⬲⬲ CHAPTER 4 ⟴⟴

She was born on the 14th day of the 5th lunar month. Scorpius hung low in the southern sky, dragging its tail along the horizon like a sullen afterthought. The moon was a crescent dog, head down, ears alert, prowling between clouds. The Sun, meanwhile, had the color of polished teeth and refused to blink. Somewhere overhead, the stars rearranged themselves into something she’d spend her whole life misreading. For those keeping track in the Gregorian, all of this places her in Gemini territory -- Sun in the sign of the Twins. Twinhood as a cosmic joke, a biological stutter. It is well known that Gemini girls are born talking and die mid-sentence. Their patron is Mercury, a god who wore winged shoes, wasn't a twin, and had no fixed address. Gemini rules communication, commerce, trickery, and twins. That's why it shouldn't come as a surprise that she had a twin -- once. A theoretical sibling, a shadow-self absorbed before she had eyelids. Vanished twin syndrome, they call it -- like it’s quaint, like it’s not cannibalism with better PR. Just another reason to add to the list of: why twins are ridiculous; mirror images, hive-minded gigglers, or worse, solemn little freaks who finish each other’s sentences. Twins are a mistake. A biological copy-paste error. Identical twins? Forged by nature’s laziest intern. Fraternal twins? Just two strangers who happened to share a womb like a bad Airbnb. There’s nothing magical about it. People coo over them in public like they’re some kind of miracle, but spend five minutes actually talking to twins and you’ll see: eerie overlaps in speech cadence, synchronized blinking, shared delusions of uniqueness. It’s like watching a bootleg of a movie you didn’t like the first time. And don’t even start on the psychic connection stuff -- if you want to know what your sibling is thinking, try therapy, not telepathy. Twins aren’t wondrous. They’re a cosmic shit. When Just Nicole ate her twin in utero, she did the world a favor. One of her was just enough. She was no glitch. She survived her first existential betrayal -- almost eaten by a copy of herself -- and came out the other side smiling. A singleton by conquest. The kind of child who enters the world having already committed a murder. Naturally, a girl like that could only be born in a town like Williamsport, Pennsylvania: a place that smelled faintly of paper pulp, wet wool, and whatever was leaking from the Susquehanna that week. It was the kind of town where parades outnumbered protests and everyone knew at least one person named Buddy. The factories coughed through the winters and wheezed through the summers, and the local economy ran on handshake deals, rotary phones, and the vaguely divine authority of Little League baseball. History passed through Williamsport like a train that didn’t always stop, but left behind enough soot and myth to keep the people busy retelling it. Her father worked maintenance at the high school and coached the local Little League team, the Maynard Midgets, whose name was considered spirited at the time and only mildly cursed. He was a man of practical myth: built like a vending machine, smoked Pall Malls like they were rationed, and believed all problems could be solved with a hose, a wrench, or the strategic deployment of a bunt. He kept scorebooks like scripture and had theories about cleats he wouldn’t even tell the priest. When the Midgets became the first team to win the Little League World Series, he celebrated by grilling kielbasa in the rain and pretending not to cry during the national anthem. By the time Just Nicole was born, her father had already steered the Maynard Midgets to a string of improbable victories, including that inaugural Little League World Series -- a local miracle archived in black-and-white, all knobby knees and triumphant squints. His reward: a civic citation, three aluminum bats, and the mild adoration of a town that still thought of baseball as a form of weather. He met her mother not long after, during an off-season church raffle where she was selling lemon bars and balancing expertly on her right foot, the left having been removed (politely, with anesthesia) following an accident no one ever had the nerve to describe. He fell for her on the spot -- her posture, her silence, the way she refused to laugh at his jokes and called the raffle “a statistical insult.” By spring, they were married. By summer, they were pregnant. By the following spring, they were quietly terrified. Just Nicole was born twinless with the haunted gravity of someone who'd once shared the womb with company and came out on top. She was not what you’d call an easy child -- moody, inward, occasionally caught speaking to door handles or staring too long at ceiling fans. But she was loved, deeply and without confusion, by parents who came to believe that oddness was just another form of potential. Her mother, especially, took it as gospel that girls like her -- bright, difficult, a little tilted -- had no business staying in places like Williamsport. She stocked the house with used encyclopedias and Reader’s Digest condensed novels, refused to let Just Nicole play the tambourine in church, and said folksy things like “you’ll go to college or you’ll go to seed.” By the age of nine, Just Nicole had memorized the capitals of all the world’s countries, though she pronounced “Djibouti” like a threat. School, predictably, was a crucible. Just Nicole was small for her age, sharp-elbowed and sharper-tongued, with a posture that suggested she was always bracing for impact. She corrected teachers, read ahead, and asked questions that made adults uncomfortable at barbecues. Children, being natural bureaucrats of the social order, did what children do: they gave her a name -- “Nicole the Troll.” It stuck -- not because it was true, but because it rhymed, and because kids are cowards with imaginations. Years later, she'd scrawl it on the backs of notebooks like a title reclaimed in blood. Trolls, after all, were clever, resourceful, and never asked to be beautiful. By high school, Just Nicole had discovered the thrill of forgery. It started with hall passes -- sloppy at first, then uncannily precise. Report cards were next, then doctor’s notes, then tickets to see Simon & Garfunkel (floor seats, for the right price). What began as a convenience became a cottage industry, her locker a quiet node in the barter economy of teenage subterfuge. But every artisan meets her patron. One afternoon, she was caught -- not by a vice principal, but by an assistant administrator with a lava lamp on his desk and a suspicious fondness for Coltrane. Instead of turning her in, he invited her to coffee. He was, as it turned out, affiliated with a loose federation of antiwar organizers, zine distributors, and campus ghosts. They needed someone who could fake things. Just Nicole, in all her cunning and compactness, had finally found her people -- or at least their stationery. Just Nicole never quite fit the mold of a revolutionary. She didn’t chant, she didn’t march, and she found slogans embarrassing. But after the run-in with the hall-pass administrator -- real name Haskell Goldfinch, but no one called him that -- she was quietly inducted into the backroom world of the underground. They didn’t need martyrs; they needed specialists. Just Nicole became the forger-in-residence, crafting travel papers, university IDs, and press credentials that held up under scrutiny. She wasn’t exactly political, but the adrenaline suited her. She learned to speak without speaking, to read rooms like blueprints, to disappear even while holding everyone’s attention. But as the stakes rose, so did the tension. The meetings grew quieter. Some people stopped coming. New faces showed up with bad instincts and better questions. There were rumors of someone -- no one knew who -- leaking just enough to make things difficult but not disastrous. The phrase 'controlled burn' started floating around, followed by 'limited hangout'. It didn’t help that the print shop had been raided, or that the post office box they used kept getting mail that wasn’t theirs. Just Nicole, who once felt pride in her near-mythic ability to recreate official seals, began to feel watched even as she worked. The others brushed off her worry, but she could feel it in the way they paused before answering questions. Eventually, a smaller group broke off. They didn’t trust the larger collective anymore. It wasn’t that anyone was definitely an informant -- it was that maybe someone was. And “maybe” was enough. This new inner-inner circle, tight as a noose, believed they could confirm it one way or another. The plan was simple, or seemed that way: steal internal FBI files that might prove surveillance, infiltration, or worse. It wasn’t the first time this had been done. Some of them had cut their teeth in draft offices, lifting and burning records to disrupt conscription. But this felt different. There was no moral clarity here, only a creeping dread -- like turning on a flashlight and realizing you’re not alone in the dark. It was a plan forged not in fire but in mimeograph ink and mutual suspicion -- The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, so-called as if to lend bureaucratic heft to what was, in truth, a ragged circle of eccentrics, ex-seminarians, physics professors, former