People assume hackers live in basements with pizza boxes and conspiracy theories. They imagine dark rooms and jittery fingers and the sweet glow of code like a confession. They're half right. I live in a room with solder smells and good coffee, and my fingers are steady because they have to be. That steadiness is a performance. The panic is the part I tuck into the seams.
We call it "the loop." When Elara is on a roof, when Raven is a black silhouette and Noctis is folding time into neat corners, I sit in the middle of the messy hum and I run circles around danger until it gets bored and goes home. To anyone watching me on camera I am calm: fingers tapping, screens moving, a mouth that makes jokes about firmware like it's a cozy fireside chat. Inside my ribs my heart does interpretive dance on a bed of hot coals.
Tonight is one of those nights.
The hideout feels smaller when the city is yelling. We've had better furnished crises — gods moaning about decor, demons complaining about contracts — but city police have a procedural arrogance that's focused and dangerous. They like squares and signatures. They don't like poetry. They especially don't like being made fools of on camera. And tonight, we are the joke they did not consent to.
My station is the center console: three monitors, a row of hardware that looks like a small museum of past errors, and a laptop whose power cable has known my habits long enough to forgive them. Jess's altar, my commandments: keep the feeds, loop the CCTV, make sure the thermal grid takes a nap and doesn't wake up until we are out the door.
Everything in my world has a sound: the hiss of a fan, the tap of a key, the faint bark of Raven at the door when he wants to be petted. I listen to those tiny noises the way other people listen to songs. They tell me the room is still a room and not a war zone.
Elara's last message came in my ear like a smile pulled tight. "Three minutes," she said, voice warm and casual and infuriating. "Enjoy the view."
"Enjoy the view?" I bark-laughed into my mic because sarcasm is a defensive posture. "Enjoy the view? You are not a picnic."
"Nope." She kissed my line. "See you soon. Don't die — I need my audio technician."
She's an idiot, and I love her so thoroughly it should be a crime.
I set the loops like threads under a tapestry. Cameras in the north courtyard go on a twelve-minute rotation. The market-facing cams get a feed of a very convincing documentary on local masonry. The police monitors — bless their linear hearts — get a carefully calibrated glitch at T-minus: they are convinced their system is buffering. If they reboot, they see nothing unusual: ghost footage, corrupted frames, the sort of plausible deniability I sell for breakfast.
While the code runs, the seconds have a texture. They are small and granular, like sugar. I taste them the way people taste wine: note the acidity of adrenaline, the bitter finish of caffeine, the warm middle of frantic affection.
I can see her on a dozen feeds at once: a silver flash across a roof, the suit catching light like a galaxy she borrowed for the night; a hand, quick and careless, flip a card between fingers; Raven like a sentinel shadow moving in deliberate arcs. In one screen she is a person. In another she is a legend. I flick between them like a DJ. That is my job. Make the world believe what it expects to believe. Make it bored where it needs to be bored.
And still: the panic, like a fly, insists on being seen.
The first sign that something is wrong is a tiny red blip on the northeast camera. Minor — a thermal variance. Amateur crews would ignore it. I do not. My hands move before my brain finishes the thought because practice is a kind of reflex. I divert the feed manually, slow the refresh, send false positives down another line. Everything looks steady on the monitors. The police think they are in the middle of a buffering storm. The city thinks the night is mildly glitchy.
My throat tightens. I tell myself it's nothing. I tell myself I'm being protective because my job title is "overprotective childhood friend" and that comes with lifetime benefits. The truth is harder: I am afraid. I am afraid because the thing I love is spectacular, and spectacular things get hungry crowds and angry gods and men with pens who like to make examples.
Elara's voice cuts across the feeds. "How are we looking, Jess?"
"Like a county fair with better snacks," I answer, which is my version of graceful lying. My fingers are two steps ahead of my mouth. The loop is perfect. The feeds are butter-smooth. The police monitors are taking a nap worthy of envy.
"Good," she says. And then, softer: "Hey. Promise me you'll yell if something goes wrong."
Promises are slippery. I think of all the times I have made them for myself and not kept them. I think of the time we swore never to steal from the same god twice and then laughed and broke the vow because we both liked dramatic endings. I want to tell her no, I will not yell because yelling is an escalation. Instead I say, "I'll text you three words: 'Now, please.'"
