We Know Where You Sleep

At 10:40 on a Monday night the only light in the Emberline loft is your monitor and the red standby dot on the espresso machine that hasn't worked since August.

You've watched the same ninety seconds of data forty times. Sensor 114 on the Stellhorn Peak ridge, a white stake in the dirt under a lodgepole pine, sniffs the air every two seconds. At 2:13 p.m. on a Saturday three weeks ago it decided it smelled smoke. So did the eleven sensors around it. The alert went out to the resort, the resort pulled the alarm, and four thousand people at the Stellhorn Fall Fest ran for the gondola.

There was no fire. There was a woman with a broken ankle on the gondola stairs, a video of the stampede with two million views, and a resort CEO on every channel in Colorado.

The TV on the wall is muted, but you don't need sound. You know the clip. Lyall Wenninger, big and silver-bearded in a Stellhorn fleece, jabbing a finger at the camera. The caption crawls under him: STELLHORN CEO: "I WILL BURY THEM."

You rub your eyes and look at the data again.

The thing is, the sensors weren't wrong about the air. They were wrong about the threshold. Somebody told them that a whisper of smoke was a scream. And you didn't write that number into them. You'd bet your life you didn't.

Your laptop chimes.

New email. No subject. The sender is a string of letters at a privacy mail service you've never heard of.

Next time your toys go off, someone dies. Shut Emberline down before the vote. This is the polite version.

You read it twice. Then you do what you've done with the other three: forward it to Pierson, forward it to Nyla Obuya at Greyridge Ventures, and sit there feeling stupid for being afraid of words on a screen.

Your phone buzzes almost instantly. Pierson.

Jesus. Another one? Go home, man. Seriously. This is why we take the Pendergast deal and let somebody with lawyers worry about it. Call you tomorrow.

You type not selling and delete it. You've had that fight three times this week.

You pack up. Laptop, charger, the protein bar you were going to call dinner. You kill the lights and the loft turns into a cave of whiteboards and shipping boxes, sensor stakes leaning in the corner like spears. Selin's desk has a sticky note on her monitor that says DON'T TOUCH MY BUILD, Ethan, I MEAN IT. You smile at that, at least.

The stairs down to the alley smell like old tires. The shop below you closed a year ago and the smell never left.

Outside, the October wind comes off the plains with nothing to stop it. Your Outback is where you left it, nose to the brick, under the one alley light that works. Something white is tucked under the driver's-side wiper.

A flyer, you think. Pizza. A church.

It's a photograph.

You know the window before you know why. Fourth floor. Exposed brick. The ugly green lamp your mother bought you, glowing on the sill. Your apartment, at night, shot from the street, so close and clear you can see the stack of mail on the table.

Underneath, in neat black marker: WE KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP. SHUT IT DOWN.

Your hand moves on its own.

"Don't touch it," a woman says behind you. "You'll smear the prints."

You turn so fast your bag hits the car.

She steps out of the alley shadow like she's been part of it all along, and your first stupid thought is that nobody that beautiful should be standing next to a dumpster.

Black wool coat. Dark hair pulled back so tight it looks like a decision. A face built of clean, high angles, the kind photographers chase and never quite catch, and gray eyes the color of a storm a long way off. A small scar splits her left eyebrow. You know that scar. You were there when she got it, on a ladder in the basement lab, swearing in Polish.

Her eyes go to your hands, the note, the street, the rooflines, and come back to you.

"Darya," you say.

"Hi, Ethan."

Four years. Four years since the graduation party where she hugged you hard and left early, and a year of texts that got shorter and further apart until they stopped. And she says your name exactly the way she used to, like it's something she's been carrying in her pocket.

"What are you doing here?"

"Working." She pulls a pair of black gloves from her coat and puts them on, finger by finger. "Nyla Obuya called my firm at four this afternoon. Ironbark Risk. Threat assessment for Emberline and its founders. I took the job."

"You work in security?"

"For two years. In Denver." Something moves in her face and is put away. "I know. I should have called."

She leans past you and photographs the note on your windshield with her phone, three angles, flash on. Then she pulls an evidence bag from her pocket, because of course she carries evidence bags in her pocket, and slides the photo into it without touching anything but the edge.

Up close she smells like cold air and cedar. She used to smell like solder and cheap coffee. You used to share the coffee.

"How long have you been out here?" you ask.

"Twenty minutes. I was about to knock." She seals the bag. "I watched someone walk away from your car right before I parked. Ball cap, heavy build. He didn't run. People who've been paid don't run."

The cold finds the back of your neck.

"Someone was here. Right now."

"Yes." She looks at you, and there's no softness in the words but a great deal of it in the way she's standing, angled between you and the mouth of the alley. "You're all right. He's gone. I'm going to drive you home, if you'll let me. But I need to do something first, because I promised myself in the car that I'd do it before anything else, and if I wait I won't."

"Do what?"

She takes a breath. You've seen Darya Zabrowski fix a burned-out circuit board with a sewing needle at four in the morning. You've seen her carry her father's crew helmet out of a church in Pueblo without letting her face move. You have never seen her look afraid.

She looks afraid now.

"I'm not here by accident," she says. "Nyla called the firm. My boss was going to give it to someone else. I asked for it. Because it's you."

"Darya..."

"Let me finish. Please." Her gloved hands are steady. Her voice isn't, quite. "You're going to spend the next few weeks letting me close to your life. Your office, your apartment, your business. You deserve to know who you're letting in. So here it is."

The alley light buzzes. Somewhere on Larimer a bus sighs at a stop.

"I've been in love with you since the first week of college," Darya says. "I'm telling you so it isn't a secret between us. You don't have to do anything with it. Now give me your keys."