A/N (AKA today's excuse for why it has taken so long to post a new chapter): Work? Mostly anyway. Yes, I'm working way too fucking hard as of late, which leaves me burnt out by the time I get home, so brain no work for the writer. That said, I am participating in the July Camp Nano, and am currently on vacation so writing is getting done. Will I finish the story this month? No. No chance in hell. Will I get a couple more chapters completed? Probably (especially since I already finished one).
I will finish this story before I permit any other bunnies to run free.
Once again thanks for reading and sticking around.
. . .
He arrived right on time, a couple of large bags of gear in his hands, and strode up to the manned security desk in the expansive lobby. Walking her home last night had been interesting, while she had achieved a state of mildly buzzed thanks to the amount of high-test beer she'd consumed, she'd lost none of the wariness. Seemingly certain they, meaning she, would be followed. What Bucky knew with certainty was they didn't need to follow her home, they already knew where she lived, so waiting and watching for her return would be absurdly simple to do.
If something more sinister had been planned, like abducting her off the street as she walked home alone, it would have been aborted due to his presence.
Turned out that the garage she'd told him about actually existed underground, with, yes, a gated and monitored entrance, but other than that the security seemed below average given the building itself. She lived in one of those converted industrial buildings that dated back to the late 1800s, formerly a silk manufacturer according to the displays in the grandiose lobby. His assumption of the value of the condos shot upwards by a large zero when he looked it over. Yes, its value had probably plummeted during the Snap years, which had permitted her to purchase the four apartments, but these days, with space once again at a premium he had to consider the possibility that the bomber might have been someone just trying to get her to sell. That theory held until he discovered there was exactly one other tenant in the entire building. Aside from the front desk person and the maintenance crew she essentially lived here alone.
He had been directed to the bank of elevators, his arrival expected and pre-approved, which surprised him given how easily they'd gotten to her car.
The elevators were in the center of the building so when he stepped out it was into a hallway that formed a square around them, four doors demarcating the different apartments. There were cameras mounted on the four corners pointed at said doorways, plus the ones in the elevators themselves, but that seemed to be it for security. Provided those actually worked.
One door had clearly been modified as the entrance to her business, which was probably required by state law, and meant she did, at least occasionally, meet with clients here and not at the formal offices in the city proper. The only other door that looked to get regular use had to be for her home, so he walked to that one and tapped on the solid metal.
He noted the lack of a camera to verify who stood in the hallway and decided to correct that first.
"Who is it?" came a moment later.
"Bucky… uh, James," he responded.
He heard at least two locks being undone and the door cracked open, sliding instead of the usual push/pull, a chain still across the opening as she peeked through. "Hey," she greeted with a wan smile. She closed the door, undid the chain, and then slid it wide for him to enter.
She looked like crap.
Now, granted he usually saw her after a day of meetings or what have you, dressed in one form of business attire or another. Suit pants and jackets, button-down shirts, hair up with makeup on. The occasional pair of expensive jeans. Today he had been greeted with the real Ni, leggings, an oversized t-shirt, hair down and looking as if she had just rolled out of bed.
The giant mug of coffee in her hand clued him in to the fact that sleep had most likely eluded her.
He set the bags down on the floor, shut the door behind him, and walked to stand in front of her. He gently grasped her chin and tipped her head up to look her over with a gimlet eye. "Did you sleep at all?"
She snorted and shook her head. "Define sleep." Her entire body drooped for a long moment, but she found her backbone and straightened, fully intending to fake her way through the day. "And... Bucky?"
"That's what my friends call me so…" He lowered his hand, not that she'd complained about him invading her personal space.
"Bucky… Yeah, I think I can do that." She returned to the door, shutting and locking it, though she didn't bother with the chain or the massive bar that appeared to be original.
"Does that work or is it decorative," he asked, gesturing to the four-inch-wide steel bars.
She grasped the wheel and spun it, the bars sliding efficiently into the brackets mounted to either side of the doorway. "How effective it is against someone trying to force their way in is the question and it'll depend on the strength of the walls," she pointed out. "The landlord claims they'll stand up to a police battering ram. The video was impressive, to say the least."
"If the wall is reinforced, then yes. I'll add it to the list."
"James… Bucky…" He could see in her eyes when she changed her mind about what she planned to say. "Coffee?"
He nodded. He picked up the bags of tech goodies he'd been able to acquire this morning and carried them over to the island in her kitchen. He set them down and began emptying them as she poured him an oversized mug of caffeine. She brought it over along with the usual accouterments, having learned how he took his coffee over the last few weeks.