girl scouts and, yes, Just Nicole, whose entrée into their secret society had been greased by her uncanny knack for reproduction -- not of ideology, but of paper. Passes, permits, permissions. She could write your mother’s handwriting better than your mother. And now here she was, an initiate among the self-ordained clerics of counter-espionage, her soul split between a righteous American paranoia and an instinct that if the devil came knocking, he’d do it in regulation black wingtips. There were lists, yes, and floorplans, and keys made from wax impressions taken in the dull hush of archival evenings. But beneath it all hummed the queasy, psychic tinnitus of something unseen. A haunted logic. A silence too purposeful. One Veteran’s Square -- Media, Pennsylvania -- a name so drably mythic it might as well have been invented by Borges or branded on a box of processed cheese. The target was real, though, and so was the carpeted stairwell Just Nicole would eventually tiptoe through in a pair of borrowed heels and a cardigan two sizes too big, looking for all the world like a timid typist out of Flannery O’Connor’s attic. The plan, they all agreed, was idiot-simple: break in, take everything, leave no one wiser. But the devil of it was the details, and the devil was busy -- whispering codes into walkie-talkies, hiding in ceiling tiles, grinning from the oily sheen of a doorknob and locks that did not give way. Asher Doyle, years later, would stumble across fragments of this plot in a xeroxed manifesto wrapped around a dead bird in a parking garage, but Just Nicole lived it, breathed it, nearly bled it. No one knew quite how deep the FBI had reached into their lives, but she would help them find out, even if the answer lay folded in an envelope marked Confidential and sealed with the kiss of a ghost. And so they got away with it. Truly. On the night of March 8th, 1971 -- an ordinary Monday for most of America -- they breached the sanctified vault of Hoover’s unblinking eye. While Nixon nodded off under a tonic of uncut scotch and televised boxing, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, under fluorescent moonlight and the wheeze of failing radiators, pried open the file cabinets of One Veteran’s Square and found what they had long suspected: The government was not just watching; it was writing the script. COINTELPRO -- an acronym too neat for the havoc it wrought -- was not a conspiracy theory. It was the conspiracy. The files spilled forth like locusts, naming names, tapping phones, dousing movements in gasoline and calling it rain. The revelation scorched the country’s moral field. Black leaders, antiwar protestors, feminists, socialists, poets, priests, professors, lunch ladies -- none had been spared Hoover’s necromantic little war against dissent. Even the ghost of Emma Goldman might’ve felt her bones shiver. Just Nicole read the documents aloud in a farmhouse kitchen near Upper Darby, the pages shaking in her hand like dry autumn leaves. The others stared blankly, the way farmers do after a storm clears and there’s nothing left but insurance claims and flooded soil. They had won, technically. But a sour wind blew. She could feel it. Something hadn’t broken. Not really. What followed was not a triumphal parade or a third-act redemption. Instead: a slow bleed into the margins. Just Nicole didn’t so much disappear as begin the long arithmetic of subtraction -- less contact, fewer meetings, a name removed from a phone book, a story changed slightly when asked where she was from. Her parents, who once read about her escapades in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a cocktail of horror and pride, were instructed to burn any letter that came without a return address. Some said she fled to Vermont. Others claimed she joined a commune in the Ozarks. There were whispers -- mostly drunk, always late -- that she was recruited by East Germans, that she’d shaved her head and taken a vow of silence, that she spoke only in code. The truth, as always, was stranger and less cinematic. By the time Hoover died, clutching the corner of his empire like a miser with a bad ticker, Just Nicole had become a kind of myth. A “her,” whispered rather than spoken, stretched across campfires and copy rooms alike. The irony -- the kind that would make God smile cruelly, or at least with a raised brow -- was that she now lived under the very conditions she’d once sought to expose. Files, aliases, false leads, no permanent address. Not quite hunted, but never safe. Paranoia, someone once told her, was a form of intelligence. She wondered if that someone had ever slept with a loaded pistol under their mattress