She laughs. It's a sound that should be an actual moon. I feel both redeemed and doomed. She leaves me with the minimum of theatrics and the maximum of trust.
If you're picturing me in a neon-lit belly of monitors, I will not stop you. The screen shows the perfect image: loops in place, thermal ghosts, our virtual footprints erased like a good cleaning job. The feed is a lie I take artisanal pride in. But underneath that screen, the human part of me is a knot of things: childhood memories of scraped knees (Elara's), midnight consolations (Elara's), the way she once told me, eyes bright with something like conspiracy, that she would steal the moon if she could make it clap. We were ten and should have been in bed. I believed her.
Believing her then is the reason I cannot ever be calm.
A radio crackles downstairs: Reven's voice, flat. "All quiet on my end. Holding the south egress. No hosts yet."
Good. I breathe a little.
Then a different crackle: Noctis, measured. "Cameras nominal. Two minutes."
Two minutes is a personal vendetta. We build our lives around the tweak between one minute and the next. Two minutes is a planning window and a panic button.
The feeds look perfect. The code is singing. And yet. Yet my eyes keep flicking to the northeast blip. I pull up the thermal mesh and expand the frame. There — a tiny heat spike, like a match being struck and then covered. Transient, minute, the kind of detail half the city would never notice. My fingers dance over the keys like a nervous metronome. I push a subroutine to shadow the spike, to give it a name in case it decides to evolve into a monster.
While I do this, I narrate to myself in the voice that keeps me polite when I am about to lose it. Keep it steady. Make it normal. Elara needs color, not panic. Noctis needs calculation, not hysteria. Raven needs the comfort that someone knows the score.
The spike becomes two. My throat clamps. I send a decoy ping to the grid and reroute the feeds into a small loop that would be convincing even to someone who liked obvious tricks. I breathe in. I breathe out. I am a machine that pretends to be human.
I picture Elara on the roof: the mask glossy in moonlight, her ponytail a flag, her cards a small private religion. I imagine her taking off the mask whenever she pleases, like an outfit. I remember the time she put it on for me as a joke and then, for a beat, looked lost. That memory is a splinter in me: half-grief, half-adoration. I will drag that splinter until it draws blood if it keeps her alive.
A new audio channel opens in my console: a live feed from a street vendor who swears he saw a woman run across the rooftops. His audio is messy, full of the kind of panic that tastes like strong tea. I thread his sightline into the camera meshes and cross-check. My stomach drops. The vendor is right — my feeds missed a rooftop merge.
"Jess?" Noctis is quieter. Concern seeps through the calm veneer. "You seeing that?"
"Yes," I say. My voice is flatter than I feel. "Adjusting."
I run a bespoke tracer. It's clumsy, one of my old scripts patched together with caffeine, but it will do: it maps the vendor's sightline into the rooftop meshes and pulls up a feed I can magnify. On screen—a sliver of movement. A flash of galaxy-thread. A hand reaching for the sky.
Elara's face is too small to make out, but the motion is her. She is moving like someone whose bones are rehearsed to flight. Something tumbles from a ledge. There — a glint of porcelain. She is pushing the mask away.
And then the world decides to be theatrical.
A helicopter wakes up, whining like an offended god. Sirens bloom like invasive flowers. The police, having been gently patted on the head by our loops, find their dignity and roar awake. A dozen low-latency feeds flip back into attention like a field of startled birds.
I flip reactions into calm. On the outside my voice is a balm.
"Loop the east courtyard two cycles," I tell Noctis. "Throw them a replay of the busker. Loop the squad cams to thermal null. Send signal noise on the alt-comm. Activate the decoy pigeons."
It sounds ridiculous even as I say it. It's theater, practical and petrochemical. Each order is a stitch to close a gap in the city's attention. My hands type the stitches. I am the seamstress of tonight's costume.
Inside, my mouth tastes like iron. I will not let panic be the director. Panic is good at making mistakes. I am not good at making mistakes where my friends are involved.