Her eyes widened at the amount of stuff he'd brought. "Do I really need all this?"
He shrugged. "I'll know better once I've looked over the place."
An eyebrow rose on her forehead. "You want the grand tour?"
"When you're ready, yes. I need to make an assessment before I start the install." He sipped the coffee, finding it familiar and suggesting she had purchased the beans from The Daily Grind, which wouldn't surprise him all that much. "Do you hang out at The Daily Grind a lot?"
She ducked her head as if feeling guilty. "I discovered them when I moved here and since I was doing okay, figured it was an easy way to keep others going. It became one of those spots where locals would check in on each other when things got rough."
He nodded understanding at least a little. "It became the community hub."
"Yeah," she agreed. "It's changed since everyone came back, but some of us who weathered those years still meet up a couple times a month to check in with each other. The last six months have been almost as challenging as the five years previous."
A running theme he'd kept hearing since his return. That gave me a thought. "When did the pressure to return to your government contract start?"
"Uh, not all that long, a few months ago. Why?"
"Because it might be an individual who wants you back instead of the department who'd been paying for the work."
She set her mug down. "And they'd been one of the Snapped," she summed up. "That makes sense, but it still doesn't explain why, or the sudden need to kill me."
"True, though given the bomb failed, it might have been meant more to scare you, rather than to actually kill you." While even he had to admit that this scenario didn't make a whole lot of sense, neither did planting, based on the pictures he'd seen, a bomb that could have taken out a fair portion of this building and having done it so poorly that all it did was drain her car battery.
So, what if the target hadn't been her specifically, but something she had here. Like that algorithm, she managed to recreate. It might not be someone wanting to encourage her back into the loving arms of that government think tank, but to stop her from using a potentially explosive discovery.
"Bucky, what's wrong?"
He shook his head, not wanting to tell her the theory he'd just come up with. He needed more data before he freaked her out more than she currently was. Taking the mug with him he turned around to really look at her place. From the looks of it all the living areas were corner apartments, which would make the internal layouts somewhat challenging given the massive windows on all the exterior walls. Or it would if it weren't for the fact that they'd designed the place with an almost completely open floor plan. From where he stood he could see only two sets of complete interior walls. The one to his right, which was part of the kitchen probably separating this apartment from the next. That apartment's kitchen most likely a mirror image of this one.
He put the coffee down on the counter and strolled away with Ni trailing after. "Were the apartments all identical when you started?" he asked.
She nodded. "Mirrored, but otherwise the same. Certain walls hide the roof supports, but I was able to partially open them up to connect three of them to convert to my personal use. The fourth is my business office."
"So that," He waved at the interior walls diagonally across from the kitchen, "is?"
"Master suite," she confirmed. "Where I failed to sleep last night."
The kitchen and dining occupied basically the same area, the ostensible living room taking up the space between that and the walled off master suite. "May I?" he asked as he paused in the doorway to her bedroom.
"The bed's not made, but it's reasonably clean."
He snorted and swung the door open to reveal the room. Her bed up against the tall windows that had what looked like blackout curtains currently pulled back to permit the light in. There were two doors off the room. "Bath and closet?"
She nodded and waved for him to check them out.
Both were clearly designed by someone with modern industrial taste in homage to the history of the building, and looked lived in as opposed to showroom neat, signaling a human being actually resided here. He didn't do more than glance about to get an idea of spacing and risks. Both had windows, the ones in the bathroom frosted out in deference to privacy and while they opened, they tipped instead of slid upwards.
Leaving the bedroom he looked upward realizing this had to have been part of the second unit originally. Turning about he could see where the kitchen used to be and the wall that had been opened to the third apartment. "You realize most people would kill to have just one of these places for the size alone."
She nodded. "I know it seems excessive, but I put a lot of money into this place over the years, money that kept others paid and in their own homes. I was one of the lucky ones, my skills were needed to keep the lights on, literally, and I did what I could to share the wealth." She sounded a touch affronted. "I'm not rich by any means, but I earned this place."
"Wasn't saying that, doll." He pondered some of the comments she'd made over the weeks. "You bought all of these so you could feel safe. Having someone living next door…"
She shivered. "Exactly. I left Manhattan after… an incident I will not talk about today. I would have bought the whole damn building if I could have."
He set a hand gently on her shoulder. "You've spoken to your shrink about it?" he asked, hoping she'd talked to someone. Not that it needed to be him. Her life was hers and he would not force her to tell any or all of her secrets.