and a bible full of cut-out microfilm in the drawer beside it. Years didn’t pass so much as reconfigure themselves, swapping faces and street signs like a cardsharp at a bus station table. Addresses became seasons, each one brief and unreliable -- winter in a Detroit flophouse where the radiators clanged all night, summer in a Tucson motel with curtains the color of old nicotine, autumn on a farm outside Eugene where every pumpkin field seemed to hum with a subsonic warning. The news came in fragments, half a headline glimpsed in a laundromat, a name overheard on a scratchy AM radio between farm reports and sermons. The country was molting, shedding skins of certainty, and she moved within the discarded layers, always ready to move, as though the world were something she could catch only in her peripheral vision. In Philadelphia, the tap water tasted like copper pennies and the light through the rowhouse blinds cut the air into Venetian stripes, every slat a possible surveillance aperture. Just Nicole had developed a habit of walking at odd hours, never twice along the same block, doubling back mid-step if a parked van looked too recently washed. She made herself forget the faces of those who’d helped her get this far, because in forgetting there was a kind of mercy -- neither side could betray what neither side remembered. Somewhere, a mimeograph machine clicked and hummed, spitting out copies of something that might have had her name on it. Baltimore was better only in that it was louder -- sirens, dockyard clang, bar fights spilling onto cracked sidewalks -- noise that could swallow her footsteps. Here she learned to trade favors in untraceable currencies: a bag of oranges for a place to sleep, a typewriter ribbon for a new coat with the tags still on. She stayed in boarding houses where the wallpaper peeled in the shape of countries no one could name anymore. Rumors drifted through the hallways about plainclothes agents, about people vanishing into the back seats of sedans that looked like they hadn’t been washed since the Eisenhower administration. By the time she hit Chicago, the wind itself seemed to be following her, curling around her coat collar with conspiratorial whispers. It was there, in a diner at the corner of Wabash and some street whose name she never caught, that a man she didn’t recognize slid into the booth across from her and left without ordering. On the napkin he’d palmed her, smudged in red fountain pen, was a single word: Westinghouse. She didn’t know if it was a place, a person, or a warning. She only knew that the question would keep following, patient as mildew, until she opened the door. Chicago was a city with too many doors, too many rooms you could never get back out of. Just Nicole rented small, suspicious spaces -- by the week, in cash -- from landlords who didn’t ask for her name but noticed too much anyway. She rode the El in slow loops, noting who got off where, who kept their face toward the window. A woman selling horchata at the corner of 18th and Blue Island called her a cunning woman and laughed as though that explained something, but when Just Nicole turned back to ask what she meant, the stand was already shuttered, the cart gone like a false storefront in a stage set. She heard the name in fragments -- half-intoned in Polish over pierogis on Milwaukee Ave., muttered in the electrical supply shop where no one ever seemed to buy anything but always came in carrying brown envelopes. Westinghouse. The word was like Neil Young’s Journey Through the Past: part hymn, part warning, part a memory you weren’t sure was yours. It followed her through the traffic roar on Wabash, in the freight elevator of the building where she was briefly a janitor, even in the wind off the lake that smelled of diesel and dead fish. At night she read files she shouldn’t have had, photocopies with the edges burned as though someone had tested whether paper could be taught not to speak. The story was never clear. A former city inspector in Bridgeport said Westinghouse was a man; a machinist from Pilsen said it was a building, a labyrinth under the city. A retired priest whispered that Westinghouse had “no birth and no death” and then asked her to leave. It was impossible to know who was feeding her maps and who was just moving her in circles. The contact came on a Thursday in late February, when the river was iced over and steam from the manholes made the streets look unwalkable. She found the note in her coat pocket -- unfamiliar handwriting, familiar paper -- telling her to be in a certain room in the Monadnock Building at 11:03 a.m. No name, just a line: We can give you a life without the