I watch the rooftop tracer—Elara vaulting, sliding, breath a metronome. She reaches for the mask and misses; something — wind? rotor wash? — throws a patio chair into her path and she stumbles. My chest drops. I send a command that reroutes a streetlight's feed to show an artificial shadow crossing the courtyard, convincing the officers below that their suspect's silhouette is moving in a different alley. I pray the city believes me.
On the comms, a voice screams: "We have visual! She's on the roof!"
Shit.
My fingers move like the weather — precise, almost tender. I toss code like confetti: an intercept here, a scrambled tag there, a micro-delay to a police drone's sensor that scratches its logic for a precious second. Every second is a saving grace. Every saved second is a heartbeat I keep for her.
She texts: Stuck. Need assistance. There is no punctuation in it. That is Elara speaking plainly. She is the sort of person who can be a threat and a request in the same breath.
I send back, no emotion leaking into the line: On it. Breathe. Watch my light: three blinks = jump left. Two = fall right. One = go low. Don't stop moving until you hit the bell tower's shadow.
She responds with a flippant emoji and then, because she is a drama queen, See you on the other side? I want to throttle whatever part of my heart is still humane.
I fling another script into the mesh. It is aggressive and rude and brilliant. It compromises a rooftop projector in a neighboring building and throws a giant, very convincing image of a falling tarp into the police's line of sight. They screech their focus toward it because human brains are terrible at resisting obvious ploys. They take the bait. Good. They will chase a false tarp. They will not see the real woman who slips between chimneys.
"You magic," Noctis mutters, admiration a soft hazard.
"Just annoying," I say. It's a lie. I am magic in an unsexy, caffeinated way. My hands make the world believe a fiction.
There is a scrape of static and Elara's voice on my ear, soft: "Jess—there's a child on a balcony. I don't—"
"No distractions," I tell her. The words are sharper than I meant them. "Distract the kid. Tell them a story about a wandering star. Make up a dish your grandmother used to make. Anything."
She does. I can hear the child's small laugh in the feed. Elara curls into a story, and the rooftop around her becomes a stage and a nursery at once. I exhale until my ribs don't hurt.
The helicopter turns in the wrong direction. The officers below are arguing. They whisper about the tarp and whether they have been had. I smile, briefly and very badly. The feeds are obedient. The code is a faithful hound.
But then something else flickers—an old feed we thought decommissioned, a thermal miscue an administrator forgot to lock. It pings open to a nationwide monitoring channel. Great. A blinking eye with federal reach. My stomach drops again — bigger, meaner. Those eyes are not as easily amused as local police. They take pride in being right.
I patch a quieter shield over it; it's messy and likely to trip alarms if they look, but we are not in the habit of giving them pretty options. My hands move with the practiced calm of someone steadying a lamp while the house burns.
Elara's message pops in again, short: Mask stuck. Might try to—
The text hangs. There are a dozen ways that sentence could finish. None of them are good. I force myself to think mechanistically. If the mask is stuck, then mechanical assistance may be the answer — a rope, a grappling hook, something to wedge it loose. But I cannot be on that roof. Reven is staged at the southern egress; he can move, but he is heavy and obvious. The ideal help is the quiet kind: someone who can move like shadow and make one good, solid push.
I call Raven on an analog channel because sometimes animals are less compromised by surveillance. The wolf answers like he always does — a low, comfortable sound that I would swear is a laugh if he were human. He shifts to a silhouette and slips out the back door within minutes, a dark thing knowing the geometry of edges.
"Raven, please," I say, a prayer disguised as a command.
He is off like a ghost. I stay at my console, because I know my role. I am the center of the web. I pull threads tighter.
Time becomes a series of pulses. The city is a drum. My breaths fit inside the beats. A hundred tiny interventions: a misdirected traffic cam, a falsified alert about a gas leak, a pigeon's flight path manipulated by a sound lure — ridiculous, petty, and effective.
Elara manages to free the mask at last in a flurry of swear words and the sound of fabric rubbing porcelain. I hear the sigh in her voice when it slides free and I reboot my entire body with relief so strong it almost knocks me off my chair.
Then there is another voice in the network — a local news anchor, breathless. They have a hot feed that shows a woman on a rooftop. The anchor's finger hovers above the "go live" button. My stomach drops because live is a dangerous drug and anchors are addicts.
