The Palmetto House doesn’t open its mouth so much as part its lips and expect you to arrive grateful. A valet umbrella shakes ocean off itself at the door; iodine wind ghosts inside and dies against velvet ropes. Lanterns along the drive paint slick stone; the hurricane barrier crouches farther out, its park arches lit the way cities pretend safety is festive. Drone rotors murmur above the trees like shy cicadas; then they stop, repelled by the club’s no-fly perimeter. Money buys silence that tastes like upholstery.
“Phones sleeping,” the attendant says, and the brass bank of Faraday lockers blinks a sleepy constellation. He offers velvet trays for watches, pendants, rings—anything with a pulse. Elias unclips his smartband and sets it down like a truce.
I hand over my decoy phone, the one that breathes but never speaks, and my compact—empty twin, not the reader June wired. I keep my smile tender and bored, then let the silk lining of my clutch kiss my fingers. The wafer-thin master key rides the seam, transparent as a rumor, warm from my body. The attendant doesn’t look at my hands; he watches Elias the way a prospector watches a vein.
“Don’t worry,” I tell the man, low. “We’re here for the music.”
“And the lantern gin,” Elias adds, humoring the club’s signature drink. His tie is exactly wrong again by a thumb-width. I fix it with the absent intimacy Palmetto House expects from couples who date inside NDAs.
We step beneath the stained-glass dome. Algae-lit panes in the atrium throw sea colors over the parquet; the quartet tucks a synth pad into their strings like a secret. The air smells like citrus peel, beeswax, and old wood that remembers arguments. In the hush, every gesture is louder than it intends.
“Eyes?” Elias asks, the word feather-light.
“Everywhere and nowhere,” I say. “Phones sleep; people compensate with their faces.” I nod toward a gallery of polite predators: donors with camera eyes, aides with empty hands, security in tuxedos pretending to be ferns. “We give them something beautiful and let their attention become our smoke.”
He offers his arm with theater that reads sincere. “Dance with your barometer?”
“Clock first,” I say, and tip my chin toward the far wall where a tide clock hangs, gilded and smug, three minutes fast even indoors. “Everyone here plans. No one is ready.”
He follows my gaze to the gardens. Raindrops hiss on the conservatory glass, then slide down and vanish. “Ready now?”
“Ready,” I say, and we drift to the floor.
I let my palm find the back of his shoulder, the place where fabric warms quicker. We rotate slow, a small orbit under the dome. My gaze lazies past faces, counts lenses disguised as art, marks the sconces with their leaping fish in gilt. At the third sconce, on the seam between atrium and corridor, I feel the airflow change where a server vent whispers. A good throat for a relay.
“Left shoulder,” I murmur, telling him the eye at nine o’clock is awake. He relaxes into the turn, giving me a brief slip of shade behind his body. My clutch opens on a breath; the wafer key slides to my fingertips; the relay felt patch rides my thumb like a postage stamp.
I lift my hand to adjust his collar; my wrist brushes the sconce. The adhesive takes, capillaries of copper settling to the plaster. The relay dies to a whisper only a network knows. I tuck the wafer key into the sconce lip, half-in, half-out—retrievable if I need to cut a door’s pulse.
“We’re being watched by everyone not dancing,” he says, smiling for the world.
“Let them,” I say, matching the smile. “Attention is the fog I move in.”
We drift another turn. I catalog doors: one to the library—oak, heavy; one to the gallery—lighter, a lie; a third unmarked, half-hidden behind a potted palm with leaves the size of a confession. The unmarked door breathes cool.
Elias’s breath grazes my temple. “Tell me the plan like it’s a love story.”
“Two acts,” I say, choosing cadence over content. “Act one: we give them a picture. Act two: we borrow a key, kiss a server, and learn who owns the drones that flirt with your windows.”
“You had me at borrow,” he says, eyes amused; then his mouth straightens because he recognizes a face beyond my shoulder. “Sable.”
I pivot with the dance.
Dr. Sable Kincaid floats at the atrium edge, champagne tilted like an instrument she plays for tone. Light eats her silver cuff and throws it back; her dress is the color of rules that don’t apply. She’s speaking to a woman I clock as a board member and a man with the posture of private security. Sable’s mouth makes the shape of patient approval as if the room earned a grade.
Heat marches up my throat, then smooths. “Keep dancing,” I say. “We want to be forgettable.”
“You’re rarely forgettable,” he says, and he means it like a problem and a promise both.
We complete another measured circle. When the quartet swells, I ease off his shoulder and brush the skirt of a woman whose laugh rings too loud. It buys me a step closer to a waiter’s station. The waiter sets down a tray to adjust a napkin; the clip dangling from his belt includes a slim white keycard stamped with the Palmetto crest. My knee nudges the tray’s rim, not enough to spill, enough to tilt his attention. My hand lifts the card with two fingers, a prayer answered by habit.
“Back in ten,” I whisper, and let go of the dance.
The unmarked door expects a keycard. It purrs when it reads the crest and cracks just enough for me to slip through. The corridor holds its breath—cool, humming, carpet that drinks footsteps. Sconces throw honey light. I hear the atrium’s music muffled and feel the building’s other song—HVAC throb, server fans, the hush of secrets queued.
