It took Samantha four tries to get all three of them on one call. Marcus kept trying to figure out how to get in touch with Daniel. Vlad kept saying he was wasting battery. She finally just conferenced them, set the phone face-up on the lab bench, and let them go at each other.
“We’re not running,” Marcus said. “Running is what guilty people do. We didn’t do anything.”
“We woke a wallet that had been dead for twenty years, in front of the entire planet,” Vlad said. “Guilt is not the problem. Attention is the problem.”
“That’s — fine, it’s bad, but it’s not a crime. Sam. Tell him it’s not a crime.”
Sam stared at the phone. Vlad was scaring her. Marcus was annoying her. And she felt stupid that she’d used Marcus’s harness without checking it first. Her brain raced. Who would want this. How fast they could move. And what should they do?
She noticed Vlad screaming at Marcus about something but wasn’t listening.
She thought about burning the lab down. She knew that wouldn’t matter, and they could just buy new gear anyway. The part that mattered wasn’t physical — it was the stuff in her head. No one could copy that, but lots of people would want that. Including Vlad and Marcus.
The machine was portable because the machine was her. One copy. Behind her own eyes. And the simplest way to delete a thing that exists in only one place is to delete the place. She shivered and quickly backed off that thought.
“Daniel is telling me there’s a safe approach,” Marcus said. “He said he’d protect me and my partner. Sam — he’s offering us a path.”
“Who the fuck is Daniel and why do you trust him,” said Vlad. “Do you even know his last name? No. He could be anyone. At least he thinks you only have one partner.”
Marcus started reading the text from Daniel again. She was suddenly very tired of Marcus trying to convince them of something, to sell them, to use his force and charm and charisma to move something forward. This was his fuckup even though she didn’t check the harness. She wished he’d just say he was sorry.
Vlad cut Marcus off. “Marcus, shut the fuck up. Daniel isn’t a known entity. We can’t trust him. You shouldn’t be responding to him. Turn your phone off right now. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Marcus started to protest, but Sam cut him off.
“We leave,” she said. “Tonight. All three of us.”
“Sam —”
“Vlad is right. We aren’t safe. People who want something like this will do anything to get it. If we sit here and wait for whoever it is that is coming after us, we are at their mercy. We’ve got to get some time to sort this out and figure out what to do, and we won’t have the opportunity to do this if bad guys suddenly show up. Or someone pretending to be a good guy, who has some agenda that’s his, not ours.”
The line went quiet. Marcus, somewhere in there, running it again — fast, hunting the version where he still came out ahead. Then, smaller: “Okay. Okay. Where.”
Where. The first useful word anyone had said in ten minutes. She knew how to be unreachable on purpose, with a pack on her back and the road behind her.
“Up,” she said. “Past where the pavement ends. I know places in the mountains. Let’s meet at your house in 30 minutes. Load up the Jeep with all your camping shit. Make sure the mini Starlink is in the back — I left it there the other day. Bring your laptop. Turn off your phones and put them in the faraday bag. Vlad, bring the thing we don’t talk about.”
She hung up.
On the monitor the two keys still sat stacked and matched, patient, like they had all the time in the world. They did. But she didn’t.
She didn’t touch the machine. There was nothing to do to it that helped. Pull the power and the atoms warmed and flew apart and it was glass and wire and a cold box worth more than the building. The dangerous part already happened. And the secret to it walked out the door with her. It always had — she had just never felt the real weight of it.
Her pack was in the bed of the truck where it lived, because she’d been able to walk into the backcountry for three days at any hour since she was thirteen. She pulled it out under the parking-lot light and felt how little it weighed.
A stove. A filter. A bag rated to twenty degrees, dry socks. Everything she had ever needed to be alone in the mountains and be fine.
But she had nothing for being hunted. No cash. No name that wasn’t hers. A phone she couldn’t use and couldn’t leave, lit in her hand, certain of exactly which parking lot she was standing in. She turned it off. Vlad would bring burners — still traceable, but less linked to them.
She got in and drove to Marcus’s house, pretending they were leaving for a long weekend in the mountains. Down deep, she knew this was going to suck.