Feds in it. She went, because by then the question had been following her too long. The Monadnock’s brick walls rose like a fortress of rational geometry, swallowing her in their narrow corridors. The elevators groaned like they were lowering miners into a shaft, and she thought for a moment about leaving -- just stepping back into the Chicago wind and vanishing again. But the letter had been precise, handwritten in a looping, old-fashioned script: Fourth floor. East side. 11:03. No name, no return address. She walked down a hallway that smelled faintly of newsprint and radiator steam until she found the room: door half-closed, light seeping out in a thin parallelogram. Inside, a figure sat by the window, backlit so their face was a flicker, more suggestion than substance. “Just Nicole,” they said, not asking. “You’ve been running a long time.” “I’ve had to,” she replied, remaining by the door. “You could stop,” the figure said, voice low enough that the radiator hiss nearly swallowed it. “You could eat in daylight. Sleep without counting exits. No more moving every three nights.” Just Nicole crossed her arms. “And what’s the catch?” A pause. A faint smile, maybe. “Work for us. Westinghouse.” The name hung there, she felt something coil in her gut -- half fear, half recognition she couldn’t place: "but who or what is that, really?" “You’ve got until morning to decide,” the figure said, rising. They left without looking at her, the door swinging shut in slow motion, like a page turning. That night she walked the frozen grid of the Loop until her feet ached, thinking about the proposition. She’d never actually worked for anyone but Just Nicole -- never taken orders she couldn’t rewrite, never worn a name she couldn’t discard. Signing on with Westinghouse felt like stepping into a set of clothes that weren’t hers, tailored too close in places she couldn’t move. And yet, there was that hum in the name, the way it seemed to recognize her without introduction. Shadowy organizations didn’t show up without knowing what they wanted -- and what they already owned. On the other hand, living like this wasn’t living. It was slow-motion drowning. A new identity, a real bed, food without backdoors -- those things had a gravitational pull she could feel in her whole body. She imagined waking up in a place where the morning light meant morning, not surveillance; where she could eat eggs without scanning the windows. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe it was the only way forward. Either way, by sunrise she knew the feds would still be out there, and Westinghouse would still know her name. The only question was which one she’d rather keep closer. The sunrise arrived in no hurry, hauling itself over the lake’s edge like a hungover shift worker, dragging a ribbon of pale gold that refused to resolve into anything so clear as promise or threat; it had that in-between quality, the way a half-heard confession in a diner booth might hang in the steam between coffee refills, neither to be seized nor ignored; she stood at the window in her borrowed apartment, fingertips resting against the cool glass as if testing the voltage of indecision, feeling both the itch to move and the strange gravity of staying put; below, the gulls strafed the shoreline in loose formation, their shadows jittering across the sand like marginalia written by an inattentive hand; she reminded herself -- because this was the kind of thing she liked to remind herself -- that time was elastic, a theory that held until you watched it in color, bleeding minute by minute into a narrowing horizon, the sky’s palette a slow-motion ultimatum from forces unnamed but intimately familiar, and in that light she could almost hear the whisper of a clock that might not have been ticking at all, except inside her. The knock came not like a cop’s -- sharp and confident -- but like a neighbor’s cat pawing to be let in, tentative, rhythmically uncertain; Just Nicole, half convinced it was a trick of the plumbing or her own heartbeat, opened the door to find a girl who looked about twelve and dressed like she’d borrowed her entire outfit from a thrift store that only stocked spy movies. “Sara NoH,” the girl announced, enunciating the “H” like it was a threat. “Like the Japanese theatre but also… no H,” she added, already looking past Just Nicole into the room with the flat, inventory-taking gaze of someone who’d been trained not to blink. “You’re with Westinghouse,” Just Nicole said, not so much asking as pulling the string on a wind-up toy. “Obviously,” Sara replied, stepping inside uninvited and producing from the depths of her coat a manila envelope the size and heft