The apartment overlooked one of three classified national weapons testing facilities, close enough that on clear nights Yoshi Yoshimura could stand at the window with a mug of cold coffee and watch the perimeter lights blink in their slow, patient sequence. He had learned the sequence a long time ago. Eleven seconds on the north fence, four on the east, back to eleven. It was the kind of detail an engineer noticed without meaning to and then couldn't stop noticing.
Tonight he wasn't watching the fence.
He was watching the reflection of the woman standing behind him, caught faint and doubled in the window glass, her hand resting on his shoulder like it belonged there. It had felt like it belonged there for six months. He had let himself believe that.
"Once they find out what you've done, they won't hesitate to kill you," Liz said.
Her hand didn't move. Her voice didn't change. That was the part that should have warned him weeks ago, the way she could say a sentence like that in the same tone she used to order coffee.
"If they find out," Yoshi corrected, still facing the glass. "No one knows that I have it."
"I don't think you understand the position you're in." She said it patiently, the way you'd explain a rule to a child who kept forgetting it. "An easy life isn't on the table for you anymore. If I found out what you did, it's only a matter of time before they do too."
"I didn't steal anything from anyone." He turned, finally, and made himself look at her properly instead of at her reflection. Same dark hair, same fake blue contacts he'd noticed the very first week and told himself he was imagining. "I studied the design from a distance and worked out how to build my own version. That's different. Legally, that's different."
"That's semantics, and semantics won't matter to them." She crossed her arms, and for one unguarded second something almost like sympathy crossed her face before she smoothed it away. "Best case, they decide you're clever instead of dangerous and don't put a bullet in you on the spot. Worst case, and the likelier one, they put you in a windowless room for the rest of your life. Personally, I'd take the bullet."
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"Trust me instead of them." She stepped closer and pressed her palm flat over her own chest, over her heart, a gesture he had once found endearing and now, looking back on it in the last clear seconds he'd ever get to look back on anything, understood as pure theater. "I would never let anything happen to you."
He studied her eyes. They didn't waver. That was the thing about a good liar, he thought. The eyes never gave you the tell you were hoping for. You had to look somewhere else, and by the time you thought to, it was already too late to matter.
"You're one of the best problem-solvers I've ever met," she said, softer now, coaxing. "So solve this one for me. My people want things. You happen to be holding one of them. What do you think they'd do if I walked in and told them you could give them more?"
"They'd want to keep me around," he said slowly. "Secure my services, one way or another."
"There you go."
"I'm screwed either way, then."
"You're alive either way, if you're smart about it," she said. "That's not nothing."
He held her gaze a moment longer, running the calculation one last time the way he ran every calculation, weighing inputs, weighing risk, looking for the version of this that let him keep breathing. He didn't find it. There wasn't one. There had never been one, not from the moment he'd let himself fall for the woman who'd been sent to fall for him.
"Alright," he said. "I'll trust you."
Something in her shoulders loosened, a fraction, a tell he only recognized much later, replaying it, wishing he hadn't needed to.
"Everything you need is on a hard drive," he told her. "Locker fifteen, men's changing room, university pool. That's the only copy."
"Locker fifteen. Male changing room. Pool." She repeated it back to him exactly, filing it the way you'd file a part number, and he thought, distantly, that it was a strange thing to notice about the woman who was about to end his life, that she was precise.
"If you screw me on this," he said, and heard how hollow it sounded even as he said it, "I'll make sure you get nothing."
She didn't answer that. She kissed him instead, long, deliberate, tasting faintly of the wine they'd shared over dinner, then collected her coat from the back of his chair and left in a hurry that he told himself was excitement and knew, even then, in some buried unlit corner of himself, was something closer to relief.
A shadow peeled off the wall two doors down from Yoshi's apartment the moment the elevator doors closed on her. It followed her down two flights of stairs into the parking garage beneath the building, keeping to the pillars, keeping to the blind spots a professional would keep to, close enough to watch, far enough not to be seen doing it.
She fumbled with her keys at the car door. They slipped from her fingers and hit the concrete with a rattle that echoed off the low ceiling.
The figure closed the last of the distance and bent to retrieve them before she could, then placed them gently back into her open palm, an oddly courteous gesture from a man wearing a heavy black trench coat and a hat pulled low enough to put half his face in shadow.
"Did you get what we came for?" he asked.
"I know exactly where it is." She looked him over, unbothered, the way you'd look at someone you'd worked beside for years. "Were you following me because you don't trust me to finish the job, or because you were worried about me?"
"Both," he said. "We can't be sure the Americans haven't caught the scent of this yet. And you two have gotten awfully close, in my opinion. I don't much like him."
She smiled, stepped in, and kissed him on the mouth, unhurried, the way she'd just kissed Yoshi three floors up, and neither kiss, watching her do it, would have told you which one was the lie.
"It was an act, baby," she said against his mouth. "We already have everything we need from him."
"What do we do with him now?"
"Get rid of him." No hesitation in it at all, flat as a closed ledger. "He's served his purpose. He might still get cold feet and run to the wrong people. He's a coward."
"That's harsh," the man said, and something in the way he said it suggested he'd learned, a long time ago, not to argue with her past a certain point. "He cooperated with us the whole way through. What if he built in some kind of failsafe, something that keeps us from getting the plans if he turns up dead?"
"Don't go soft on me now." She pulled the door open and dropped into the driver's seat, reaching up to peel off a blond wig and a pair of blue contacts, tossing both onto the back seat where they landed like something already discarded. "He wouldn't do that. He trusts me. Now get rid of him, or I will."
The engine caught. Taillights swung out of the garage and dissolved into traffic, and the man in the trench coat watched them go for a long moment before he turned and walked back toward the stairwell, back toward the building where a man who thought he'd just bought himself a future was, right at that moment, probably pouring himself a celebratory drink he had no idea was his last.
A few hours later, in an apartment considerably nicer than the salary of a corporate handler should have afforded, Liz sat cross-legged on her bed with the stolen hard drive plugged into her laptop, scrolling through file after file with the particular, private satisfaction of someone who has just closed out a job cleanly. The satisfaction lasted until the folder structure resolved itself on her screen and she realized, first with confusion and then with a cold, sinking, professional kind of dread, that there were no tank blueprints anywhere on that drive.
What there was, instead, arranged with an almost insulting neatness into subfolders by date, was several terabytes of high-definition video footage of Emperor penguins. Waddling. Sliding on their bellies. Feeding chicks. Hours and hours and hours of it, catalogued like real intelligence, like something worth stealing.
She sat very still for a long time, staring at a thumbnail of a penguin colony on an ice shelf somewhere in Antarctica, and somewhere underneath the rising panic was a single thought she would never get the chance to act on: that the last true thing Yoshi Yoshimura had ever told her was a joke, and she'd walked out of his apartment too pleased with herself to catch it.
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