She sighed softly. "Yes, and I've moved on from it as much as I can for now. This place, living here, was a big part of my healing process."
"Okay." He squeezed her shoulder in commiseration then dropped his hand. "Lead on."
She managed a smile and led the way through a wall that had once adjoined the apartments and into the third unit. She had obviously converted the kitchen into a wet bar and wine cellar, though not much resided within at the moment. There was another full bath and what he suspected to be another bedroom. Next to it stood a mini fitness center. A selection of weights, a stationary bike, and mats that all looked to be used regularly. "How often do you work out?"
"Daily. Mix of cardio and weights. Had a trainer before the world fell apart, but I've kept up as best I could on my own. YouTube shall provide," she quipped.
"Do you run at all?"
She nodded. "There's a few running trails in the area that I like to use, though I'll just loop the block if that's all I'm in the mood for."
He wandered over to the bedroom, noting it was smaller than the master suite, but still larger than average. Definitely bigger than the tiny one he had. Not that he was envious, he had all he needed. In fact, he would have no clue what to do with all the space she had. He'd rattle about like a lost marble in an oversized coffee can. Maybe one day he'd feel comfortable in a place like this, but for now, he preferred his tiny and eminently defensible apartment.
In the closet were some clothes that from the looks of it did not belong to Ni. "You have a guest?" he asked, simply because that would change how he'd set up the security.
"No, not anymore," she responded with more than a touch of melancholy in her voice.
"If I may ask?"
"A… an ex."
"Ah. Mutual decision?" No, he shouldn't question her about it, as it was none of his business, but if there were the slightest chance that this ex might be the one who had planted the bomb he had to ask.
She shrugged and sipped her coffee. "Ish."
"What happened?"
"The short version?"
"Sure."
"She was snapped and I wasn't."
Bucky's brain kind of froze on the she. "And the slightly longer version?"
"I'd spent five years missing a piece of my life and she felt I'd moved on without her. I let her stay with me while she got her life back together. We, at least I thought it was we, tried to work things out, but in the end, she located her parents and moved back to live with them. Supposedly to help with the transition, but…" she trailed off, head tipping down and shoulders sagging slightly. "I guess my surviving five years without her meant I didn't love her."
Bucky stared at her. "That's some serious bullshit. What were you supposed to do? Waste away like in some romance novel?"
Nienna snickered. "I said something similar. Which just seemed to make her angrier. Made me realize that no matter how much I loved her that I didn't need her any longer. Not that I'd ever been overly dependent on her, but…"
"The relationship had become uneven. Probably before the Snap," Bucky suggested, seeing the truth simply because he was an outsider.
"Yeah. I miss talking to her, but my life has never revolved around her the way she wanted it to. I'll donate the items eventually. Houseguests have been few and far between so there's been no real motivation to do so."
He could relate to that and had done the same until events had led him back to Sam. Kicking and screaming at first, but ultimately for the better. The fact that Ni's ex had been a woman still left him shocked and wondering exactly why she'd swiped on his profile if she preferred relationships with women. Then again, her profile had said looking for friendship first. So maybe that's all she wanted from him. He had no reason to complain about it as he had no clue what he'd been looking for and friendship had seemed to be the place to begin.
And she had most definitely given him that.
They didn't just meet a few times a week, they texted pretty much daily, about everything and nothing. Sent videos and memes to each other, the usual stuff two adult humans did. It felt nice to be able to talk to someone other than Sam or a therapist about his day and while for a moment he considered backing off and permitting her to find someone more appropriate for her to spend time with, she had not even hinted she would want that. In fact, she had encouraged him to join an online book club that she was a part of in an effort to get him to expand his admittedly small circle of friends. He'd been mostly quiet during the chats so far, but had enjoyed watching the conversations and friendly arguments from the others. He'd also discovered a few additional authors to try out. Being a nerd was no longer looked down upon, in fact, the smarter you were the better. Plus it gave him a way to fill some of those long hours between missions with Captain America.
"Bucky?"
She'd obviously caught him out while lost in thought. "So where's this office I keep hearing so much about. You don't actually leave your apartment to get to it do you?"
She gave him a wan smile and shook her head. She led him towards a bookcase inset into the wall that divided this part of her apartment from the last one on the floor. She flipped a hidden latch then shoved the bookcase in and then slid it to the side revealing the entrance to the next room. He followed her in and immediately spun about and slid the bookcase back into place. The hidden door had been created expertly, the seam almost invisible once the door had been shut. He could hear the latch engage and he pushed on the section of wall, but it didn't shift even slightly.