of a small casserole. “We’re prepared to wipe your name from certain unfriendly filing cabinets,” she continued, “in exchange for your abilities and a willingness to exist in the blurred margins of public record.” Just Nicole tilted her head, weighing the offer like a horse trader inspecting teeth. “Do I get dental?” “We’ll keep your teeth where they are,” Sara NoH said, smiling for the first time, and it was not reassuring. Just Nicole signed without reading, partly because she never did, partly because there’s no such thing as a clean contract when the ink is invisible. By the time Sara NoH left -- vanishing into the hallway like a magician’s dove -- Just Nicole’s apartment felt less like her own and more like a room she’d been shown in a dream, the kind that ends before you can ask the obvious questions. The envelope sat on her table, radiating a low-grade inevitability, and when she finally opened it, there was a one-way ticket to San Francisco, a name she’d never heard before, and a Polaroid of a door she was expected to find without an address. It was 1990, San Francisco had the smell of a party long since broken up -- beer rings on hardwood, incense burned down to the wire, a lingering sweetness that wasn’t so much nostalgia as the hangover of it. The Haight still had its peacocks, but now they strutted past storefronts selling “vintage” tie-dye for twice the price of a hotel room in ’68. Just Nicole had no trouble blending in; she’d always been a shape-shifter by necessity, wearing eras like hats -- take them off, swap them out, keep walking. Westinghouse had lodged her in a neat little Victorian with polished floors and a refrigerator already stocked, the sort of place that said, “We trust you... for now,” which in Westinghouse meant: “We’ll be listening.” The door in the Polaroid was on a quiet street that seemed to exist in a fold of the city, like the paper had been pinched and creased just to hide it from view. She spent three days watching from a parked car, memorizing patterns: no milk delivery, mail only on Tuesdays, and a single bulb that burned in the front room at odd hours like the occupant had a grudge against the dark. And then, on the fourth day, the door opened and out stepped the Duck Man. No metaphor -- this was an upright mallard in a weathered Pan Am postal pilot’s uniform, epaulets and all, his beak just chipped enough to suggest experience. She watched him for hours, trying to decide if the absurdity was camouflage or simply what it looked like: a duck in a uniform. He walked the neighborhood like a retiree on patrol, sometimes stopping to adjust a stranger’s mailbox, sometimes vanishing into alleys that didn’t appear on any map she owned. Just Nicole, who had seen her share of freakish street theater, recognized something different here. This wasn’t performance; this was ritual. On the sixth day, she made contact. No big plan, just the sort of impulse that comes from realizing the surveillance has gone both ways -- because that morning, the Duck Man tipped his cap to her car before she even got out. Crossing the street, she found herself looking into eyes as gold and impassive as coins at the bottom of a wishing well. “Scout Metradon,” he said, the words rolling out as though he were announcing himself at a cotillion. “Aviator, archivist, occasional apiarist.” She blinked. “Nicole,” she said. “Just Nicole.” He nodded gravely, as if filing her under a classification that might one day require review. “You’re not from here,” he continued, “but that’s alright. Most of the best people aren’t.” They talked for the better part of an hour -- about the weather, the relative merits of sourdough, and whether the moon was technically an archivist of tides. By the time she excused herself, Just Nicole wasn’t entirely sure if she’d just met a neighbor, a hallucination, or a future co-conspirator, but she knew she liked him. It started with coffee. Scout made it in a battered Italian moka pot that hissed like a mild curse, serving it in mismatched teacups chipped along their rims, each one allegedly salvaged from “the wreck of the Andrea Doria” (though he also claimed to have bought them at a thrift store in Daly City, depending on the day). She began visiting in the mornings, at first just for caffeine and curiosity, but soon for the strange calm that settled in his apartment -- a place that smelled faintly of cedar shavings, leather polish, and something she couldn’t name but suspected was a duck thing. They’d sit by his bay window, trading scraps of stories about places they’d been, or claimed to have been, both aware that most of what was said lived somewhere between confession and