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Beryl didn't complain, as I tended to her wounds. Didn't flinch when I took needle and thread to stitch up her lip. It would scar. We both knew it would. She didn't flinch, just held my gaze as she bled on my hands.

She didn't complain when I pulled her into my arms, when the reality of it all, the weight of it all finally caught up to me and I broke down. She held me, in response, and didn't say a word until I pulled myself back together, and tried to apologize.

"Don't." She spoke softly. She'd never been gentle with me before. Not like this. "I get it." She said, her calloused, scarred fingers on my cheek. "It's a lot to ask anyone to roll with. I'd be worried if you weren't feeling the pressure." She said, nodding her head. "Right now, you do have to roll with it. I'm sorry that's how it is, but we're both dead if you don't." She added. She didn't need to. I really could have done without the reminder.

"Don't get complacent." She said, keeping my eyes on hers. "They're working an angle. They don't need you. You're just convenient. Understand?"

I nodded at that. It wasn't any conclusion I hadn't already come to. At best, I was meant to be the fall guy. Left holding the bag while they took whatever it was they were after and split. At worst, I was meant to be bait. Let me soak the bullets while they raided the place. And Beryl? Wrong place, wrong time. She was someone they could use as leverage.

I needed a way to turn the tables. To have even a temporary advantage. A fistful of time. Anything. But I knew that was easier said than done. I didn't have any ideas.

"Beryl..." I said, as I looked around the grimy, dingy room. "If you have any sage advice, now's the time, honey."

"Think like a thief." She said, with a shrug. "You know their set up as well as anyone. You've worked for the company for as long as I've known you. Trust your instincts. They need a way in. You? You need to prove you're more useful alive." She sighed at that, and nodded. "Or we're both dead."

"In the meantime," She shrugged as she stood up, glancing over her shoulder at me. "I have a few tricks up my sleeves. I'll figure out an extraction angle, if you can stay alive long enough for it to mean something. It's been a long time, and I'm not the runner I used to be, but I'm not letting these smug pricks toy with me. My reputation used to mean something, damn it!"

She left, and for a long moment, I wasn't aware of anything beyond how quiet it all was. I was used to there being some kind of sound. My hands on the keys of my home made cyberdeck. The electrical buzzing of my private terminal. Traffic. Something.

The empty room felt cavernous, for the first time. My thoughts echoed in my mind in the silent concrete coffin. Think like a thief? I didn't even know for sure what that meant. Pulling the battered box out from under my half-broken bed frame, I jacked into my terminal and started going over the footage again. I didn't know what I hoped to find. I didn't know what I was even looking for.

I just couldn't think of anything else to do.

I could barely focus at work, every phone call. Every door opening. The sound of footsteps. It was maddening. I struggled through the most basic steps. Nobody seemed to notice, but I was paranoid someone would catch on. I hated even being in the building. But I needed to keep showing up. I needed my credentials current. My access was the only reason I was breathing.

At night, I paced my cramped, tiny apartment until I swore I was wearing a rut in the floor. I had moved my furniture against the wall, tried to create a little cover, in case they sent someone to finish what they started. But it didn't happen. I considered going back to the crow's nest, but I couldn't work up the grit to do it.

I had no idea when they were going to move, or what they needed me to do, exactly. I was to deliver a package. Of what? Probably something horrible. Or deadly. Explosives? Something that would set off the alarms? I didn't know.

I didn't know anything. Fumbling about in the dark, lost and terrified, and suddenly I was furious. Livid. I wasn't about to let some damned carrion birds pick me apart while I just waited for it to happen!

It came to me so suddenly I almost laughed aloud, I had a new idea. The credit stick in my hand felt heavy. Purposeful. I threw on my coat, and was out the door, into the dimly lit streets.

File it under 'business expenses'.

It was a huge risk. The whole damned thing. But at the same time, I knew it was the right play. Diver had tapped the local grid, the local networks. Semi-anonymous, unless you knew where to look. I had a few ideas.

I sat in my room with a box full of hardware, and jacked into my terminal with a flash of a digital map of a few square blocks at street level. It was beautiful, like that. Pristine. Pure. Raw data. Without the graffiti. Without the stink. I loved that about the matrix. I loved that about my job.

I could hear myself think there. No distractions. No noise. Looking at it from a mile above, it all started to come together.

She would have piggybacked her signal off of somewhere already broadcasting a lot of noise. Institutions and offices were out. Too procedural. They hit the same networks and data nodes regularly. She'd have stood out like a sore thumb, and they'd have severed the connection. Or fragged her, directly.

The little diners were a second tier bet at best. Inconsistent. Not a lot of traffic to mask her activity, though it would have been random enough. She'd have to time her ventures to their peaks, which I doubted Diver would have had the patience for.

No. She was probably tapped in through the nearest hub, directly. It was the smart play. She could have been in any of those buildings. Impossible to say at a glance and if anyone started sniffing around, she could physically sever the connection from her end and they'd never be able to narrow it down.

She was riding on the back of bureaucratic inefficiency. It was clever, and it was also a pain in the ass. She must have had some good hardware tucked away in her little nest. Or someone on the inside with access credentials to spare.

