Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The warehouse smelled like rust and rain-soaked cardboard, like the place had been abandoned halfway through falling apart. Water dripped from a hole in the ceiling, echoing as it splashed onto broken concrete.

Jane moved between a row of leaning shelves that had once been full of printer supplies but now were nothing more than temporary housing for spiders and the occasional mouse. Her boots were soundless as she moved, gun loose in her hand. Something didn’t sit right. The silence was too silent.

She paused near several rolls of dusty pallet wrap, letting her eyes adjust to the faint light that spilled in through a broken window on the west wall.

Weller’s voice crackled in her ear.

“North corridor’s clear,” he said.

Jane scanned her quadrant again.

“East loading bay’s empty,” she said. “No sign of the van.”

It was supposed to be simple. Anton Devereux, ex-Interpol turned broker for hire, was supposed to be offloading stolen surveillance tech in a deal Patterson had traced to this abandoned supply depot in Jersey City. Simple retrieval. In and out. No badges, no backup, just them. That used to feel like freedom. Now, just felt thin.

The problem was, there was no sign of Devereux.

Jane crouched near a broken crate, gloved fingers brushing the dirt. Fresh tire tracks. Someone had been here recently, but the bay was cold. No voices, no van, and no sign of their target.

“I don’t like this,” Jane admitted.

“Maybe he got spooked,” Weller offered after a beat.

“Or maybe someone tipped him off,” she said quietly.

A low electric hum filled the room, like an electric garage door opening. Jane turned toward the sound and followed it carefully, her eyes narrowing as she pushed through a door at the end of the row.  It opened into a narrow room full of dead monitors and dust-caked server racks. A single ancient monitor glowed a faint blue, flickering with a command line.

She crossed to it slowly, her pulse ticking a little faster. Every fiber of her being told her something was wrong, and the hair pricked up on the back of her neck.

The code on the screen wasn’t standard surveillance routing. There was nothing standard about it – especially being in a space that time had seemingly forgot. It wasn’t Patterson’s work, either. It was newer, cleaner, and running off a server that shouldn’t exist.

She hit record on her body cam, took two steps back, and paused.

“Kurt, you seeing this?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Weller replied.

At the bottom of the screen was a string of numbers. At first glance, they may have been mistaken for coordinates or time codes. But coordinates and time codes wouldn’t have been paired up with names and locations. It was almost like a gambler’s odds sheet.

Jane recognized each name on the list, and a chill settled at the base of her spine.  Her name wasn’t at the top, but it may as well have been.

Jane Doe.

And just underneath it: Kurt Weller.

They weren’t tracking a deal. They were tracking them.

She tapped her comms again.

“They knew we were coming.”

Chapter Text

Three weeks earlier…

The Catskills were colder than they should be for early fall. The morning fog clung to the evergreens, and the smell of wet pine and burnt coffee drifted from the camp stove outside of the cabin. Jane pulled the sleeves of her thermal up over her knuckles and sat back on the porch steps, her gaze fixed somewhere off in the tree line.

She heard Weller before she saw him. He always seemed to move heavy when he wasn’t in the field. It was like some part of him didn’t quite know how to power down without powering all the way off. He stepped out of the cabin with a mug in each hand, pausing just long enough to nudge the screen door closed with his shoulder.

He handed her a chipped blue mug.

“It’s terrible,” he warned.

Jane took a sip anyway.

“Still better than the NYO’s.”

Weller gave a faint smile, but it didn’t last. He sat beside her on the steps and followed her gaze while they sat in silence.

“I thought it would feel different,” Jane said finally, interrupting the quiet morning. “Being cleared. Being… free.”

“You thought it would feel better,” Weller said.

She gave a small shrug.

“I don’t know,” Jane admitted. “I guess I thought I’d feel something. Relief, closure, rage. Something. But mostly I feel…”

“Stuck? Bored?” Weller supplied.

“Yeah.”

He set his mug down.

“I was trained to do a job. All of us were. You don’t just undo that because someone says you can’t wear the badge anymore,” he said.

“They didn’t say we couldn’t,” Jane corrected. “They just made it impossible to go back.”

Weller didn’t argue. He didn’t need to.

“Maybe we don’t need to go back,” he said after a long moment.

Jane drew her knees up and rested her arms across them.

“You’ve been thinking about it.”

Weller glanced at her and took a long swallow of his coffee.

“I’ve been thinking,” he began slowly, “that waiting around for someone to fix the world isn’t working.”

She nodded like she already knew. Because she did.

“We wouldn’t be FBI,” Weller continued. “No badges, no funding, probably no backup. We’d have to stay underground.”

Jane turned her gaze back to the tree line and watched the morning fog curl around the branches.

“You think they’ll say yes?”

“No,” Weller said. “But I think they’ll listen.”

***

The smell of burnt toast and coffee hung in the air. Patterson sat cross-legged at the kitchen table, her laptop surrounded by two monitors, a notepad full of hastily sketched flowcharts, and a Critical Role mug that hadn’t held hot coffee in at least an hour.

“…and remember, the key with dictionaries is that they are mutable,” she said, glancing up at her webcam. “Which is good news for you and bad news for your debugging window.”

A row of faces filled the screen, most of them young women – some in hoodies, one in a bright hijab, another with a baby bouncing on her knee. The weekly workshop had started off as a one-off favor for a friend at GirlCode but had quickly morphed into something Patterson looked forward to more than she expected.

She shifted slightly, her headphone wire snagging against a stack of textbooks that doubled as a mic stand.

“You’ll want to run your .get() call before trying to update the key value, or you’re gonna end up chasing a ghost in the stack trace,” she continued and took a sip from her cold coffee. “Speaking of… Jules, I still think your ghost detector app is great. I can’t wait to beta test that.”

A loud bang came from the next room like the sound of something solid hitting hardwood. Patterson flinched.

She looked at the camera deadpan.

