The wind finds the seams of the rooftop bar and rattles the glass like a hand testing a cage. The algae facade shivers green, waves sliding over the tower’s skin in patient pulses. Someone decided the city’s resilience looked better with cocktails, so the terrace wears string lights and a jazz trio and the self-congratulatory laughter of people who sponsor courage with other people’s pain.
“You picked the view on purpose,” Elias says, touching the parapet with his knuckles. The river below glints like a slow knife. Far out, the hurricane barrier holds the line, its arches black ribs with amber pools beneath—CCTV domes pointed away to keep the park photogenic. The blind zones lurk like promises.
“Views make people forgive the price of the drink,” I say. “And cameras love a backdrop.”
He studies me through a curl of hair the wind throws across his brow. He’s dressed like a man trying to be less noticed—dark jacket, unremarkable shoes, badge chain tucked like a secret and failing. He doesn’t fidget, but his breath shortens near edges. I file it and offer him the seat that doesn’t face a drop.
“June texted,” he says, lowering his voice to where jazz can’t overhear. “She says your timing yesterday was… elegant.”
“June likes verbs that make us sound like we rehearsed,” I say. “Drink?”
We order low-proof because that’s the city’s fashion when everyone’s NDAs make real secrets flammable. The glasses sweat on contact with the air. The wind tastes of iodine; the algae wall breathes its spa-calm light across our knuckles. Drone rotors thrum far above, cicadas with steel thoraxes.
I glance down at the soft balm on my mouth—the transmitter June built into a compact that looks like a guilty pleasure and isn’t. My body remembers the choreography; my conscience drags a toe along the floor. I set the counts under my tongue: lean, graze, press, hold. Six seconds to handshake. Three to harvest. Two to be greedy. I tell my hands their parts so I don’t have to tell my heart anything at all.
“I’m still thinking about the shaft,” he says, not touching his glass. “How clean the funnel is.”
“We’ll make it filthy,” I say. “Filthy with options.” I tap the railing, measuring arcs between domes and shadows. Under the arches, joggers form silhouettes like notes on the staff of the seawall. The tide clock at the marina glows falsely ahead, three minutes fast, the city’s favorite lie. We live inside it and call it punctuality.
He follows my gaze, then looks back as if he can feel the six minutes I stole for us. “You make me feel like the future is solvable,” he says, the words accidental and therefore true.
I don’t look at his mouth when he says it. I look at the badge chain that flashes silver when the wind lifts his lapel. The chain is short; the badge rests inside the jacket pocket, warm with him. I don’t have to fish. I just have to be exactly what he hired and never what he fears.
“Solvable is a big word,” I say. “I can give you ‘less rigged.’”
“I’ll take it,” he says. He leans in on some micro-shift of music from the trio, and the terrace edits to give us privacy—conversations ratchet louder elsewhere, waiters spin, cameras settle for silhouettes. He is three inches from me and out past them all.
I breathe shallow to keep the transmitter dry. “We should make it public,” I say, watching the nearest drone’s angle. “Let them write it down for us.”
“Make what public?” he asks, equal parts teasing and test.
“This,” I say, and I do it like I’ve been doing it all my life and never once for a reason that could end me.
I tilt first. He meets me, unsure for half a beat, then certain. The balm is cool, then warm when his skin gives. The transmitter hums to life against the badge’s field through his jacket, that animal-fast tick I know in my bones from locks and lies. The kiss itself is soft, deliberate, unhurried by my mission, and that’s the problem—I don’t speed, and the little device uses my sin to shake hands with his credential. My thumb rests at his collar to hide the angle. I count the heartbeat of the city in my mouth.
The ping arrives like a coin striking glass behind my teeth—two quick taps in the balm’s housing, confirmation haptic and smug. I taste citrus and copper, him and guilt. I press for one more second to grab the key material, then I let go exactly like a woman who remembers oxygen.
“Wow,” he says, but it’s not the stupid word you say when you’re impressed. It’s a soft astonishment at the surprise of trust. His breath fogs the corner of his glasses, and his eyes remember to blink.
“Photogenic,” I say to the room, for the drones and the strangers and the story we need. My fingers leave the clasp of his jacket and slip the wafer—the micro-receiver—into the lining of my clutch. It’s smaller than a fortune, bigger than a lie. I feel its warmth like a verdict.
He touches my wrist and doesn’t let go. “You okay?”
“I am good at my job,” I say, which isn’t an answer and never has been.
The jazz brushes a softer rhythm and the algae wall does its calming pulse, the ocean filtered through a billion green cells that want to be believed. Far below, the arches glow, and I can almost sense the blind cones like soft hollows where secrets nap. The terrace laughs at a joke I didn’t hear. Harbor Eleven has its resilience festivals and we have our private rehearsals, and none of it makes the weld bead at the hatch unlaughable.
“I used to watch the barrier from my window,” Elias says after a silence that isn’t empty. “When I was supposed to be coding, I’d time the ferry drones to the tide clock. It’s wrong, you know. Three minutes.”
“I know,” I say.
“I pretended I was the one who knew,” he says, smiling quick. “It felt like a secret I could live inside. Then everything else—” He stops, making a small, embarrassed wave that means the rest of his life.
“You can live inside smaller secrets too,” I say, thinking of keys and kisses and all the ways I weaponize soft things. I pull the clutch against my ribs to feel the wafer, the fresh-born key that opens doors I can’t ask permission for.
