MON–TUE, FEB 23–24, 2026
She came to the parking garage. He didn't know this until he went back to his drop point on Monday morning, two days after he'd left the note, which was long enough that he'd started running the probability that she hadn't found it or had found it and declined, and discovered a piece of paper folded once, unaddressed, containing ten digits and the words: next time use a nicer garage.
He stood with the paper in his hand for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. It was a small piece of paper. The handwriting was clear and even, the kind that came from someone who wrote things down often and had an opinion about legibility. The ten digits were a phone number. He photographed it with the operational phone, put the paper in his jacket pocket, and went about his day.
The number stayed in his phone for two days. He was aware of it the way he was aware of certain things he'd decided not to act on yet, not nagging, just present, like a door in a corridor that he passed twice daily and had not opened.
He had the Chelsea trip to process, the Byzantine reliquary to move through the dark web market, a lab session with Gwen on Tuesday afternoon in which they were closing on a methodology that was genuinely going to work, and a conversation with Marco about the third crew member question that had been pending since December. The number was not the most pressing item on any list he maintained.
It was the most distracting one.
He had an argument with himself about this, which he conducted in the evenings with the particular thoroughness of someone who preferred to defeat their own rationalizations before they could do any damage.
The argument went: it is strategically useful to have a direct communication channel with an operative of her demonstrated capability and information-gathering reach, and this is a neutral observation about resource management. That was the strongest form of the argument. The strongest form was correct. It was also incomplete.
The argument's weaker form, which kept intruding during the gaps in the Tuesday lab session and on the walk home, was: you want to talk to her. Not for strategic reasons first and personal reasons second. You want to talk to her and the strategic value is a coincidence that your brain is using as adequate justification because your brain is used to having justifications for things.
He was not accustomed to wanting things that his planning hadn't accounted for. When he encountered such wants the honest response was to acknowledge them rather than file them, because unacknowledged wants had a way of acting on you anyway, and acting on you in ways you hadn't planned was how you got into trouble.
He acknowledged it. He found it slightly irritating and more interesting than irritating, which was its own kind of information about himself that he stored without immediately knowing what to do with.
On Tuesday evening, after the lab session with Gwen, who had proposed a modification to their measurement approach that was genuinely good, precise in exactly the way his original design was not, and when he said so her expression did the eye-widening thing and she looked immediately back at her notes as though the response had embarrassed her, which he found both understandable and charming in the dispassionate way that he found things charming, he sat in his room at the desk with the operational phone on the wood beside his academic notebook and looked at it.
He picked it up. He typed: The garage was practical. You found it fine.
He read it back. It was not a warm message. It was not performing warmth it didn't feel — it was accurate and slightly combative and came from a genuine place, which was that the garage had been practical and she had indeed found it fine, and beginning a conversation with a defensible truth felt more honest than beginning it with a softened opener he'd constructed to seem accessible. If she was going to be put off by factual bluntness, this was useful information to have early.
He sent it.
Eleven minutes passed. He worked on the cytoskeleton paper for ten of them and spent one looking at the phone with the specific mix of focus and peripheral attention that was not quite waiting but was not not-waiting.
Her reply: You sent a note on paper. Like a Victorian.
He wrote: Untraceable.
She wrote: So is this number.
He wrote: Fair.
A pause of about three minutes in which he genuinely returned to the cytoskeleton paper and made some progress on the third section and noticed that his attention was better than it had been all day, which he suspected was not coincidental. Then: What's the job?
He wrote: Who said there's a job?
She wrote: You did. Tip for tip. The garage. The date. That's not a social invitation from you, I can tell already.
He sat with that for a moment. She was right about the job, which he'd known, and right about it not being a social invitation, which he'd known, and there was something in I can tell already — the compressed confidence of two weeks of mutual observation — that he was not going to examine too carefully right now because the paper was still due Friday. He wrote: There's a job. When you want to know about it, tell me.
She wrote: I already want to know. Tomorrow. Same garage, say seven.
He put the phone face-down on the desk. He looked at the ceiling. He noted, that he was looking forward to tomorrow in a way that went past professional anticipation by a measurable amount. He noted the amount. He filed it without suppression or performance.
Then he picked up the academic notebook and worked on the cytoskeleton paper for two hours, because it was due Friday and it wasn't going to write itself regardless of what was happening tomorrow evening, and the paper was genuinely interesting work, and interesting work deserved the attention it asked for.