“I apologize for the noise,” she said. “My girlfriend has decided to redecorate the apartment. Aggressively.”

Tasha’s voice carried from the living room.

“That shelf was a hazard.”

“To who?” Patterson muttered, then turned back to the screen with a brighter smile. “Anyway, that’s your warning about mutable types. Now, let’s walk through this loop again, but this time, let’s break it on purpose. Failure is how we learn, right?

She walked them through the rest of the segment, cracking dry jokes and fielding question in the chat until she glanced at the clock, a bright red analog in the shape of a Nuka Cola bottle cap  mounted on the far wall.

“Alright, we’re gonna wrap for today. Same time next week, and don’t forget to email your broken code. I’ll get feedback to you before our next session.”

Faces blinked out as the call ended. Patterson sat back in her chair, rubbed her temples, and shut her laptop halfway. The silence was interrupted by the sound of a chair being dragged across the floor.

She waited a moment and then twisted around to face the living room.

“You know, most people rearrange furniture once, not on an hourly rotation,” she teased.

Tasha appeared in the doorway, one hand braced against the wall. She wore loose joggers and a tank top, her hair twisted up and pinned with a pencil. A faint sheen of sweat clung to her skin as if she’d been doing drills.

“I got bored,” she admitted. “Needed to move.”

“You moved the entire bookcase.”

“It was leaning.”

Patterson raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Into or away from the window?”

“…Yes.”

Patterson rose and crossed the room, letting her hand brush briefly against Tasha’s as she passed. She surveyed the rearranged furniture silently for a moment.

“Wanna talk about it?” she asked finally, turning to find Tasha watching her.

Tasha shrugged.

“Not much to say.”

“You’re pacing,” Patterson said. “And rebuilding the apartment. And picking fights with poor defenseless shelves.”

“I’m not picking fights,” Tasha said. She sighed. “I’m just… I don’t know. I’m ready. For something. Anything.”

Patterson nodded. She understood. Last time she’d talked to Jane, she’d said something similar. Sitting still wasn’t in their nature. They had become used to noise — missions, alerts, movements, bullets flying through the air, and crude bombs exploding at their heels.

“I get it,” she said. “But you also are still recovering. Maybe take a break.”

Tasha flopped down onto the couch.

“Recovery sucks, P.”

“I know.”

“Like a lot.”

“I know this, too.”

Tasha let the silence spin out for a moment before letting the real problem out.

“I feel useless,” she said flatly.

Patterson sat on the couch beside Tasha and was about to respond when her phone chimed. She fished it out of the pocket of her lounge pants and checked the screen.

“Jane,” she said.

Tasha frowned, tilting her head.

“I thought she and Weller were enjoying the great outdoors or some crap.”

“She is.”

***

Boston’s apartment looked like a Crate & Barrel catalog had been invaded by a thrift store. Modern lighting, pristine white counters, and a collection of wines shared space with a vintage Ms. Pac-Man machine, a throw blanket that looked as if it had been a children’s parachute in another life, and a stack of well-worn vinyl records that Rich kept meaning to alphabetize.

Rich sprawled inelegantly across Boston’s designer couch.

“I feel itchy,” he complained for the third time that morning.

Boston glanced up from the kitchen where he was carefully assembling a charcuterie board.

“You’re wearing flannel pajama pants in June,” he deadpanned. “Of course you’re itchy.”

“Not like that,” Rich said. “Like… existentially.”

Boston raised an eyebrow.

“Did you eat more gummies than you meant to again?”

Rich gave a dramatic groan.

“No! I mean, yes, but also, no. It’s not the gummies. It’s…” He waved his hand in a vague spiral. “…the world. The great cosmic injustice of it all.”

Boston turned his attention back to his charcuterie board and continued turning thinly sliced pieces of cured meat into tiny roses.

“This again.”

“Yes this again,” Rich said, sitting up. “People like us — genius-adjacent misfits with poor impulse control and access to encrypted servers— we don’t just retire and take up birdwatching.”

“You never had a badge, Rich.”

“I had an FBI ID card and a Kevlar vest that said ‘consultant’ on it. I was basically leading a strike team. Honorarily I mean.”

Boston leaned against the counter.

“You want to risk your life again because you miss being…honorary?”

Rich hesitated, then stood and crossed the room to the windows, looking out over the brownstone rooftops.

“You nearly got disappeared,” Boston reminded him gently. “You were a ghost for weeks.”

“And you helped bring me back.”

They locked eyes.

Boston softened. “I like this life.”

“I like this life too,” Rich said. “But I’m starting to think I’m not built to just… sit still.”

Boston took a beat, then nodded toward the phone buzzing on the table.

“You gonna answer that?”

Rich checked the screen. It was a message from Jane. Just four words.

“Can we talk today?”

He didn’t answer immediately.

Boston walked over, slid an arm around his waist, and kissed his shoulder.

“If you go,” he said, “you go with a plan. And you come back.”

Rich nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

Chapter Text

The garage smelled like motor oil, dust, and the faint lingering scent of whatever rodent had died behind the water heater last winter. Patterson crouched beside a milk crate full of tangled ethernet cables an let out an exasperated groan that echoed off the cinderblock walls.

“This is not a command center,” she muttered. “This is a crime scene. Against cable management. Against everything.”

She shoved aside a box labeled Xmas Stuff and ducked behind the beat up desk that now held a mere two monitors, a keyboard missing a few keycaps, and a battered laptop that whined every time she launched a script. A spare router blinked weakly from the top of a dented filing cabinet, its signal strength flickering like it, too, was giving up.

Outside the wind kicked up, causing the old garage door to rattle in its track. A frayed extension cord snaked through the gap under the side door and plugged into a surge protector that Patterson wasn’t confident would protect against even the smallest power surge.

“There’s no flow! No flow. None,” she complained to no one. “I have too many inputs. Half of them are so old they were around when Al Gore invented the internet.” She stood abruptly and knocked her empty coffee cup off the desk. It landed upside down on a pile of cables. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

From the far side of the garage, Tasha’s voice drifted in through the cracked inner door.

