Vlad had dozed a little but every time Samantha or Marcus moved he was wide awake. At five until six, he took the case outside and plugged it in. He left the door open and Cooper followed and then disappeared into the trees.
The forgery wave was in its second day and it had a shape now. He read it the way he read code, fast, looking for the parts that repeated. Overnight somebody had forged a cable company’s firmware signing key and bricked a few hundred thousand routers in the southeast. Somebody else had signed a fake update for a car control system and the car company had pulled its whole over-the-air system offline rather than find out. The pumps from yesterday were on the list too, already old news.
He knew which ones were coming next. He had lived inside these systems since he was a teenager and he could see the holes the way Samantha could see hers. He had a map in his head of where the old keys were still trusted and nobody had looked in years. He opened Doug’s notebook to a clean page and started a list of his own. He didn’t care about the method anymore. He was focused on the doors a key would open.
He wrote the first one: the switches on the power poles, the kind that took a signed config over a radio and had taken it the same way for thirty years, that nobody on Eleanor’s list owned and everybody depended on. He would send it at eight. He already knew the next three under it.
He wrote until the window ran out and the bars dropped, and then he sat on the rail with the dead tablet and the cold coming up through his jacket and thought about how easy it would be to stop.
He knew exactly how to disappear. He had done it for seventeen years. He could walk down the mountain, and in a month there would be no kolobok anywhere, no account, no face, the photograph on the roof the only one that had ever existed and useless. The feds had let him walk out of the building. Nobody was looking for him anymore. He could be no one again by spring.
This was appealing. Being no one had been the safest he had ever felt. Staying meant a name on a government list for the rest of his life, with some people who knew his face and his name.
Cooper came back up and dropped a stick on his boot. Vlad stared at Cooper who stared back at him. Vlad looked away but could feel Cooper still looking at him. He made eye contact again with the dog, picked up the stick, and flung it as far toward the trees as he could.
As Cooper bounded after it, Vlad decided he wasn’t going to disappear. Somebody had to watch the doors and he was the only one of the three of them who could see all of them.
Samantha came out at six-forty with two cups of coffee and gave him one. He took it. His back hurt from the chair and the cup was warm and the coffee was bad, and he drank it anyway.
“You were up,” she said.
“The window.”
She sat down on the top step below him. Marcus was still asleep inside. Vlad was glad he was sleeping. He could hear him snoring through the door, and under it the fact that Marcus would wake up and ask for a list of what had broken and Vlad would have one.
“Anything new,” she asked.
“Routers. A car company. Your pumps are on page two now.”
She didn’t flinch at that.
“Are you going to keep pulling them,” she said.
“Yes.”
“For how long.”
“Until the old keys are gone. Years.” He drank the coffee. “Somebody has to see them coming. It is a thing I can do and almost nobody else can. I started my own list.”
“I know what that costs you.”
She did know. He knew she understood what it cost him to be findable at all. She had put something incredibly powerful out into the world under her own name without asking him. And she knew exactly what his staying would cost him now.
“You moved without us,” Vlad said. It was not a fight. The fight had been four days ago and was over now.
“I know.”
“You said we decide together. Then you decided.”
“Yes.”
“I am not going to pretend you didn’t.”
“I don’t want you to.”
He looked at Cooper, who was back with the stick, but didn’t appear to have a plan for it.
“I think you were wrong and made a mistake,” Vlad said. “I think the hospital is what being wrong looks like. There will be more things like the hospital and some of them will be worse.”
“I know. I don’t like it, but I know.”
“I am going to sit on this rail every two hours and pull the list and send Eleanor the doors, because the alternative is that nobody does.” He finished the coffee. “You can be wrong and still need somebody watching. Those are different issues.”
Samantha was quiet for a second.
“You could go,” she said. “You don’t owe the doors anything. You don’t owe me and Marcus anything. You certainly don’t owe Eleanor anything.”
“No,” Vlad agreed. “I don’t.”
He didn’t explain it. He wasn’t sure he understood how he had decided this. Once, he had been the kind of person who figured something complicated out at three in the morning, posted it and vanished, and let it become somebody else’s problem in a billion machines. He was comfortable doing something and disappearing. He was not comfortable in this moment. But he didn’t want to be the person he used to be, even for a decision he thought was wrong, even tired and cold on a porch with a dog who ate deer shit.
“Marcus is going to want the list when he wakes up,” he said instead.
“You already have it.”
“I always have it.”
Cooper bumped the stick into Vlad’s leg. Vlad looked at him and then grabbed the stick. They played tug of war with it while the sun came up over the ridge and the clock ticked to the next window.