Nadia wrote the Thursday run twice just to check it. Neither fit in six hours.
She sat at her kitchen table with the stove light on and the rest of the house dark. The first version was on graph paper. The second was on the back of a printout of an Amazon return label she had not yet sent because she had run out of graph paper around eleven and had not felt like going to the basement to get more.
The wobble was three hertz. She had not seen it since Friday. Her own probe could not find it any more. Priya’s atoms were a better magnetometer than anything Nadia was ever going to build. They sat two floors above her shield.
On Monday she sat behind Priya for four hours, watching numbers come off the array that would take her own lab a year.
“You’re quiet,” Priya said, somewhere in the third hour.
“I’m watching.”
Priya gave her six hours on Thursday on the way out.
Nadia had still not said one word to her about the visit from the stranger.
It was ten past two. She had been at the table since one for the third night in a row. She was tired.
The phone lit up face down on the label. She picked it up. A 303 number she didn’t know.
“Hello.”
“Is this Nadia?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Eleanor Voss. I’m sorry about the hour.”
“I know who you are.”
“Good. That saves time. There are two people who need to be inside your building tonight and on Priya Raghavan’s array, and there needs to be no record that they were in there. You are one of the only people I could think of who might be able to do this.”
Nadia put the pencil down on the label.
“Say that again.”
Eleanor said it again. All of it. Word for word.
“I need a name on a visitor form and somebody in the building who will say they came in with her,” she said. “I’m not asking you to be in the room.”
“Hold on.”
Nadia set the phone on the table on speaker and opened the laptop.
“You’re typing.”
“I’m looking you up.”
“Go ahead. The photograph is twenty years old.”
It was. The NIST directory still had her page. The woman in it was in her fifties.
Nadia scrolled. She had run the post-quantum migration: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and the schedule every federal agency in the country was still working through. Nadia’s own lab signed its data with one of those. She had testified in front of a House committee three times. The National Academy had elected her in her forties. She was on five boards. There was a talk somebody had posted with four hundred views, and a committee that had a number instead of a name.
This was much more information than she had gotten on Ardmore Risk Advisory.
“Who are they,” Nadia said.
“I’m not going to say that on this phone.”
“Is it the two on television?”
Eleanor didn’t answer.
“Okay,” Nadia said.
“I’m not asking you to hide anybody. If somebody comes to you in a week and asks what happened, tell them all of it, including my name. I’ll be easy to find.”
“How long do they need it.”
“A night.”
“A night,” she said. “You don’t hand somebody an array at midnight and get it back the way you left it.”
“No.”
“I have six hours on that array Thursday night.”
“I’m still asking,” Eleanor said.
“Will Priya know you called me.”
“No.”
“Are you going to call her.”
“If you say yes, you’re going to call her,” Eleanor said. “That’s the part I can’t do. She doesn’t know who I am and she has no reason to get out of bed for me.”
“Then find somebody else.”
“I asked somebody else. He has a better machine than that one but he hasn’t answered me since nine o’clock last night.”
“Then wait for him.”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because I am not going to wait for him,” Eleanor said.
The motion light over the garage came on and put a white rectangle on the kitchen floor.
Nadia took the phone off speaker and stood up with it. She went to the window over the sink. The driveway was empty. The gate was where she had left it. The light ran its ninety seconds and went off. Then it came on again. This time she saw the fox come out from under the deck and go along the fence and squeeze through the gap by the gas meter.
“There’s a light on the side of my house,” she said. “It’s a fox.”
Eleanor said nothing.
Nadia went back to the table and sat down.
“Did Seth give you my name?”
“No.”
“Do you know him.”
“Yes. He put money into the same company I did, a long time ago. Your name is on your department’s page and yours is the other lab in that building. That’s all it was.”
Nadia took her glasses off and set them on the table.
“A man came to my building on Friday and asked me who I’d called on Tuesday,” she said. “I gave him Priya’s name, and then I called her and didn’t tell her.”
“I know how that happens.”
“You want me to call her at two in the morning and ask her to put two people I can’t name on her machine with nothing written down.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“All right,” Eleanor said.
Nadia waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t any.
“That’s it?”
“You said no. I believed you.”
“You’re not even going to tell me why it matters.”
“I could. You’d have no way to check a word of it, and I don’t have time to sit here while you decide whether I’m lying to you. I do not have a better idea than the one I just asked you for. I have other calls.”
Nadia stood up again because she could not sit.
“You’re the third person to call me about this in six days,” she said.
Eleanor was quiet for a second.
“Then stop answering your phone,” she said. “I mean that. Thank you for picking up.”
She was gone.
Nadia stood in her kitchen with the phone in her hand. She was shaking a little, which annoyed her.
“Fuck,” she said.
She ran the tap and filled a glass and drank the whole thing standing at the sink. She looked up Priya on her phone and called her.
It rang four times.
“Nadia.”
“Did I wake you.”
“No. I’m in the lab.”
“I should have told you this on Friday.”
She heard Priya get up and go through a door.
“Go ahead,” Priya said.
“On Friday a man came to the building and asked me who I’d called about the Bitcoin thing on Tuesday. I told him Ted Sarno and you. Then, when I called you and you asked me what was broken, I said nothing. I’ve had all week to tell you.”
Priya did not say anything for a while.
“What was his name.”
“Peter Lund. He had a card for a risk firm.”
“Is the firm real?”
“I don’t know. He never asked me one question about the physics.”
“Hmm,” Priya said.
“I’m sorry. I feel shitty that I didn’t tell you right away.”
“Did anybody call you tonight?”
Nadia turned the overhead light on and sat back down under it.
“Twenty minutes ago,” she said. “A woman asked me to get two people into the building and onto your array tonight. She wouldn’t tell me who they were.”
“Did you say yes.”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because I already gave somebody your name once.”
“You should have asked me,” Priya said.
Nadia did not say anything.
“I’m not saying I’d have said yes.”
“I know.”
“Who was she.”
“Her name is Eleanor Voss.”
“I know that name,” Priya said. “Christ.”
“Yeah.”
“Is she going to call me?”
“I don’t know.”
Priya was moving again. A chair went back and something plastic went over on a desk.
“I’m going to go read my card logs,” she said. “Three weeks of them. If somebody’s been in my building I’d rather find out tonight than Thursday.”
“Do you want me to come over.”
“No.”
She hung up.
Nadia put the phone face down on the second version of Thursday, which was still eleven hours of work with six hours to do it in. She still had Thursday.
She got up and went down to the basement for the graph paper.