"Does it auto-lock when closed?"
She nodded. "I admit I usually leave it open when working as I often like to pace the loop of the apartments when thinking or on a call."
"Why low tech?" He was curious as to her reasoning.
"Will you be upset if I say I thought it was cool to have a secret door?"
He chuckled. "Not at all. It does have the advantage of being unhackable."
"But it's not perfect," she added with a sudden frown turning her lips downward. "My work never seemed to be something I needed to protect beyond a decent encryption and firewall."
"I suspect your decent is better than government spec."
She managed a grin over the top of her mug. "Your suspicion might be correct. Don't need my work stolen and copied."
"No need when you can just give it away, right?"
One eyebrow rose on her forehead. "And what might you be implying with that statement?"
He shrugged. "I may have heard a rumor that you intend to open source the control programming in the near future."
"I'd ask where you heard that, but I suspect your friends in high places told you."
Bucky gave her a small smile. "Your suspicion might be correct."
She laughed softly. "It's not that big a deal. The base code is identical for all the companies I've sold to, just adapted to their specific needs. When it goes open source everyone will be able to take advantage of it. Large or small."
"Why though? Why lose all that potential income?"
"It was never about the money."
"Then what was it about?"
"Saving lives. Whether by keeping the heat on, or a plane in the air until it can land safely." She strode away from him and towards the massive desk that housed multiple screens and keyboards. She tapped a few keys and the monitors sprang to life. "I took everything I'd learned to make the most flexible and versatile system that I could, and I'd like to think I made difference the last few years, but-"
"You want to do more."
She gave a single shoulder shrug. "Something like that."
"Could someone out there not want you to?" He intended to consider any and every possibility when it came to those who wished her harm.
She sighed heavily. "It makes as much sense as anything else. Look, what I do isn't anything that special, I just happened to have been in the right place at the right time with the right tech. Adapting it to work with the existing systems had been the hard part, but once I figured that out for the first one, it became easy."
"You wrote this massive program that easily?"
She shook her head. "Oh, god no, I already had the program, sort of, I modified one of my AI attempts for this. Think of it like something between Stark's JARVIS and Siri. Smart enough to do a lot on its own, but without the… freedom of will. There were set boundaries of what the program could and couldn't do."
Bucky wasn't stupid by any means, and was far from tech challenged, so he could grasp what she really meant with the layman's description of what her program could do. "So are we talking smart house smart or something more?"
Her eyes widened for an instant. "Something more. Smart houses can be given routines to follow, but wouldn't necessarily think to turn off the faucet if the cat were to accidentally bump it on. My program can, to a degree, make decisions outside the pre-programmed responses."
He nodded, remembering that she'd told him about that before. "Just to be clear, the program wouldn't be able to do anything beyond its set parameters. The ConEd program wouldn't be able to order groceries or anything like that."
She chuckled. "No, and they can't talk to each other unless a human initiates it. About eighteen months ago we had some serious flooding in downtown, the rain getting into the conduit systems and making a mess of things. They used the cross-communication platform on that occasion and it worked damn near flawlessly. I've made tweaks since, but once the connection had been closed each program returned to its primary duties without incident." She ducked her head for a few seconds. "That's when the city put me on the payroll with a five-year contract."
"So they would have no reason to eliminate you." He took a moment to ponder. "What about your competition?"
"What competition? Me getting this job was at least partially dumb luck, but aside from government agencies and big companies like Stark Industries, who had their own problems at the time, no one had a program like this ready to go with minimal modification. Most programs to run big systems like that aren't off the shelf, or if they are, require major modifications to function properly. This isn't like using a website builder on WordPress or the like. I had to design a server system that would allow me to clone their current system so I could create a functional interface. Lather. Rinse. Repeat."
"Wait. You built a server system?"
She nodded and gestured at the only enclosed space in the office aside from the obvious public restroom. For some reason, he had thought it was storage or another smaller office, though, given the thick coil of cords running from her desktop and towards the walled off area, he should have realized it all on his own. "May I?"
"Sure." She followed after him as he went to the double doors that had been out of his direct view and opened them. The temperature inside was noticeably cooler in deference to the stacks of computers inside. The windows were once again covered with blackout curtains, but these were also insulated to keep the sun from adding to the temperature in the room. The room hummed with power and machines thinking.
Comparatively speaking the server farm was tiny, nothing like major corporations or cloud service companies would have, but obviously more than enough for her work, which just as obviously required something more than a multi-gigabyte drive and a couple of externals.