It was almost midnight when I made my way back through the alleys, climbed up the drain pipes onto the roof of a building a few blocks away and set up shop. Slipping through their network to the grid itself was the definition of simplicity. Even with the cheap cyberdeck I'd shown up with. From there, it was all lights and noise. Pure signal, but that wasn't going to be a problem. Setting it up to record was a few keystrokes and a sigh.

I'd have to filter through the noise to find her, but knowing she was out there... all I needed was a little time. A little patience. So I watched, and I waited. Packets up and downstream. Running the programs on the cheap little deck, an unfair stress test to hardware that wasn't really made for the job. But she did it admirably.

It started to make sense after a while. The patterns, the rhythm. Security feeds from the nearby office cameras. Encrypted, but constant. A few pulses of data out, and data in. Invoices and shipping updates from the warehouses. You could set a watch by them.

The few odd pings, heavy latency. Interference. Noise. Poor signal quality. Cheap diner networks and unlicensed taps. Outdated hardware of public terminals and vidphones. I could have laughed. Calling cabs or arranging drug deals? Neither would surprise me.

There. Fast, small. A blip on the radar. Anomalous for how small it was. My fingers danced through the keystrokes. Encrypted message. Short pulse. Return in the span of milliseconds. Automated. A second. Short pulse. Long delay. Half a second. More. Ping.

Even encrypted, I could at least get ahold of the messages. It was a start. I started recording those, specifically. Enough data and I'd have a real shot at it.

She kept her signals short, but over the course of an hour there were several dozen. Call and response. Some were almost instantaneous, hitting automated services. Some took time. Obviously reaching people who needed to formulate a reply.

A few hours of listening, quiet and patient, and it fell quiet again. I stretched, my back protesting the workspace. It had been worth it. I took down shop, scrambled off of the roof, and slipped away into the darkness. It was going to be a long night.

The beauty of encryption is at its core, it's math. It's all numbers. Probability. Code. Yes, it can be difficult to crack. Yes, in a lot of cases, brute force is pointless. But it's not impervious. My entire job was data and math. If there was an answer to be found, I was at least equipped to search for it.

The length of the messages, the time between them, piece by piece I whittled down my options, scoured backnet message boards for ideas. A long, sleepless night with few ideas that were more sophisticated than hitting it with a hammer, figuratively speaking.

But there, in the midst of it all, was my gleaming silver thread. She was brilliant, and it made sense like a jigsaw puzzle falling into place. I wished I could have thanked her without giving myself away. It had to be enough that I used the idea well. My living would be her payment.

Setting up my personal terminal, I recreated the environment, to the best of my ability. Made the messages bounce off of two virtual environments, back and forth, her precious algorithm turning the encoded signal into the most probable permutations. It was brilliant, if it worked. It was a brilliant idea, even if it didn't.

I managed an hour of sleep just before dawn, and all but crawled to work with bleary eyes and a heavy head. I was so tired I barely noticed the courier deliver a package to my cubicle, signed for it with a clumsy hand and began to toss the box off to the side before I realized that the delivery had come from a troll's hands.

Another box of generic office supplies, another padded envelope. This time I wasn't stupid enough to open it in the cubicle. Instead, I tucked it into the filing cabinet, and finished my shift as though nothing had happened. I took the scenic route home. A nice euphemism for saying I walked the long way through filthy alleys and cut behind dumpsters until I was alone.

Inside the envelope was a picture of a van. Nondescript, but in seemingly decent condition. A time scrawled in red ink on the page. A location wasn't necessary. I knew where to pick it up. I could only imagine I'd find out the rest after.

I went home after I burned the picture, and jacked into the terminal I'd left running from the night before.

I wasn't expecting a miracle, but had managed to hit paydirt. I was right about the signal pings, the messages were short. Might as well have been in code, except for a few snips.

"Progressing smoothly. Status update?"

"Tower is ours. Nobody will know the difference."

"No loose ends."

"We're sure the payload is there?"

"As sure as we can be. Suits kept Almagest close to the vest."

"We take our shot. If we don't get our hands on the data now, we don't at all."

Almagest, a project name. A weapon? No. The reference to a tower, and the certainty that nobody would know the difference. It had to be a data payload. And a hefty payment. Corporate data was the kind of thing people lived and died for. Wars were fought for it. Or ended with it. Whoever was bankrolling this project probably had a dozen backup plans just waiting in the wings.

No loose ends. They might not have meant me, specifically. But that wasn't something I was about to gamble on. It wasn't just my life, either. If I was a loose end, Beryl was a thrice damned liability. I couldn't convince myself for all the luck in the world they didn't know she used to be a runner. They were probably already tracking her. I just had to trust she knew how to be subtle.

It felt like I didn't really have anything, but I knew I'd found something. I had, at the least, an idea of what they were going to go for. I wished I knew what it meant. I wished had a plan. But it was a start. It was a start and I still had two days to figure out my next move.

Data and numbers were my job. If I had to assign odds to my being alive by next week, I'd have said 'a generous eight percent'. That was at least double what any unbiased actuary would have offered.

It was a grim realization.