performance. By week three, she’d stopped thinking of him as “the Duck Man” and started thinking of him as Scout, full stop. He seemed to know everybody, or at least everybody worth knowing -- beat poets still half-alive in North Beach, a retired Navy cryptographer who lived in a van in Pacifica, the woman who ran the city’s most dangerous card table out of a laundromat on Clement Street. But in between these whimsical introductions, there were questions that seemed too specific: had she ever been to Pittsburgh? Did she know much about corporate shell companies? Had she ever heard of an organization whose initials rhymed with guesting mouse? She played dumb, because it was easier than playing honest. One rainy night, he showed her a box. No ceremony -- just slid it across the table while the storm rattled the blinds. Inside: folders, microfiche, yellowing memos stamped CONFIDENTIAL, a stack of grainy photographs that might have been of filing cabinets, or might have been of nothing at all. “Westinghouse,” he said, as if naming a childhood illness. She asked what it meant, and he shrugged, lighting a cigarette. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. They’re everywhere, in everything. Electrical grids, broadcast towers, deep-sea cable relays. Half the city runs on their parts and doesn’t know it.” He talked until the ash on his cigarette bent under its own weight, tracing connections between names and dates, none of which she wrote down. That night, lying awake in her furnished Westinghouse-paid apartment, she understood. She wasn’t in San Francisco to blend in, or even to wait for instructions; she was there to watch Scout. To listen without listening, to gather without appearing to gather. But she didn’t know why -- what threat a duck in a vintage pilot’s jacket posed to an entity whose fingers were wired into every circuit from coast to coast. And if she was supposed to keep her distance, Westinghouse had underestimated her. Because she liked him. Worse, she trusted him. And that was dangerous in ways she wasn’t ready to name. By the end of the month, she had begun carrying his voice around with her, the way a child keeps a found stone in a pocket -- comforting weight, strange texture, no real purpose except to touch and remember. Westinghouse’s weekly check-ins came in the form of nondescript envelopes slid under her door, always requesting updates on the subject, never Scout. They never asked if she liked him, if she laughed at his terrible jokes about maritime ducks, if she’d started filling in his sentences when he lost the thread. They didn’t care about any of that; they wanted patterns, meetings, anomalies. But she found herself editing the truth, letting certain encounters fall between the cracks like dropped coins she didn’t bother to retrieve. Still, she could feel the gears of the arrangement grinding beneath her feet. If Scout was chasing Westinghouse, and Westinghouse was chasing Scout, then she was just the rabbit released between the two, meant to be run to exhaustion. Her instincts told her to vanish -- change apartments, cities, names -- but another instinct, the one that had kept her alive this long, told her to stay put and listen. The city had a way of holding secrets in its fog; maybe she could find hers before either side decided she’d learned too much. The trouble was, each new scrap of information Scout let slip only made her want to lean in further. It was a balance she’d never tried to keep before. With the feds, there’d been a clear line: them and her, hunter and hunted. With Westinghouse and Scout, the lines seemed drawn in disappearing ink, fading just as she began to make them out. She began keeping her own notes -- on napkins, in the margins of library books, scratched into matchbooks she kept in her coat pocket. Not for Westinghouse, and not entirely for herself, but for some imagined future moment when the truth would need to be arranged and presented like evidence at a trial that might never happen. She made the quiet decision -- never out loud, never even in complete sentences -- that she would give each of them just enough to keep the game going. Westinghouse would get their reports, sterilized and incomplete; Scout would get her company, her occasional hints of knowing more than she should. If playing both sides was the only way to stay in the middle, then she would make the middle her territory, her country without borders, at least until the tide shifted. And tides, she knew, always shifted. The first time Scout mentioned Counter Media, it was almost by accident -- one of those conversational landmines that seemed harmless until you felt the tremor underfoot. They