The wall is lined with mailboxes, though to judge from the dirt and dust in the corners no one’s lived in this building—except Gideon, I guess—for years. Sometimes, sealed behind doors like this, whole buildings get forgotten. Gideon reaches for one of the boxes and presses his fingers against the number panel—and the whole thing goes in with a click. The mailbox façade opens outward to reveal an optical scanner and three different keypads. No wonder it looks like a low-rent tenement on the outside—with the kind of security Gideon’s got, it’d be a big flashing neon sign to anyone with eyes that someone important lived here. Or someone with something important to hide.
He presses his thumb to one of the keypads—it’s a print scanner in disguise—and then leans down for the camera to scan his retina. “Honey, I’m home,” he murmurs. Voice recognition? Or just Gideon being Gideon? He keys in a numeric code on one of the other keypads, quickly enough that I struggle to follow it, but he doesn’t bother to hide the code from me. After all, unless I had his thumb and his eyeball—and possibly his vocal cords—I wouldn’t be able to get in without an invitation.
After a cheery beep of acceptance, the whole wall clanks and shifts. Gideon shoves his shoulder against it and it swings back to reveal a metal staircase leading down, dim lights flickering to life. “After you.”
“Lovely,” I reply, hiding my genuine uneasiness with sarcasm. The staircase leads to a dark little cave of a room, sparsely furnished and dominated by a whole wall of screens on one side. The equipment and the chair, one of those tailor-made ergonomic things, are clearly the only things in the whole place he’s bothered to spend money on, and the red and blue rug on the floor is the solitary homey touch in the whole place. The bed in the corner is little more than a cot with an ancient mattress slung across it. I sigh. “I suppose a secret palace down here was too much to hope for.”
“I’m a man of simple needs,” he replies, voice airy and utterly unconcerned. He leaps down the last few steps to the cement floor, then slips past me to bend over his desk, eyes scanning his screens. A few of them he closes before I can see what he’s doing—others are filled with coded gibberish that means nothing to me. The rest seem to be chat feeds and crackpot conspiracy sites. I guess everyone’s got some guilty pleasure tucked away.
There’s nowhere to sit except the computer chair, so I sink down gingerly on the edge of the sagging mattress. For all its age, it does seem to be relatively clean, at least. The other side of the room is empty, but the ceiling is full of fold-down equipment. I recognize a chin-up bar and some ropes. “So this is where you practice for climbing elevator shafts?” I ask, keeping my voice light—still trying to regain my balance with him.
The corner of Gideon’s mouth lifts as he turns away from the computer screens. “Nah, just vanity, really. Takes a lot of work to be the peak of physical perfection, you know.”
“I’d pretend to believe you, but you clearly don’t have girls over very often.” Threadbare mattress and tatty rug over a cold cement floor, case in point.
“You caught me,” he says, inspecting his den as though he’s never seen it before. “A lot of my best targets are isolated. No connections in or out from the servers, no chance of a remote hack. You have to pay a house call, if you want to know what’s in there, and that means climbing, sometimes.”
“So you break and enter as well.”
“Well, once you’ve got started, a little trespassing is the least of your problems. I only do elevator shafts on special occasions though, Dimples. They’re tough.”
“I like to talk my way in rather than break my way in.”
Gideon grins at me, but I can spot a hint of that same tension he wore in the mag-lift down to the slums. “Bet you wish you’d asked for more detail before you talked your way in here. If I’d known you were coming, I’d have gotten curtains or something.” Despite the total lack of windows in his underground den. His eyes meet mine, the easy arrogance stilling for just a moment, becoming thoughtful, measured. “You didn’t give me a lot of warning.”
I swallow, my gaze sliding away from his. “How did you find me?”
“Got your message, tapped into the security feed at your place.” He drops down into his chair, easing back as the whole thing folds around him, adapting itself to the shape of his body. “I tracked you from there.”
“The security—” Abruptly, all I can think of is that I stripped naked in the middle of my living room while those men made me change there—and the security camera’s in the middle of the ceiling. “You could see the camera feed from my apartment?”
Gideon laughs, not doing much to calm the sudden flush burning across my face. “Don’t worry, Dimples. If I want to see you with your clothes off, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”
I roll my eyes, suddenly very aware that I’m sitting on his bed. But getting up now would be telling, so I stay where I am. “Fine. Look, I’m grateful you came to get me. Just not that grateful. My clothes are staying where they are.”
Gideon laughs again, though more softly this time, the sound punctuated by the creak of his chair as he leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Whatever you say, Dimples.”
The not-so-subtle reminder that he still doesn’t know my first name makes me long to scratch at the skin-patch covering my genetag. I take a slow, quiet breath in and out, my eyes flicking toward the screens. In the background of one, I can see a search function running—I can’t tell from here what he’s looking for, but I can see it combing the hypernet for information, gathering data here and there, collating it for easy digestion. My skin crawls, the itchiness on my forearm suddenly overpowering.
What the hell am I doing getting involved with a hacker, of all people? I should just cut and run the next time he opens that vault of a front door. When I first came to Corinth, stepping off a free ride all the way from Ivanoff Orbital Station, I’d thought I was capable of charming anyone I met into doing anything I needed.
But my first attempt at a con here cost me nearly half my hard-earned savings, and left me on the run from a guy called Thor. For weeks it was two steps forward, one step back. I took whatever I could find, whatever I could get, until I built trust with my first contacts, then used them as stepping-stones to the next.
Starting from scratch, building my contacts all over again—it’ll take months. Months I may not have, now that LaRoux Industries is on to me.
It was bad enough when they just thought I could hand them the Knave—now they know for sure I’ve seen the rift, and what it can do. And that’s enough to keep them chasing me across the galaxy. I have to find some way to get to LaRoux faster. Before he can get to me.
Maybe a hacker is exactly what I need.
“Look,” I say softly, keeping my eyes on the floor, lashes lowered. “I want to trust you, Gideon.” I let him hear the longing there—easy enough because it’s true. But wanting and doing are two very, very different things. “You saved my life back there. And I—I like you.”
“Uh-huh.” His voice is flat, dry—skeptical. Nothing like the soft murmur up on the roof.