skin of water that runs like mercury in the light from the algae panels inside. The city makes its threat-and-promise music—boat horns, drone buzz, tires hissing on wet streets. I keep low, under the sightline a lens would expect, and peek along the rail.
It’s there. Squat, matte, a little hunkered machine with feet like a gull’s folded wrong. Someone painted its casing a friendly gray, like siding. A camera eye stares across the glass, patient and gross.
“Don’t move,” I say. I pull a slim tool from my jacket hem—habit, not magic—a two-pronged extractor I once used to pull staples from embassy drapes. I slide it under the drone’s belly and feel for the power nipple. The machine emits a sleepy chirp.
“June, you seeing this thing?” I ask.
“Seeing three of them,” she says. “Yours is perched. Two are circling the block like hungry kids who spent allowance on sugar.”
“Source still K?”
“Triangulation says yes. They’re piggybacking a mesh that logged into Palmetto House yesterday at 2 a.m. Who uses a club’s subnet at 2 a.m.?”
“People who like rules asleep,” I say. The extractor catches; I twist and the drone shudders. A tiny light pulses amber to red.
“Wait,” Elias says. “If you kill it, doesn’t that tell them—”
“I don’t kill,” I say. “I mimic a battery death after weather interference. See?” I nudge a second toggle hidden behind the power bus, a kindness I learned from a bored engineer who wanted to impress a woman at a pier bar. The drone’s status belly blinks a plaintive blue, then darkens like a sigh. “It’ll report weak juice and curl up. They’ll blame the storm.”
“You make even murder sound gentle,” he says, but the lines around his mouth loosen.
I crouch and slide the unit into a planter that holds a rosemary bush the size of a toddler. My jeans soak through at the knee; cold climbs. “You ready to do the public part?” I ask. “We go downstairs, we let someone see us hold hands. We get the feeds to write a narrative we can ride. Then we exit through the garage, not the main doors, and we take a side street to Arches. The barrier has cameras that nap. We’ll use the arches for a breath.”
“We’ll be seen,” he says. “Then we’ll be not seen.”
“That’s the dance.”
We head back inside. I wipe my palms on my jacket and catch a glimpse of us doubled in the window: two figures trying to look like something simple. He reaches for my hand, then stops, then commits, threading fingers through mine. The contact floods heat up my wrist to my throat, inconvenient and efficient.
“June,” I say, swallowing around the warmth. “We have our dinner. Keep eyes on K. If the operator moves, I want a street, not a guess.”
“Working,” she says. “Oh, and hey—your cufflink cam at the Spire is happy. It watched a lawyer clean his glasses and lie by omission. I’ll gift you snippets later.”
“After oysters,” I say, letting the word be bait for the microphones that survived. “We’re heading to Arches.”
“Copy.”
Elias pauses at the door and touches the edge of the watercolor with a caution that surprises me. He doesn’t straighten it; he just recognizes the weight of what hung inside it. Then he looks at me.
“I did almost cancel,” he says. His voice has no flourish. “Not because of you. Because pretending feels like capitulating to a world that buys the expensive lie and calls it etiquette.”
“Then let’s make the lie ours,” I say. “We weaponize the etiquette.”
“Do you ever get tired of turning everything into a blade?” he asks.
“Every day,” I say. “Then I sharpen.”
He nods once, decision settling in his shoulders like a coat that finally fits. We step into the hall. The elevator gives us back that mint-ozone breath, steady and indifferent. I angle him to the lobby camera’s shallow depth of field and let our hands swing like we’re careless. We aren’t.
At the front, the concierge has found a smile and a napkin he pretends to need. Outside, the drones have repositioned—one near the awning, one brazen over the curb, one angled high, catching us at a flattering height designed to sell faces and swallow context. My scalp prickles. I squeeze his hand once and tip my chin to his left shoulder.
He moves half a step closer in a way that reads as habit. I go up on toes, place my mouth near his ear, whisper, “Now,” and we kiss for the cameras—the kind with a thesis. I rise into it just enough to make the shot, just little enough to keep my head. His hand lands, light, at the back of my neck for balance. Rain medals my lashes. The algae-lit glass behind us paints our skin a calm it hasn’t earned.
June’s voice slips in. “Operator confirmed at Dockyard K, warehouse thirteen, second floor, west windows. Your public’s eating this up. Also? The Palmetto subnet just lit like a bonfire.”
“Let it,” I say against Elias’s mouth. I break and smile like I mean it. “Our ride,” I add, nodding toward a car I called that looks like every other car, boring enough to bounce a lens.
We step into the rain. The air tastes like the sea learning our names. The tide clock over the marina reads three minutes fast; of course it does. We’re always a little closer to impact than we think.
The car door opens. A rotor hiss tightens near my ear like a whisper. Behind us, up on the balcony we just left, the curled drone blinks from fake-sleep to alert, its belly light snapping to a feral white. The tiny machine lifts, shakes water off its wings, and turns its eye toward our backs as if it learned a new trick mid-storm.
“June?” I say, hand on Elias’s shoulder, keeping the smile for anyone still watching. “Why is my dead bird awake?”
“Because somebody just pushed a manual override,” she breathes. “From inside your building.”