He noted wide-angle cameras in two of the four corners, which would cover the entire room. "Do the windows in here open?"
"Technically yes, required by the fire department."
"And in actuality?"
"It'd take about ten minutes to unseal them from the thermal insulation," she informed him.
"Which meets the letter of the law I suppose."
"Yes. The fact that the fire escape is at a different window is what got them to sign off on it."
"Damn it," he muttered, stepping back out of the room. "How many fire escapes?"
"One per unit." She directed him to the one in the office, the mandatory emergency exit sign, lit and in its place above the window with the metal stairwell that clung to the side of the building. The wide part of the building faced the street, so the fire escapes ran down into the alleyways on either side. Which looked nice from a curb appeal perspective, but also gave thieves easier access to the interior building.
He huffed out a breath. "I'll need to figure out how to put an alarm on those."
"Use a screamer. That's what I did in here."
"A… a screamer?"
She pointed at the small device set into the sill of the window, unlocked it, and opened it.
A shrill high-pitched beeping sound came from the tiny device causing him to flinch and clap his hands over his ears. She quickly shut the window and the sound cut off instantly. "The fire escape has to be accessible, but you can still alarm it, like emergency doors in stores. And now my phone will ring."
A second later it did so and she assured the person at the other end that everything was fine, that she'd forgotten to disarm the device when opening the window."
"It's wired to the building security?"
"Nope. Just loud." She locked the window and returned to her mug of caffeine.
"Do they go all the way up to the roof?"
"Yes, and there's roof access via the stairwell."
He huffed out a breath fully realizing this was definitely going to be more complicated than he had expected. "What's on the roof aside from the obvious."
She scrunched up her face in a manner he found endearing, but which clearly meant she didn't understand what the hell he'd been asking. "Oh, you mean aside from the AC and elevator equip and such. It would probably be easier if I just showed you."
He didn't like that over much. What the hell could possibly be on the roof of this building that needed visual aids? And worse, need its own tour for him to understand. Instead of the main door, or back through the hidden door they'd come through, she walked towards the wall that adjoined this unit with hers at the kitchen/dining area. She repeated the secret door trick, only this time with a blank section of wall. As they passed her kitchen she waved for him to grab his mug of coffee while she headed to the window that had the fire escape and opened it up.
Like most New Yorkers who had the luxury of the fire escape, it had been partially converted into a balcony of sorts with a tiny table and chair set so she could sit outside and enjoy the fresh air. Well, as fresh as air filled with car exhaust ever got. Her corner of Brooklyn, just a few blocks over from his own, had fewer businesses, so most people would be leaving the area during the day which made it comparatively quiet at the moment. The susurrus of vehicle traffic faint since the majority of it remained a couple of blocks over.
Ni stepped out and began climbing upward, her bare feet making almost no sound on the metal steps. He followed along, up the one short flight then up and over the knee knocker lip of the roof.
Whatever he had been expecting it wasn't what he saw.
A massive greenhouse took up a fair third of the space, forming an el in order to fit around the various pieces of necessary equipment that had been here prior to its existence. A cistern had also been built and appeared to supply water to the greenhouse, which made sense, though he suspected it might have also been used as a gravity system for the building itself at one point in time. Not unusual, a lot of buildings in New York still used cisterns, if only as a supplemental system to the city water supply. He could also see a wind turbine and a set of solar panels facing south so they would be able to absorb the most sun possible even during the cold winter months.
"Wow. This is impressive." He rotated about looking at the roofs of the nearby buildings noting similar setups on most of them. At a guess, the ones without had remained unused during those years half the planet had been gone.
Ni smiled and curtsied, clearly proud of what she had achieved. "I can't take all the credit though, a lot of this was collaborative."
"You pooled your resources to the benefit of all."
"Yes. Not that we had much choice. Those first couple of years were… bad. Supply chains fell apart and left us having to figure out how to grow food in a place completely unsuited to that task." she gestured her mug at the other rooftops. "We had to come together and share what we had in order to survive."
He cocked his head. "Show me."
She tipped her head and led him to the entrance of the greenhouse. It had been designed with a baffle entrance to keep as much of the warmth as possible from bleeding out during the colder months. Inside he discovered a riot of plant life, a variety of vegetables and herbs, and even a few fruit trees, oranges, and apples from the looks of it, though neither were currently producing any fruit at the moment.
And, much to his surprise, he saw bees. "You have a hive?"