“It’s only temporary,” she called. “You can do this.”

“I had a system, Tash,” Patterson called back, her voice approaching a whine. She dragged a monitor a few inches to the left and then immediately moved it back. “And also? I miss the lab.”

She leaned over the desk again, typing furiously. A data stream crawled across one monitor. Packet sniffing from a local business network, most likely the dry cleaner three doors down that hadn’t updated their firmware since Obama’s first term. It wasn’t elegant. It was barely functional, but it did function, and it did let her crawl the dark web.

Barely.

“I swear, if I get one more buffer error…” she began.

And then Tasha was behind her, hands on her upper arms, rubbing lightly in an attempt to ground her.

“Babe, it’s okay,” Tasha murmured. “Stop for just a second and breathe, okay?”

Patterson visibly deflated and turned so that she was facing her girlfriend. Had it been anyone else, she might have snapped at them, but Tasha was looking at her without concern and love on her face, and any protests that were forming on her tongue vanished in an instant.

“Tash…” She trailed of and closed her eyes, gathering her thoughts. She continued after a beat. “Was this a mistake?”

Tasha flashed a weak, sympathetic smile. Since they’d said yes to Weller and Jane, her part had been easy: help set up a space and make sure they were ready go when Weller inevitably barked “let’s move” at them. Patterson, however, had spent nearly every waking moment lugging every piece of mismatched computer hardware she could find into their temporary base. She’d sifted through a massive crate of old Cat-5 cables, rejecting half for fraying near the connection and the other half because they “smell funny.” Her stress level had skyrocketed, and there was little anyone could do. Patterson, no matter her frustration, was right; she had a system. And that system had fallen apart in moments.

“Would you rather be home?” Tasha asked carefully. “I was thinking about moving the bed to the other wall.”

Patterson’s eyes went wide.

“What!? Tasha. If you put the bed on the other wall, the sun is going to keep me awake. I’ll never sleep again,” she protested. “That’s a terrible idea!”

Tasha smiled broadly.

“I know.”

Patterson’s mouth snapped shut and she narrowed her eyes in mock accusation.

“You were just distracting me,” she accused.

Tasha kissed her lightly and then stepped back, nearly tripping over a coiled extension cord that Patterson had rejected because “I swear it’s mocking me.”

“And it worked,” Tasha said. “Come on. What can I do? Can I help?”

Patterson sighed and shook her head slightly.

“I don’t know,” she began.

The garage door creaked open, and Weller’s voice cut through the chaos.

“We brought sandwiches,” he said.

Jane followed close behind, a paper bag from a local deli in one hand and a roll of blueprints in another.

Patterson blinked at them.

“You’re not just here to see the world’s oldest server?”

Weller handed her a wrapped sandwich.

“Tempting, but no.”

Jane unrolled the blueprints across the only clear section of desk.

“How would you feel about doing this is an actual workspace?”

Patterson raised an eyebrow.

“With reliable power?”

“And walls that weren’t formerly home to a family of possums,” Weller added.

“Tash, help me pack this stuff up.”

***

The elevator had given up a long time ago, so they took the stairs. Five flights up a concrete stairwell that smelled like dust, old rubber, and some cleaning product none of them could immediately identify. The overhead lights flickered to life only after Weller kicked the breaker box with the flat of his boot.

When they reached the main floor, Jane shoved a heavy metal door open and stepped into what looked like an old permitting office. Rows of mismatched desks lined the open room, most stacked with yellowing forms, unplugged phones, and molding coffee mugs. A faded city seal for the Depart of Public Infrastructure, Yonkers, was stenciled on the far wall in peeling paint.

“Place used to handle zoning applications, bridge inspections, municipal fiber permits,” Weller said as he turned a slow circle in the space like a realtor showing off their prize property. “City pulled the plug five years ago. Too old, too expensive to modernize. No one wanted the lease.”

Patterson’s eyes lit up.

“But there’s wiring.” She ducked under a bundle of exposed conduit and traced it back to a corroded panel. “Ethernet ports, a server cage. Oh my god, they ran fiber through the basement.”

Tasha wandered toward the back where a faded corkboard still held an employee of the month photo from 2008.

“No one’s gonna miss this place?”

“Leased it under a shell company Jane and I set up,” Weller explained. “No one’s touched the place in years.”

Patterson crouched beside the main switchboard and flicked it experimentally. A few floor outlets hummed to life.

“It’s a fixer-upper for sure, but it’s got promise.”

She stood and scanned the room again, mentally cataloging what’d she need: power distribution, servers, uplinks, environmental control. A decent chair.”

Jane and Tasha exchanged a look.

“She’s planning something,” Jane said.

“Has that expensive look in her eye,” Tasha replied.

“Just… thinking aloud,” Patterson said, brushing her hands on her jeans. “I’ve got some hardware stashed from an old contract. If I reroute a few power taps and install a decent battery backup, this could work.”

Tasha arched an eyebrow.

“We talking ‘pull from the closet’ or ‘we’re eating ramen for the next two years’?”

Patterson hesitated. They’d moved in together quickly and had never really talked about money aside from splitting basic expenses. She shrugged.

“A little of both,” she admitted.

“P…”

“No, I mean, yes. I have some stuff in boxes that I can bring over, but I’m thinking Wizardville money,” Patterson replied.

Jane smirked. “You’re still riding that app wave?”

“Turns out enchanted goats and digital spellcraft have long financial tails,” Patterson said. “I reinvested. Built some automation. There’s still a surprising number of microtransactions coming in from Romania.”

Weller shook his head.

“So this whole operation is being funded by pixelated sheep?”

“Dire goats,” Patterson corrected. “But yes.” She saw the frown on Tasha’s face. “If we’re doing this, it has to run clean. I can’t keep duct-taping together a bunch of junk that didn’t work right 10 years ago.”

