The first thing I registered was the weight. It was a warm pressure against my chest, a grounding force in the shifting landscape of sleep. The second thing was the scent… a faint trace of vanilla shampoo and the muskier smell of sleep.
I opened my eyes, but only a fraction. The morning sun was streaming through the floor to ceiling windows, bathing the living room in a harsh light.
I was still on the sofa.
Kimiko was curled against me, her head resting on my pectoral, her arm thrown carelessly across my stomach. Her legs were tangled with mine beneath the throw blanket we must have pulled over ourselves in the hazy hours of the early morning.
My Superhuman physiology usually woke me with the alertness of a tripwire snapping, but the alcohol and the sheer emotional exhaustion of the previous night had dulled the edge.
Her breathing was steady, rhythmic.
In.
Out.
But it was too deliberate.
She was awake.
She had probably woken up minutes, maybe hours ago, realized where she was and… stayed.
A strange warmth, unrelated to the physical contact, bloomed in my chest. For a weapon forged in trauma, for a woman whose first instinct was to kill anything that touched her, this was monumental. She felt safe enough to feign sleep rather than retreat.
I closed my eyes again, regulating my own breathing to match a sleeping rhythm. I decided to give her the dignity of the moment.
We lay there in the quiet penthouse, two monsters pretending to be normal people, suspended in a fragile bubble of peace.
It lasted for another twenty minutes. The sun climbed higher, warming the leather of the sofa.
BZZT.
BING.
My phone, resting on the coffee table, vibrated violently against the glass and let out a loud chirp. It was a push notification from a news app: "10 Things You Didn't Know About Queen Maeve's Diet!"
The noise shattered the silence like a dropped plate.
Kimiko jerked, her head snapping up. I flinched, my eyes flying open.
We looked at each other. Her hair was a mess, sticking up in wild angles. My shirt was rumpled. We were tangled together like pretzels.
For a second, the old tension threatened to return.
Then, I looked at the phone, then back at her and rolled my eyes.
"Stupid phone," I mumbled in Japanese, my voice thick with sleep.
A snort escaped her. Then a giggle. And then we were both laughing, a shared release of the awkwardness.
She untangled herself from the blanket and scrambled off the sofa. She stood there for a second, smoothing down her green dress, her cheeks flushed a deep pink. She looked at me, bit her lip and then turned and ran.
She bolted down the hallway towards her guest suite, the door clicking shut behind her a second later.
I lay there for a moment longer, staring at the empty space where she had been.
"System," I thought. "Don't say a word."
[I didn't say anything!] the System replied, its voice radiating mock innocence. [I'm just enjoying the rom com. It's very wholesome. Season 2 is going to be great.]
I shook my head, a smile still tugging at my lips. I stood up, stretched… my joints popping with the sound of cracking pistol shots and headed to my own master suite.
The shower was cold today.
I dressed in fresh clothes… dark slacks, a cashmere sweater. I dried my hair and walked into my bedroom. I walked to the walk-in closet, pushed aside a row of bespoke suits and placed my palm against the back panel.
The biometric scanner read my print, my pulse and my heat signature. The panel slid aside silently, revealing the entrance to the inner sanctum.
The wall of monitors hummed to life as I entered.
I sat in the chair and pulled up the notification log.
While I had been drinking Pinot Noir, the Red Unit had been working.
[OPERATION REPORT: JERSEY LOGISTICS HUB]
[STATUS: COMPLETE]
[TARGETS NEUTRALIZED: 0 (Stealth Protocol Active)]
[ASSETS ACQUIRED: Vought Shipping Manifests, Compound V Distribution Logs.]
[ANOMALY DETECTED.]
I frowned. Anomaly.
I tapped the file. A video feed from Red One's helmet cam opened on the center screen.
The footage showed the interior of a massive warehouse. It was dark, the only light coming from the Red Unit's night vision filters. They were moving through the aisles of crates, scanning barcodes.
Red One stopped. He pointed to a shelf in Section D, Row 4.
There, sitting conspicuously on top of a crate of Vought branded medical supplies, was a small object. It was too clean, too deliberately placed.
Red One reached out and picked it up. It was a ruggedized grade hard drive.
He turned it over. There were no markings, no serial numbers. But on the bottom, etched into the metal casing, was a tiny symbol. A simplified eagle holding a shield.
It was the handshake symbol for a CIA dead drop.
The video ended.
I reached into the empty air. My hand disappeared into the system inventory and returned holding the black hard drive.
I examined it. It was an encrypted solid state drive, likely air gapped with a self-destruct failsafe if the wrong password was entered.
I plugged it into my terminal. Not directly into my network, that would be suicide but into a "sandbox," a completely isolated virtual machine designed to detonate digital bombs safely.
The drive spun up. A prompt appeared on the screen.
[ENTER PASSPHRASE]
It was a standard Agency AES 256 bit key, layered with a trapdoor algorithm. Sophisticated for 2019, but to me, it was like reading a book in a slightly difficult font.
I bypassed the front door entirely, slipping through the kernel level code. I disabled the self destruct wipe. I unlocked the data partition.
The drive opened.
There was only one file. A text document named CONTACT.txt.
I opened the text file.
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