THURSDAY, FEB 6, 2026 — 20:07
She was fast. He knew she was fast the moment she released the crate and moved left, because the movement was not a lunge, it was a redirect, the kind that started from the assumption that the direct line had already been closed and worked from there. She was good enough to know she was better than him physically. She was smart enough to be interested in confirming it rather than assuming it.
The cargo hold was four meters by two. Not a lot of room. He put the crate down behind him and moved to his right, which was the only direction she hadn't covered, and bought himself two seconds of space. She let him, which told him she wasn't trying to hurt him. She was trying to get past him. The crate was the objective for both of them, and for both of them the other person was an obstacle rather than a target.
That was the only reason it didn't go badly very fast.
She came in low, a grab for his jacket, trying to pull him off balance and he went with the pull instead of against it, which was the move she hadn't planned for, and for a moment they were both off balance together, which was equalized and therefore useful to neither of them. She adjusted faster than he did. He blocked the follow-through with his forearm, which hurt more than the training had suggested forearm blocks would hurt, and she pulled back instead of pressing it.
They were at opposite ends of the cargo hold now, three meters apart, the crate between them on the floor. The truck was still moving. The wind through the open rear door was constant and cold. He was aware that his earpiece had gone quiet. Sasha, reading the situation from outside, was giving him room, which was exactly the right call.
"You're good," she said. She didn't sound particularly impressed. More like she was updating a model.
"You're better," he said, which was true and therefore worth saying, because people who were told accurate things were more predictable than people who were managed. "But we're running out of time."
She glanced at the open door. The highway outside. She was doing the same calculation he was doing: the jammer window, the dispatch check-in, the time already elapsed. She was faster at it than he expected.
"Split it," she said.
"The crate is one piece."
"Then we have a problem."
"Not if one of us leaves empty-handed."
She tilted her head. She had the most direct gaze he'd encountered in a cargo hold at highway speed, which was admittedly a limited sample. "Which of us did you have in mind?"
Before he could answer, the sound of sirens reached them. Not close, but getting less far very quickly. Not dispatch. NYPD. Someone on the highway had called in the maneuvering vehicles. Which meant the window was collapsing faster than either of them had planned for.
She moved first. Not for him and not for the crate but for the open door. She hit it running and was on the platform and gone, dropping off the back of the truck into the highway shoulder with the kind of controlled fall that required either training or something he wasn't going to let himself think about yet. He grabbed the crate all twenty-two kilograms of it, with both arms and went to the door and stepped back onto Sasha's waiting running board.
"Go," he said.
She went. The armored sedan pulled off the highway through the access gate, onto the service road, and into the urban grid of the West Side before the police vehicles reached the highway segment. The truck sat in the right lane with its cargo door open and one missing crate and two very confused security personnel who had heard the commotion and been too slow to react to any of it.
Marco's voice in the earpiece, calm: "Jammer off. Scanner clear. What happened?"
Dan sat in the passenger seat with twenty-two kilograms of experimental battery technology on his lap and his forearm throbbing and something moving in his chest that he didn't immediately have a word for.
"Variable," he said. "Unplanned. I'll explain at the warehouse."
Sasha glanced at him. She had a quality he'd come to appreciate, which was that she asked questions at the right time, and the right time was not right now. She drove.
He made it to the warehouse. He got the crate inside. He sat in the office chair and looked at it for twenty minutes without moving, which was not a thing he normally did. Something about the last fifteen minutes had produced a residue that he couldn't categorize neatly, and he had learned in four months of this life that things you couldn't categorize neatly were worth sitting with rather than filing prematurely.
She had been fast. She had been precise. She had made a decision mid-situation — split it — that was both tactically sound and genuinely fair, which he hadn't expected. She'd left when the calculation required leaving rather than pushing the situation past what it could hold. And she had looked at him across three meters of moving cargo hold with the particular directness of someone who was filing him the same way he was filing her.
His forearm was going to bruise. He looked at it.
"Hm," he said, to no one.
[OP-007 — Roxxon Cargo Intercept · Thursday, February 6, 2026
STATUS: COMPLETE — PARTIAL
CARGO SECURED: ROXXON PROTOTYPE BATTERY ARRAY — 22KG
UNPLANNED VARIABLE: SECOND OPERATIVE — UNIDENTIFIED — DEPARTED SCENE
VC EARNED: +$187,000 VC
REPUTATION: +94 · NEW TIER UNLOCKED
WANTED LEVEL POST-OP: CLEAR — NO WITNESS ID]
He read the log. He read the reputation line — 335 total now, the next tier unlocked, which meant the Panel's shop had new inventory he hadn't seen yet. He didn't pull it up. He would do that tomorrow.
He drove home at midnight. He lay on his bed in the dark with his eyes open and thought about a black suit and a direct gaze and the particular quality of someone who made decisions the same way he did but from a completely different architecture. Then he thought about the forearm, which genuinely hurt, and that was the more productive thought because it had a simple resolution.
He got the ice pack from the freezer and put it on the bruise and stared at the ceiling and eventually, around two in the morning, slept.