Tasha nodded, quiet.

“Ok, we’ll figure it out.”

“I know,” Patterson said, her voice softer as she stepped closer to her. “We can’t start on scraps. Not if we want this to work. And I know we haven’t really talked about money but…it’s… it’ll be okay.” She pulled her phone from her back pocket and quickly tapped the screen, navigating to a banking app. She glanced around to make sure it was only Tasha looking and then showed the account balance.

Tasha glanced at the phone and then back up at Patterson. She tried her best to keep her face neutral even though it was pure shock racing through her.

“Wizardville?” she asked.

“Virtual dire goats,” Patterson confirmed. She turned back to the rest of the team. “I can work with this.”

“This is home base then,” Weller said.

Jane glanced between them.

“Then maybe it’s time we make this official.”

Patterson arched an eyebrow.

“You bring a flag or something?”

“No,” Jane said. “We brought a case.”

Chapter Text

The hum of fluorescent lights was almost comforting now.

Three days after Jane and Weller had led them up a set of winding concrete stairs, the Yonkers command center had gone from haunted zoning office to something that actually resembled a functioning tactical hub. The desks had been cleared and rearranged into a makeshift horseshoe; monitors were mounted cleanly on rolling racks; even the cracked linoleum floor had been scrubbed down until only the worst stains remained.

Patterson sat at the head of the curve, one leg tucked under her in a wheeled chair she’d personally deemed the “least offensive option.” A freshly cleaned whiteboard to her left was already packed with diagrams and bullet points in red and green ink, while three monitors flickered behind her with maps, facial recognition logs, and partial code pulls from a corrupted drive.

Weller leaned against the side of the desk, arms crossed, watching her work.

“Okay,” Patterson said, tapping a dry-erase marker against her palm. “Recap: Anton Devereux, former Interpol asset turned freelance broker. He was flagged trying to fence next-gen neural interface hardware to an unknown buyer out of Prague. I traced the handshake to a VPN endpoint here in Jersey City. We tried to intercept the handoff at the supply depot—”

“—And walked into a ghost town,” Jane finished.

“Not a ghost town,” Patterson corrected. “Someone was there or had been there. That command terminal wasn’t just old; it was rigged. It booted a modified variant of a predictive behavior suite—something I haven’t seen since Helios. But this one’s cleaner. Lighter.”

She clicked a key. One of the displays pulled up a freeze-frame of the terminal interface from Jane’s bodycam footage: a scrolling list of names, all with odds next to them.

“We were on the list,” Weller said.

“Everyone was on the list,” Patterson replied grimly. “Anyone who ever wore a badge, pushed a button, or got their hands on something they shouldn’t have.”

“Helios adjacent?” Jane asked.

“Helios inspired,” Patterson said. “But not a copycat. Someone’s building something new. Maybe testing it in the field.”

“And they were testing it on us,” Weller said.

Jane nodded. “You think Devereux spooked?”

“I think someone made him disappear,” Tasha said from across the room.

She stood near the makeshift gear locker they’d built out of an old utility cabinet. Her jacket was half-zipped, and her hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail. She held a tablet in one hand, flipping through something quickly.

Patterson turned toward her, curious.

“You find something?”

“Maybe,” Tasha replied, crossing to the desk and dropping the tablet in front of them. “Interpol has him flagged as a person of interest in a half-dozen black market tech trades. But no one’s seen him in person since Berlin, six months ago. That means either he went underground—or someone buried him.”

“Could be Rendition Group,” she added.

Weller frowned. “Private contractors?”

“More like private muscle for hire,” Tasha said. “Used to be CIA-adjacent before they got disavowed. Rebranded, but the shell corp’s the same. I ran a scrape against their recent acquisitions—new trucks, gear, dummy addresses—and guess what came up?”

She tapped the tablet again and zoomed in on a blurry satellite image of a fenced compound near the Jersey docks.

“Same logistics trail leads to this facility. Warehouse, no signage. Regular inbound shipments, heavy security. Could be a new black site. Could be something worse.”

Jane leaned in. “And that’s where you think they took Devereux?”

Tasha met her gaze, sharp and certain.

“If he’s alive? That’s where he is.”

The room fell silent for a beat.

Then Weller said, “Sounds like we’ve got our first real op.”

“And our first real test,” Jane added.

Patterson exhaled, her mind already moving ten steps ahead. “Okay. I can rig a localized signal jammer. If they’re running anything predictive like Helios, they’re going to need clean data streams.”

“I’ll build out an entry plan,” Jane said. “We’ll need eyes on the perimeter by tomorrow.”

Weller looked to Tasha.

“Think you can get us a fake delivery manifest?”

Tasha smirked. “You’re seriously asking me that?”

He grinned. “Didn’t want to insult your skillset.”

“Good,” she said, already tapping away. “Because I’m gonna need a burner phone, access to an old shipping network, and about 30 minutes of uninterrupted silence.”

She looked at Patterson, then nodded slightly. “Let’s move.”

Weller frowned and put his hands on his hips.

“That’s my line,” he complained as the rest of the team broke off to their respective tasks.

***

The warehouse looked abandoned, but Jane had learned long ago not to trust appearances. It sat behind a weather-worn chain-link fence on the edge of the old industrial zone, tucked between a shuttered metalworks plant and a distribution yard with more broken windows than working forklifts.

She crouched beside a rusted refrigeration unit, eyes fixed on the structure through a compact scope. Beside her, Weller knelt in the shadows, tracking a different angle with binoculars.

“Doesn’t look like much,” he said quietly.

Jane adjusted her grip. “That’s the point.”

At first glance, the building could have passed for a forgotten shipping depot. But Jane had already clocked two mounted cameras and a perimeter light system—too new for a place this rundown. One guard made regular rounds in civilian clothes, but his pacing, posture, and gear suggested military training.

“Patrol loop’s on an eleven-minute interval,” she said, checking the timestamp on her burner tablet. “That was lap four.”