The first room I pass smells of leather and old paper—library. The second smells of flowers with the edges trimmed off—gallery. The third smells like nothing, which is how machines say welcome. I test the wafer key on the panel beside the handle. The red dot shifts to think, then green.
Inside: racks. Black spines and blue LEDs, a spine of cable trays like vertebrae. A small fan tries and fails to make a breeze. I taste ozone and solder in the back of my mouth and hear the faint tick of a tide clock someone installed here out of habit or humor. Three minutes fast.
I slide along the racks and find the switch that gates the guest subnet. The relay I planted should already be flirting with it, but a direct kiss seals the pact. I lift the compact reader June dressed as powder and press it to the metal, feeling rather than hearing the handshake. The reader vibrates once. The error logs blink open like eyes. I don’t pull data; I tag routes—breadcrumbs for June to fetch later when the House sleeps harder.
“Come on,” I whisper. Packets list their innocent destinations—kitchen inventory, climate control—and the less innocent: revenue management, media handling, a “vendor services” VLAN that likes aliasing its own name.
There it is: the drone subnet—MACs in a family I’ve already tasted. It resolves to a registrar name even the board wouldn’t question: Arcady Shore Logistics, LLC. A shell so clean you could eat compliments off it. My reader bounces the chain; the registrar leads to another, then another. The final hop lands on a service retainer: Client: Sable Institute Holdings.
I exhale the quiet laugh that isn’t humor and isn’t surprise. “Got you,” I say to the rack.
The server room door whispers. Air shifts. Voices scrape across the threshold: heels and confidence. I tuck the compact into my bra band and step behind the end rack where the light doesn’t want to go.
Sable’s voice enters first, warm as a scalpel in a sunbeam. “I admire risk-tolerant trials,” she says, and the honey in her tone coats the steel. “Courage in science gets edited out by committees.”
A man murmurs something about liability. Sable makes a soothing sound and continues, conversational as gossip. “We have one loose thread at Dockyard K, then the narrative is complete. People forget noise when the signal rewards them.”
The words hit the space between my ribs where the cut from the drone throbs. A loose thread. My loose thread. Lila’s jacket patch lives under my skin; I feel it twitch.
The board member’s voice sharpens. “The drones?”
“Handled,” Sable says. “A subcontractor with discretion. We’re quite good at compartmentalizing.”
I keep my breath a metronome.
She lingers another beat, then the heels recede and the door clicks. I let the fan noise reclaim the room and slide my palm over the rack face, as if machines could take confession.
“You okay?” Elias’s whisper is a soft wind at the door.
I step out of the dark and into his eyes. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” he counters, then flicks a glance at my empty hands that tells me he knows I am lying to the air. He swallows. “She saw me.”
“Sable?”
He nods. “She said hello like I owed her money.”
“You probably do,” I say, and this time the laugh finds me. “We’re done. I have what we need.”
We ease back into the corridor. Music swells, and chatter drapes the edges. I return the keycard to the waiter’s belt with a bump and an apology that wins me a smile. The relay hums in the wall like a heartbeat under my hand as we pass.
Back in the atrium, we become scenery again: his hand warm at my waist, my mouth shaping nothing words about the mural’s color. The stained glass throws teal and garnet over our faces; we wear them like borrowed morals.
“Tell me,” he says, the syllables barely air.
“Arcady Shore Logistics,” I say. “A shell that belongs to your favorite institute. Their subnet ran the drones we chased off your balcony.”
His jaw flexes. The muscle jumps like a struck wire. The anger isn’t theatrical; it’s contained the way a dam is contained, which is to say: temporarily. “Risk-tolerant,” he repeats, so quiet I feel it on my collarbone more than hear it.
“Don’t give them theater,” I warn. “Give me fifteen minutes and your mother’s attention somewhere else, and we walk out with access that survives your next accident.”
“I can give you that,” he says. He kisses my cheek like the club taught him, brief and camera-ready. His breath smells like citrus and the faint burn of gin. “Thank you,” he adds, which is not wise and not safe and exactly him.
We make for the foyer. The Faraday lockers glow, tiny night-lights for sleeping devices. A house steward peels off the wall where he’s been a shadow too patient. His tuxedo fits like a threat. He recognizes me with the smile of a man paid to greet and to remember.
“Ms. Quill,” he says. He should not know my true name; I filed under an alias. His voice remains smooth enough to skate. “A small thing. I believe you misplaced a master key.”
He lifts his hand. Between fingers gentle as a pianist’s, he holds my wafer, the one I lodged behind the sconce like a wish. Water-condensed light jeweling its edge says he fished it from a damp place. He tips his head toward the corridor I left. “My employer would prefer it back.”
Elias’s fingers tense at my waist, then release. I measure the distance to the door, the lockers, the steward’s center of gravity.
“Which employer?” I ask, letting the question taste like curiosity instead of threat.
The steward smiles with his eyes and not his mouth. “The one who sponsors courage,” he says, and the stained glass throws a shard of sea across his cheekbone as if to mark him. “Dr. Kincaid will see you now—if you’re finished dancing.”