Tomorrow, Tommy walks through a door he's never walked through. Tomorrow, we both do.
The door opens. Tommy enters carrying two mugs, his glasses slightly fogged from the steam, his hair pushed back from his forehead in a way that means he's been running his hands through it while thinking.
The hoodie he's wearing is the same one I stole last Tuesday and returned smelling like my shampoo, and the fact that he chose it tonight instead of any of his other identical black hoodies is a data point I choose not to analyze.
"Coffee," he says, handing me one. "The good stuff. I hid a bag behind the server rack in March. Figured if there was ever a night for it, it's the one where we plan to dismantle an international criminal conspiracy."
I take the mug. Rich, dark, the kind of quality that means someone cared enough to source it properly and Tommy hid it from Stryker, who treats all coffee as communal property regardless of origin or cost.
"You hid premium coffee behind a server rack."
"Behind server rack seven, specifically. The one closest to the ventilation intake, so the temperature stays optimal for bean preservation. I'm not a savage, Dar."
"You literally eat chocolate over a keyboard."
"The chocolate is a calculated performance choice designed to maintain a specific persona. The coffee is a genuine luxury. There's a difference."
The humor is thinner tonight. Present, because Tommy without humor is like Echo Base without the hum, but thinner. The edges are showing. I can hear the seams where the jokes stitch together, and the thread is pulled tighter than usual.
I close my laptop. Set it on the floor beside the bed.
"Sit down."
He sits. Sets his own mug on the nightstand beside a can of Mountain Dew I left there two days ago and haven't moved. The can has become furniture. Neither of us has mentioned it, the same way neither of us has mentioned that my toothbrush migrated to his bathroom or that three of my hoodies now live in his closet or that the workspace we share has developed a borderso specific that the other team members navigate around it like a territorial boundary on a map.
"I need to show you something," I say.
Tommy's eyebrows rise above his glasses. "That's either very promising or very ominous, and the fact that your fingers aren't moving suggests ominous."
He noticed. Of course he noticed.
"Not that kind of ominous." I pull my laptop back up, open a directory I've kept locked since my second day at Echo Base. "This."
The files populate the screen. Logs. Timestamps. Results. Every unauthorized probe I ran against his systems, documented with the methodical precision of someone who was building a trust profile through provocation.
"Every test I ran," I say. "Every probe. Every time I poked your perimeter to see if you'd catch it, or if you'd catch it and say nothing, or if you'd miss it entirely." I turn the laptop toward him. "Seventeen separate diagnostics over nineteen days. You caught four. Ignored two. Missed eleven."
Tommy takes the laptop. His eyes move across the data, and I watch the recognition land in stages.
Curiosity first. Comprehension second. Then something deeper, something that drains the humor from his face the way color drains out of a screen going dark. What replaces it is sharper, more focused, and so completely unguarded that looking at him feels like standing in front of an open window in winter.
"You were testing me."
"I was testing me."
"The whole time."
"The whole time." I pull my knees up, wrap my arms around them. "I told myself it was operational. Rational. I needed to know if you were watching me the way GCHQ watched me. Ifyou'd use what you saw against me, or file it for leverage, or pretend you didn't see when you did."
The position is defensive and I know it, but knowing doesn't change the need.
"It was manipulation dressed as pragmatism. I was provoking a reaction because asking you a direct question would have required vulnerability I couldn't afford."
Tommy sets the laptop down. Carefully. The way he handles hardware when he's processing something that requires more bandwidth than his current emotional capacity can deliver.
"Seventeen probes," he says quietly.
"Seventeen."