“Vehicle traffic?”

“One black van. No tags, no markings. Pulled in about ten minutes ago. Still parked at dock three.”

Weller nodded. “Could be nothing.”

Jane didn’t respond.

A soft crackle came through their comms. “Definitely not nothing,” Patterson said. “That van dropped off grid the second it crossed into the lot. No registration, no external pings. If it wasn’t sitting in your line of sight, it wouldn’t exist.”

Weller arched a brow. “Cloaking?”

“Or some really creative plate spoofing. Either way, it’s high-end.”

Jane shifted her weight slightly, eyes still locked on the warehouse. “Security’s smart. Casual movements, but the coverage is tight. We’re not getting in through the front without drawing heat.”

Weller scanned the side lot again. “Back entrance?”

“Possibly. There’s a loading bay that’s half-shuttered. No visible cameras, but I’m betting they’ve got motion sensors or pressure alarms tied in.”

Patterson’s voice came through the comms again, this time a little tighter. “I just got a partial handshake from inside the building. The predictive suite kicked back online for about thirty seconds before it dropped again. It’s running on a closed system, probably air-gapped. That’s deliberate.”

Jane frowned. “So they’re protecting something.”

“Or someone,” Tasha’s voice added, calm and even. “That system’s not just tracking. It’s analyzing movement, behavior, probability. That’s not warehouse-level paranoia. That’s tactical.”

Weller gave a short nod. “This place isn’t a front. It’s the real thing.”

“Can you get closer?” Patterson asked.

“We can try,” Jane replied. “But we’re not breaching anything tonight. This is a scout, not an op.”

“Copy that,” Patterson said. “I’ll keep mapping out infrastructure. There’s a secondary fiber line that looks like it was patched into the block about three months ago. Might be a private data channel.”

“Could we tap it?” Tasha asked.

There was a pause on the line—Patterson thinking, calculating.

“Maybe. But we’d need physical access. A junction box, or a relay point. Tasha and I will pull building permits, utility maps, whatever’s still in the system.”

Weller stood slowly, brushing dust from his knee.

“We’ll take a long loop out. Don’t want to spook the watchers.”

“Not too long,” Jane added. “If they’re running behavioral sweeps, they’ll notice a pattern if we hover.”

As they shifted back into the cover of the alley, Jane glanced once more at the low, windowless walls of the warehouse.

“No markings. No signage. Just enough activity to look forgettable,” she muttered.

Weller nodded. “Which makes it the most interesting thing on this block.”

They moved out without another word, quiet and practiced. Across the comms, Patterson’s voice crackled softly.

“We’ll be ready when you are.”

Jane gave the faintest nod, more to herself than anyone else, as she quickly doubled back toward a rotted utility post near the perimeter. She pried loose a camouflaged sensor no larger than a flash drive from beneath a metal lip and tucked it into her jacket pocket. Just a little something she'd planted during their first pass—an old network sniffer she and Weller used to use in the field.

“Then let’s get to work.”

***

The air in the Yonkers command center smelled faintly of solder and whiteboard markers, a small, somewhat reassuring upgrade from mildew and dead possum.

Tasha stood at the makeshift gear rack, rolling a spare comm earpiece between her fingers as Patterson paced in tight circles nearby. Every screen in the room was active, from the satellite feed frozen mid-refresh to the code window running a flickering diagnostic trace.

“They’re running a variant I haven’t seen before,” Patterson said, half to herself. “It’s lean, efficient, no unnecessary overhead. Whoever wrote this knows what they’re doing.”

Tasha tilted her head.

“Like Kathy-level?”

Patterson made a face.

“Ugh. Don’t say that. My stomach turned.”

“I mean it as a compliment. Kinda.”

“She used Comic Sans in a ransomware message,” Patterson replied pointedly.

Tasha grinned.

“Okay, fair.”

Patterson stopped pacing and stared at one of the monitors, eyes narrowing.

“But yeah. It’s smart code. Adaptive. It doesn’t just watch behavior, it’s predicting next moves, and rewriting its own weights in real time. That’s not just machine learning. That’s controlled evolution.”

Tasha crossed to her side.

“Meaning?”

“It means the system could be teaching itself how to outmaneuver us.” Patterson rubbed the bridge of her nose. “And the more data it gets, the faster it learns.”

Tasha’s hand came to rest gently on her lower back, grounding.

“So we don’t let it learn,” she said. “We control what it sees. Limit its input.”

Patterson turned, surprised.

“That’s… actually brilliant.”

Tasha smirked.

“I was CIA, remember? Not just your hot sidekick.”

Patterson’s expression softened, but she held Tasha’s gaze.

“You think I see you that way?”

“I think you sometimes forget I’ve done my own share of dangerous nerd work,” Tasha replied, hefting herself up to sit on a nearby desk.

Patterson reached up, brushing a thumb across Tasha’s cheek.

“I know exactly who you are.”

The outer door groaned open, and Jane stepped in, followed by Weller.

“Perimeter’s tight,” Jane reported, pulling a small USB stick from her jacket. “Sniffer I planted caught a partial loop off their wireless cam network. It recorded a live loop before we pulled out. Should give us a pattern to work from”

Patterson took the drive and slotted it into her hub.

“You picked up video?” she asked, eyebrows rising.

Jane nodded. “Minimal. Low res. Enough to be useful.”

Patterson was already parsing the data, her fingers dancing across the keyboard.

“If I can match this to the timestamps from the predictive suite’s last burst, I might be able to isolate what triggered the system and fake a similar loop.”

Jane leaned on the desk. “Can you do that?”

“If I can get a physical connection? Yeah. But it’s gonna take finesse.”

Weller crossed his arms. “Then we go in light. No full assault. Quiet entry, eyes on Devereux, assess the system, and extract. In and out.”

Jane nodded. “We move tomorrow. Predawn.”

Tasha was already checking a sidearm, her movements methodical.