“Can I tell you something?” he asks. The wind grabs his hair; he pushes it aside with a distracted hand. He suddenly looks younger and older at once.
“You can,” I say, and I make my posture quiet in case the thing he offers is delicate.
“I feel safer with you than I do with anyone,” he says, looking down at our fingers, not my face. He doesn’t layer it with a smile, doesn’t make it perform. It falls weightless and heavy between us and lands squarely in my chest.
I don’t move for a breath because if I move I will put my hand on his face and tell him something true and ruin us both by accident. I pick up the glass and sip the soft citrus and try to swallow the part of me that wants safety too.
“You are safer,” I say, keeping my voice half a step away from relief. “Because the person trying to funnel you thinks he knows your map. He doesn’t know mine.”
He nods, but in his eyes there’s a thank-you and a question and a grief for a version of life that didn’t require security metrics to feel loved. He doesn’t speak it, and I don’t either, because speaking is a kind of commitment and we’re already committed to too many clocks.
The trio drifts into a moody standard. The terrace fills with the clean click of glassware and the thick whisper of deals. Under the table, my phone ticks a private haptic in my ring finger—June’s silent flag: haul received. I open the clutch, slide my thumb over the wafer’s ridge, and feel the micro-LED pulse twice against my skin before it dies, a fox in a pocket.
I finish my drink and propose a walk. We drift along the parapet track a designer built to suggest intimacy to people who schedule it. The algae facade ripples green on my left cheek; on my right, the river’s breath climbs to lick my ear. The blind CCTV cones under the arches shine like blessing. A drone out over the water pivots its nose and goes patient. The city pretends it’s not watching and I pretend I don’t know how much it is.
“Remember the elevator the first day?” he asks. “When your cover ID almost got you bounced?”
“Unforgettable,” I say.
“I remembered something about an elevator last year,” he says, tone turning careful. “Lila.”
The name is an electric fence I lean on anyway. “Tell me.”
He rests his forearms on the parapet and looks into the water to practice telling it first. “She’d done a temp thing—data entry or indexing, I don’t know. We got in the same elevator at shift change. Our badges did that little mutual handshake and she made the reader sound with her mouth. Bleep. Then she laughed because I laughed. She said, ‘Imagine if doors opened for jokes instead of credentials.’”
I put my hand flat on the glass to stop it from shaking. The algae light paints my palm green like I’ve been caught. “She would say that.”
“I think about it now,” he says. “All these doors we lock. All the ones we pretend are neutral.”
The kiss-transmitter lingers faintly lemon on my lip; the wafer rests lightly against my pulse. I pack the memory of Lila’s elevator laugh beside the ping, because one is the reason and the other is the method and I am the hinge between. I don’t say how much I want to break the door that welded shut.
“Thank you,” I say. “For telling me.”
He finally looks at me. Whatever he reads on my face makes him lean in without thinking, another micro-kiss that belongs to no mission. I accept it because I am human and terrible at boundaries when kindness is the bait. The balm has cooled. There’s nothing left to steal.
“I need to take a rain check on dessert,” I say, drifting it into humor. “We have to be up early to make a building late.”
“Your scheduling poetry,” he says, smiling. He reaches into his jacket to pay and the badge chain winks, freshly plundered and stupidly innocent. My stomach twists in a small, mean knot that won’t untie until the haul is clean.
We ride the elevator down in a column of glass that watches the city breathe. The car smells like steel and citrus and the last coat of wax. He stands close enough that our shoulders argue gently at every sway. I count security cameras in the ceiling and measure angles where reflections fail. My mouth asks for water; my throat asks for honesty. I give neither.
The lobby exhales us into algae-lit calm. A resilience festival flyer flashes on a side screen—live bands on the seawall this weekend, commemorative pins shaped like arches. Harbor Eleven adores its refusal to drown. It doesn’t ask who pays.
“Walk you to the car?” he asks.
“That’s my line,” I say, and we trade the smile of people who don’t mind that the joke is old because it saves us from new, harder words.
Outside, the iodine wind lifts our collars. A delivery drone skates overhead, content in its timetable that never lies. We cross the private drive; tires kiss wet pavers with a sound like sealing envelopes. I unlock the vehicle, scan three angles, and let him in.
Before I drop into my seat, I check the clutch again—habit, compulsion, liturgy. The wafer rests where I left it. The phone screen winks with June’s green checkmark and a tiny line of text: badge logs show LILA QUILL credential pinging your floor after offboarding.
The letters hit me behind the sternum. Offboarded means buried in a spreadsheet; offboarded doesn’t ping anything. Ghosting means someone kept her alive in the system to move a body without footprints—or copied her credential to open a door with her name.
I close the clutch and taste metal. “Seatbelt,” I say, more steadily than I deserve.
He clicks in. “Everything okay?”
“We’re good,” I say, and I watch my hands on the wheel to be sure they’re telling the truth. I drive us out under the algae glow and onto the road that runs along the barrier, arches passing like ribs, blind cones dozing like cats. The tide clock in the marina insists we’re late by three minutes. I consider telling him that our world has started recording his safety in seconds and my theft in pings.
I don’t. I drive, and the city hums, and a question spreads like water under a door: when he learns I stole the key with his trust still warm on it, what will the next kiss open—us, or the trap?