"Yes, I was damn lucky to get them too. Made everything so much easier."
He looked at her in some confusion.
"I had to manually pollinate before I got the bees. Butterflies are damn finicky to raise since you need to keep the caterpillars from eating the plants you need the butterflies to pollinate. The greenhouse has baffles to let them in during the summer, but we had to force plants to produce year-round and that requires pollination year-round."
"Damn. That must have been challenging."
"You have no idea. I'd never had anything other than houseplants my entire life and suddenly needed to be farmer Brown if I wanted to make it through my first winter." She sighed softly and settled back against a table holding ripe tomatoes, the worker bees buzzing around her as if she were part of their hive." She frowned slightly. "That Thanos was an idiot. Banishing half of all life does not increase resources, half of sentient life maybe - depending on the definition of sentience. But getting rid of half of everything just leaves those left with the same amount and, in some cases, less chance of those remaining to reproduce. Bees were in danger before the Snap, they damn near died out after."
"And plant life is dependent on them for reproduction."
"Yeah, that. My hive has produced two queens, which I gave to others so they could have their own colony and we let the workers run free during the warmer months so that we get some cross-pollination, but they became more valuable than… pretty much anything."
Bucky frowned as the implications of her tale struck home. "Why is none of this in the news? It's been months since we all came back and yet the… the government seems to think it's doing nothing more than maintaining the status quo. I mean, I know it's not true given what me and Sam had to deal with, but why play the 'everything is fine' card when we all know it's a lie?"
She gazed at him enigmatically for a long moment before answering, "Because they want it all to be back to normal, I guess. And it can't be. Thanks to groups like the Flag Smashers they are finally beginning to realize this."
"They want it to all be the same as before."
"Exactly. Even some of the ones who lived through those years. We need a new normal."
"Why is that?"
"How well did the old one work?"
He sighed softly. "Not very well. So trash it all and start over?"
"Maybe? That's above my pay grade. I'd like to think we'll end up with something in the middle, but humans are stubborn and like their ruts, so who knows. I'll keep to my corner of the universe and hope we don't fuck it up royally yet again."
Bucky snorted. "That is a painfully realistic point of view."
"Realistic being the keyword there." She wandered slowly among the plants, the bees drifting about calmly, even landing on her every now and then without her having a care in the world about the possibility of being stung. "During those years the world had to change, to work together or we risked the very real potential of the human race becoming extinct within a couple of decades. The first two years after the birth rate was so low we failed to replace even half of the existing population. And the death rate…" She shook her head partially in obvious dismay, but also seemingly to rid herself of the unhappy memory of it.
"You don't have to talk about it," Bucky assured her as she clearly had what he'd presume to be at least some measure of PTSD caused by events during those years.
She chuckled darkly. "My therapist would argue otherwise."
"Doesn't mean you should tell me," he emphasized. "I didn't live through it so I have no reference point to connect with."
She stopped and turned her head to meet his gaze. "But you do in some ways."
"Huh?" he responded ever so intelligently.
"How many times did you wake up to a new world, and need to learn new skills to keep up? How many… hmmm… less than pleasant memories did you collect before you reached this point? We both went through traumatizing experiences and while not exactly the same the emotional and mental side-effects, I suspect, are quite similar."
He stood so still that several bees took the opportunity to land on him, leaving a dusting of pollen behind while he took in her words and looked for a valid argument that would permit him to disagree with her. And he couldn't. "Different circumstances leading to similar endings," he muttered out loud.
"Precisely. Though I won't be demanding you tell me all your secrets or anything like that. Some wounds are still too fresh." She dropped her eyes and began her aimless wandering through the greenhouse again.
He watched her without saying a word as she picked up a container and began to pick some ripe tomatoes.
Once the container had been filled she asked, "Anything else you need up here?"
"No, or least not right now."
They left the greenhouse, climbed back down the fire escape, and back into her apartment in silence.
She took the time to wash the tomatoes and refill both their cups of coffee with fresh, before she said, "How can I help?"
He had begun to unpack the gear he'd brought, already making a list of other items he would need, and deciding in which he'd proceed with the setup. "Uh, can you? I know you're a nerd and all, but I have no clue what you can do beyond the obvious coding."
She gave him a grin that reminded him of his first encounter with Karli in the back of that truck.
"Do you really think I hired someone to install and configure the servers in there?" She hooked her thumb in the general direction of her office.
He sighed. "Right. I walked right into that one." He picked up one of the cameras. "Got any tools?"
She nodded and trotted off to get them."