“You sure we shouldn’t wait and gather more data?”

Weller looked at her, serious.

“Every hour we wait, that thing learns more about how we operate.”

Patterson tapped a few final commands.

“Then let’s not give it the chance.”

***

The sky was still dark when the team took their positions. A thin layer of fog hugged the streets near the docks, muting the distant hum of early delivery trucks and casting a bluish sheen over the pavement.

Patterson crouched beside the rear axle of their borrowed delivery van, double-checking the loop she'd loaded onto the portable uplink.

“Okay. If the predictive system’s active, this feed should mimic the last twenty minutes of patrol data,” she said. “It'll buy us a window, just not a big one.”

Jane was already in place near the loading doc. She spoke quietly into her comm unit.

“Got it. Motion sensors?”

“Still likely,” Tasha said, kneeling beside a junction box she’d cracked open five minutes earlier. “I’ve got a bypass on the lower threshold, but any sudden movement or extra weight could trigger secondary failsafes.”

Weller glanced at the side of the building, then at the team.

“We move slow, deliberate, minimal noise,” he said. “Once inside, we split up. Jane and I will take the upper level; Patterson and Tasha head for the server room.”

“No pressure,” she muttered, pulling on her gloves. “Just disabling an evolving AI before sunrise.”

Tasha touched Patterson’s wrist, firm but warm.

“We’ve got this. Don’t overthink it.”

Patterson nodded her understanding and looked to Jane for the signal to move out.

***

The back door opened with a whisper, the latch yielding to a lockpick tool Tasha worked in practiced silence. Patterson held a small signal scanner steady just behind her, watching for any spikes in electromagnetic activity.

“We’re clean,” Patterson murmured.

Tasha gave the latch one last twist, then eased the door open.

“After you.”

Patterson slipped inside, crouching low, eyes adjusting to the dim light. The corridor smelled like oil and burnt plastic, the walls unfinished and humming faintly with buried cables. Motion sensors blinked green along the ceiling, active, but untouched.

Jane and Weller moved in behind them, weapons drawn, footsteps muffled by rubber soles. A stairwell loomed ahead, its upper platform partially visible through metal grating. Jane motioned upward and took point with Weller on her six.

Tasha tapped Patterson’s shoulder and angled right, guiding them down a narrow hall toward the server room they’d identified during recon. Every few feet, Patterson paused to scan the wall, checking for hardwired traps or surprise alarms. So far, they were coming up clean.

“Hallway’s clean,” she whispered. “Whatever they’ve got running, it’s internal.”

Tasha nodded and kept moving, her sidearm low but ready.

“Then let’s not wake it up.”

They reached the end of the corridor. A reinforced door loomed ahead, keypad blinking red. Patterson dropped her pack and pulled out a portable loop array.

“Give me sixty seconds,” she said, unrolling the device and affixing its thin leads to the outer casing.

Tasha turned and faced the corridor behind them, eyes sharp as she constantly scanned for any possible movement.

“Thirty,” Patterson corrected, fingers flying. “Found a firmware exploit.”

“Of course you did,” Tasha murmured, not turning.

The door clicked. Patterson exhaled.

Inside, the server room pulsed with low blue light. Rack after rack of hardware lined the narrow space, all humming quietly.

Patterson hesitated at the threshold.

“This is it.”

Tasha stepped past her, clearing the room quickly.

“Let’s do what we came to do.”

***

The air upstairs was stale and dry, heavy with the dust of disuse and the faint tang of old wiring.

Weller moved first, clearing each corner with tight, practiced sweeps. Jane trailed just behind, her steps silent on the cracked concrete floor.

They advanced in silence, their comms set to standby. Most of the doors lining the hallway were either boarded shut or rusted off their hinges, offering only hollow glimpses into forgotten storage spaces and gutted offices. A cracked safety sign on one wall read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, its arrow pointing toward a stairwell half-choked with debris.

Jane paused at the landing, one hand brushing the wall for balance.

“This place looks like it’s been stripped for parts,” she observed.

Weller nodded.

“Which makes me wonder why they’d keep using it.”

They reached the top of the landing and paused at a junction: one hallway stretched toward the administrative wing, the other toward a row of sealed interior rooms, each labeled only by a stenciled number. Jane gestured right.

“This way.”

Weller followed, weapon lowered but ready. The hallway narrowed slightly, the walls lined with sealed doors and what looked like a recently installed biometric panel—taped over hastily, as if someone hadn’t finished the job.

“Half-built op center?” he asked.

“Or repurposed,” Jane said. “This could’ve started as a front and shifted into something real.”

At the third door, she stopped. A faint vibration tickled her palm as she pressed it to the surface—too subtle for normal HVAC. A low-frequency hum, like a live feed or powered server rack behind the wall.

“Feel that?”

Weller nodded, jaw set. “Whatever they’re hiding, it’s not just data. This setup’s deliberate.”

Jane stepped back and glanced toward the far end of the corridor. A red glow pulsed from a small wall-mounted panel just outside a locked room. Not an alarm—yet—but a heartbeat signal. Some kind of monitoring relay.

Weller tilted his head. “We tripping anything?”

“Not yet,” Jane said. “But someone’s gonna know we’re in the building if we don’t move fast.”

Suddenly, a soft metallic creak echoed from down the hall.

They both froze.

Jane signaled: one—close in. Two—slow check.

They flanked the next door, weapons up, breaths measured.

Another sound—a rustle. Soft, but distinct. Not pipes. Not settling beams.

Weller eased the door open. Jane slipped her scope through the gap, scanned, then nodded.

They stepped inside.

A cot sat in the corner. A tray of food was untouched. A wall-mounted monitor still flickered with a silent feed. Bolted restraints gleamed beneath a harsh overhead bulb.

But the room was empty.

Jane stepped back, her face unreadable.

“He was here,” she said quietly.

Weller looked over. “Devereux?”

She gave a single nod. “Not long ago.”