I throw everything I have at that feed: a subtle loop, an image of a politician giving a speech, a minor mayoral dog-chew scandal that I amplify just enough to distract. It's messy and ethically questionable, but I have always lied on the altar of "protect friends." The anchor's red button stays cold. The mayor's dog gets fat headlines. I have committed small crimes in the name of friendship and I will do it again.
After the dust settles and the helicopter's whining dwindles into a disgruntled mosquito, Elara texts me: I'm back. Compass is secure. We're leaving.
I sit back and let the breath I had been holding since noon explode out of me. My hands have the tremor of someone who held a hot pan too long. I rub my knuckles with the salt of adrenaline and feel ridiculous gratitude.
No one else sees the small wetness behind my eyes. No one knows the specific ache — the hot, squeezing fear that the city might snatch her from me because she is too spectacular to belong to anyone but the headlines. I do. I always will.
Raven pads back with the silent pride of someone who thinks being called in is a ritual. Reven grunts something about "next time don't swing so close to the bell ropes." Noctis says, in his faint, controlled way, "That was clean. Good save."
Elara staggers in, hair in a mess, mask tucked like an ornery pet under her arm. She looks like a couch that someone sat on for too long and then tried to get up from: charmingly disheveled. She flops down beside me and looks over my console like she's peeking at a magic trick.
"You okay?" she asks, voice trying for casual. She knows me well enough to ask. She also knows better than to ask a question that requires a long answer.
"No," I say, because the truth hates pretense and tonight I do not have the energy for it. "But I am functional."
She grins that reckless thing she does. "Functional is my favorite word," she says.
We sit in the quiet that follows a storm. The monitors still glow, dutifully silent, as if they had done something virtuous and were now coasting on the energy of it. The compass — the Meridian — hums soft in her pack like something sleepy. She turns to me and, without an audience, without cameras or priests or gods listening, she says, "Jess."
"Yeah."
"Thanks. For the pigeons and the tarp and making politicians' dogs go viral."
I can't help it. I laugh and then it becomes a bark and then an honest sound that feels like it might catch fire. She laughs with me, and for a sliver of time the sound is enough. She is alive. She is in the room. She is dangerous and magnificent and my heart is a mess of grateful chords.
Later, when the city forgets and the headlines spin tales and the masks of the world rearrange their faces into outrage, I will tuck this night into a drawer labeled Saved: Jess's Edition. I will write marginalia in the corners: Don't let her do that again. Call me before you climb anything higher than a bookcase.
I will not say "I told you so," because I would rather be asked to trust her than to be right. If I had to be right and wrong at once, I choose wrong, because being wrong and keeping her breathing feels like the only kind of triumph I care to keep.
We move on because our life requires motion. We pack the compass away like a secret talisman. Elara brushes rosemary out of her hair and hands me a card — the Fool — as if handing me a small comic apology.
"Keep it," she says. "It's yours."
I hold the card and feel the little twinge that always lives in my palm when she trusts me. "I'll hang it above my console," I say. "A reminder of what I will do when you break the world."
She winks. "Don't break the world first," she teases.
I want to say more — tell her how many times I have replayed the night in my head, how I made contingency plans for contingencies, how I sometimes dream of locking her in a room full of pillows and pastries. But my voice is a small, practical tool and not always suited for grand confessions.
So I put the Fool on the wall above the monitors where it can watch me work. I brew coffee. I patch a few scripts. I reroute gossip like a seamstress smoothing wrinkles. I make the hideout a nest again, because nests are more than furniture — they're promises you make with hands and tea.
When dawn finds us, she will be off again—some city, some clock, some god's vanity will have another appointment with her. I will be here, alive with stitches and scripts and a stubborn heart, and I will answer. That is my vow and my job. The world is a series of terrible choices and small mercies; I prefer to be the small mercy when I can.
Tonight I did what I always do: I made order pretty enough that Elara could be spectacular without being eaten. Tomorrow I will do it again, and the day after that. There are worse careers.
And if anyone asks me whether I fear for her, I will blink and say, "Only when she's not laughing."
Inside, though, where the truth lives like a careful animal, I am still a little panicked. I will sleep eventually. I will fix the code again tomorrow. I will hold my breath and count down two minutes the next time she smiles into my ear and says, "Enjoy the view."