Weller checked the hall. Clear.

“Then either he’s gone,” he said, “or someone moved him.”

Jane’s jaw tightened.

“And someone’s still running this place.” She glanced at the monitor, then back toward the door. “Wanna find out who’s home?”

***

The server access point was tucked behind a panel in what looked like an old maintenance corridor—wires dangling like vines, the air metallic and close. Patterson crouched beside the junction box, prying at the corroded seam with a slim tool while Tasha stood watch, sidearm angled low.

“They really didn’t want anyone getting in here,” Patterson muttered. “This panel wasn’t just sealed. It was epoxied shut.”

The seam gave way with a soft click, and Patterson exhaled, flipping the panel open to reveal a tangled nest of fiber lines and heat-shielded relay switches.

“Okay,” she breathed. “Now we’re in business.”

As she worked, a low scrape echoed from the corridor behind them.

Tasha turned on instinct, sweeping the hallway with sharp eyes. One breath later, she was moving—quick and quiet, disappearing down the corridor.

Patterson barely looked up.

“Please tell me that was a mop bucket.”

No answer.

Then Tasha returned, crouched beside her, holding up a small, grimy panel roughly the size of a cigarette pack.

“Trip sensor,” she said. “Pressure-triggered. Low-tech, but tied to a relay that probably pinged the internal surveillance net. Damn near invisible unless you’re looking for it.”

Patterson blinked.

“Did you disable it?”

“Pulled the relay. With any luck, it just reads like signal interference.”

Patterson let out a slow breath.

“Okay… way to go, Agent Double O Z.”

Tasha gave a faint smile, tucking the device into her jacket.

“Let’s not make it a habit.”

Patterson leaned back in, refocusing on the tangle of fiber lines. The stripped shielding on a few of the older threads confirmed her suspicion. This was a retrofit job, not a purpose-built server hub. Someone had wired this in fast and not for long-term stability.

“Okay,” she murmured, more to herself than to Tasha. “Secondary line’s patched through here. And… jackpot. There’s a diagnostic tap running piggyback on the primary feed.”

She pulled a cable from her satchel and slotted it into the diagnostic port with a soft click. Her portable rig lit up immediately, scrolling lines of code across the narrow screen.

“It’s not encrypted end-to-end,” she said, eyes narrowing. “That’s either super super sloppy… or bait.”

Tasha shifted beside her, scanning the hallway again.

“You think it’s a trap?”

“I think we’re about to find out.” Patterson’s fingers flew across the keypad, launching a sandbox routine to isolate the handshake.

The screen pulsed, flickered, and then held steady.

“Okay,” she said again, slower this time. “We’ve got a mirror. I’m seeing partial system logs and internal movement predictions. Confirmed live feed. It’s updating faster than I expected.”

Tasha leaned closer.

“What’s it saying?”

Patterson hesitated. Then: “It’s not just tracking us. It’s prioritizing us.”

Tasha frowned.

“Define ‘prioritizing.’”

“I mean it’s ranking our threat levels,” Patterson explained, barely looking away from the screen to glance at Tasha. “It’s assigning behavioral probabilities. Estimating who’s most likely to disrupt operations.”

“And?”

Patterson swallowed.

“You’re number two.”

Tasha’s brow arched.

“Rude. Who’s number one?”

Patterson glanced sideways, a ghost of a smile tugging at her mouth.

“Me.”

Tasha shook her head with an incredulous laugh.

“Damn right.”

Patterson tapped a command to begin the download.

“I’m scraping everything I can. Models, logs, user access history. If Devereux touched the system, I’ll find it.”

“Better make it fast,” Tasha said. “If we triggered anything, someone could already be en route.”

“Five more minutes.”

“I’ll give you three.”

Patterson didn’t argue. Her focus narrowed, screen reflected in her eyes.

Then, almost absently: “Hey, Z?”

Tasha glanced over.

“If this whole thing goes sideways… thanks for watching my six.”

Tasha’s voice was quiet, steady. “Always.”

***

They moved deeper into the corridor, footsteps soundless against scuffed tile. The rooms beyond the locked door grew smaller, tighter; offices turned holding cells, with hastily installed locks and stripped-out wiring.

Jane held up a fist, pausing at a T-junction.

Down the left hall, an emergency light flickered low red against a peeling EXIT stencil. To the right, faint mechanical noise—whirring, rhythmic. HVAC? No. Too localized.

“Something’s powered up back there,” she murmured.

Weller adjusted his grip on the rifle.

“Let’s check it out.”

They advanced right, hugging the wall. At the final door, Jane leaned in. No voices. Just the steady hum, punctuated by a faint clack every few seconds.

She popped the lock with a short jab of her tool. The door creaked as it opened—too loud. They both winced but entered quickly.

A small control room was lined with mismatched monitors and a tangle of Ethernet cables. One screen showed static; another flickered through camera feeds, some dark and others grainy with a night vision overlay. A single laptop sat open, the screen still active with a mug full of coffee beside it.

“Someone just left,” Weller said.

Jane was already moving. She tapped a key. The feed blinked—then stabilized.

She scanned the timestamp.

“That hallway’s live. They’re still watching us.”

Weller leaned in. One of the feeds showed the server corridor—Patterson crouched, Tasha at her back.

“Damn it.”

Jane killed the monitor feed and yanked the drive from the laptop.

“They know we’re here.”

“Then we don’t have much time.”

Jane’s jaw clenched.

“Let’s find the power source. If we can cut the uplink—”

“Or trace it,” Weller said. “Maybe it leads to where they moved Devereux.”

She nodded. “Either way, we end this fast.”

He slung his rifle back up, covering the door.

“Let’s move.”

***

Patterson’s rig chimed softly—three rising notes.

“Done,” she breathed. “Logs, movement models, user history. It’s all here.”

She unplugged the cable and set to work packing her gear with rapid precision.

Tasha stood at the corridor’s edge, eyes sweeping for motion.

“Alright, good. Time to go before we end up in the matrix.”

They retraced their steps down the narrow hall, Patterson tucking the cable spool beneath her arm. At the stairwell, Tasha paused.

“Wait.”

She held up a hand, listening.

Then Jane’s voice broke the low static of their comms unit, sharp and clear.

“Abort. Surveillance is live. They’re watching us.”

Tasha tapped her earpiece.

“Got it,” she replied. “Already gone.”

Patterson’s breath caught.

“Did they see the tap?”

“Too late to worry about it now,” Tasha said, already ushering her down the steps. “We’re burning the trail behind us.”

Behind them, the lights overhead flickered—one, then two, then three in a rhythmic pattern.

Patterson muttered, “Not a good sign.”

They hit the landing fast, boots barely touching the ground. At the bottom of the stairwell, Tasha paused to scan the exit, then signaled clear.

“Go,” she said.

They pushed through the door into the wide corridor just as Jane’s voice came through again.

“Server room’s compromised. We’re cutting power from the north corridor. Be clear in sixty seconds.”

Patterson swore under her breath. “If I lose this data—”

“You won’t,” Tasha said firmly, guiding her into a jog. “We’re out of here in forty.”

“And if we’re not?”

Tasha didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

***

The stairwell exit led to a narrow service corridor that fed into the warehouse’s main loading bay. By the time Patterson and Tasha reached the rendezvous point—an alley just west of the perimeter fence—the lights behind them were flickering in strange, syncopated patterns.

Jane and Weller were already there, weapons holstered but eyes sharp.

“You guys good?” Weller asked.

 “Only got chased by a predictive AI,” Patterson said. “Totally fine.”

Jane gave her a once-over, then turned to Tasha.

“Anyone follow?”

Tasha shook her head.

“No movement on the south side. Whatever system’s watching, it’s not chasing.”

Jane nodded.

“Then we move now. We don’t know how long before they lock this place down.”

They slipped through the side access gate, where the van waited—tucked behind a defunct loading ramp, engine already idling.

“Get what you need?” Weller asked as they climbed into the van.

Patterson passed a matte black USB drive to Jane.

“This is everything,” she said. “Logs, access history, movement predictions. It’s prioritizing us, but if Devereux left a fingerprint, I’ll find it.”

Tasha slid in beside her, breathing steady but alert.

“Great,” she said dryly. “Nothing like being the algorithm’s top hit.”

Chapter Text

The stairwell door slammed shut behind them, a dull clang echoing through the concrete corridor. Yonkers HQ wasn’t pretty, but it was secure. Reinforced steel vaults, biometric locks, and enough thermal shielding to keep satellites guessing.

Inside, the team scattered to their corners. Weller secured the weapons case. Jane dropped her tac vest and settled at the secondary terminal. Tasha made a beeline for the kitchenette, yanked open the fridge, and tossed Patterson a bottle of water without asking.

Patterson caught it one-handed, dropped into the swivel chair at her console, and plugged the USB into an isolated port.

“Quarantine protocol live,” she said aloud, mostly for herself. “This thing so much as sneezes at my system, it gets sandboxed into oblivion.”

Tasha leaned against the cold steel doorway separating the operations room from the space they’d set aside for whatever downtime they could scrape together. She folded her arms and watched Patterson work.

“Still think it was bait?” she asked as she headed toward Patterson’s workstation.

“Oh, it was for sure bait,” Patterson replied, eyes locked on the screen. “But it was also good. Like… whoever built this, they weren’t just watching us. They were studying us.”

Jane stepped up behind them.

“What does that mean—studying?”

Patterson gestured to the cluster of movement models now rendering in real time, each loop tagged with labels: Zapata, Doe, Weller, Patterson. Each path plotted with startling precision. Each probability score uncomfortably high.

“It’s running behavioral sims,” she said. “Predicting how we’ll move, where we’ll go next. If we hadn’t triggered that sensor—”

“They would’ve known before we did,” Tasha finished.

Weller joined them, arms crossed.

“So what’s the plan? We sit back and let them make the next move?”

“No,” Jane said. “We pull the thread. If they’re tracking us, it means they know who we are. What we’re capable of. Which means there’s a reason Devereux matters. And we need to find it.”

Patterson nodded without turning.

“I’ve already started tearing down the access logs. Give me a few hours and I’ll have a list of every time this node was hit, from where, and by who. If Devereux left a fingerprint... I’ll find it.”

Silence settled over the room for a moment.

Finally, Weller nodded, hands on his hips.

“Alright. Go get some food. Hydrate. Rest if you can. We debrief in two hours.”

***

The lights were soft. The rain hadn’t let up. Beyond the kitchen window, the city flickered and blurred, like something half-remembered.

Patterson stirred a saucepan of boxed mac and cheese, barefoot, hoodie loose over old jeans. Tasha sat at the counter with a beer, elbow resting on the scarred wood, watching her. She smiled fondly as Patterson worked.

“You know,” Tasha said, voice low, “we were almost taken out by a piece of software today.”

Patterson didn’t look up.

“Uh-huh.”

“And now you’re making comfort food.”

She glanced over, not smiling exactly.

“You want existential dread for dinner?”

Tasha lifted both hands.

“Didn’t say I wasn’t into it.”

The pot clanked against the sink. Patterson scooped the macaroni into two bowls—chipped, mismatched—and slid one over without a word. Then she leaned beside Tasha, her shoulder brushing hers lightly as she picked up her own spoon.

For a while, they ate. The silence wasn’t heavy. Just full.

Patterson broke the silence after a moment, thoughtfully staring into her bowl.

“That system flagged us as the top threats. Not Weller. Not Jane.”

Tasha didn’t miss a beat.

“Yeah. I clocked that.”

Patterson gave a soft huff.

“I’m just a girl. Not a threat.”

Tasha looked over, gaze steady.

“Oh, I think they should be terrified of you.”