had been circling Westinghouse for weeks in conversation, mapping rumors to addresses, tracing whispers through coffee shops and barrooms, until the name emerged like a half-forgotten lyric. Just Nicole didn’t press him then; she’d learned that with Scout, direct questions were like loud noises in a dark room -- they scared things off. Instead, she let the name settle between them, the way a tarot pack settles in the palm, waiting for the moment when curiosity would tip it over into explanation. Scout approached Counter Media the way a fox approaches a henhouse with a hole already dug under the fence: cautiously, with more curiosity than hunger, and a suspicion the hole was a little too neat. Westinghouse, he explained to Just Nicole over the clatter of a Chinatown noodle shop, didn’t officially run Counter Media. It was operated through an entity whose name sounded innocuous enough for a tax return but collapsed into a funny acronym that, once spoken aloud, you’d swear was the setup for a dirty joke: The Bureau of Unified Telecommunications Tracking (B.U.T.T.). They specialized, according to Scout, in making inconvenient stories disappear -- not through bribes or threats, but by diluting them into such a soup of contradictory “facts” that no one could remember what had been true in the first place. Just Nicole, stirring her tea without drinking it, recognized the tactic; she’d seen the feds try something similar back in the days when she still believed “truth” could be preserved if you hid it in enough filing cabinets. Only this was slicker, almost beautiful in its corruption. The acronyms branched like tributaries -- shell companies with names plucked from crossword puzzles; non-profits that claimed to rehabilitate fax machines; even an “arts collective” that operated out of a condemned skating rink in Daly City. Each trail doubled back on itself, leading not to Westinghouse proper but to something Scout kept calling the cage -- though he refused to explain that part. Their workdays had a rhythm now: mornings in used bookstores and surplus shops, afternoons in municipal archives, evenings at whichever diner or bar could promise anonymity with a side of decent pie. Scout claimed he’d once found a Counter Media memo sandwiched between the pages of a Danielle Steel paperback; Just Nicole pretended to believe him, partly because the idea was absurd and partly because absurdity had a habit of turning out true. The deeper they went, the more the edges of the project frayed, tangling into the unrelated but equally odd world of The Future Trainspotters of America, or FTA, which seemed to be a real organization with unreal interests. FTA’s stated mission was harmless enough: documenting “the evolving nature of passenger rail in the late 20th century.” But according to Scout’s sources, half their senior members didn’t know the first thing about locomotives and had never set foot in a train yard. Their meetings -- always held in rooms with too many clocks -- produced minutes that read more like coded transmissions than club business. It was here, in the interstitial gossip of FTA members, that Scout first heard the term “Counter Media” whispered like a slur. Some even claimed the two organizations shared funding streams, though no one could explain why a rail enthusiast club would care about manipulating news cycles. By the end of the week, they had filled two shoeboxes with notes, clippings, and half-legible napkin sketches of connection webs. Just Nicole found herself enjoying the chase in a way she hadn’t felt since her underground days -- except now the enemy was both everywhere and nowhere, and her ally was a duck in a Pan Am pilot’s jacket whose idea of a stakeout snack was canned sardines on Saltines. Still, each scrap of data, each overheard name or curious acronym, felt like a breadcrumb leading toward something that might finally make sense. And if Westinghouse thought she was watching him for their purposes, well -- she’d just have to make sure she got there first. The Future Trainspotters of America, Scout explained one damp evening in the back of a Mission District dive, wasn’t really about trains. At least, not the kind that ran on rails. “Think of it as a club,” he said, “where the membership perks include knowing where every shipment, every packet, every broadcast in the country is going to be before it gets there.” Officially, they were hobbyists who kept logs of freight schedules and antique locomotive parts; unofficially, they were a roving data set in human form, occasionally tapped by Westinghouse and its orbitals for information you couldn’t just pull from a ledger. Scout suspected that Counter Media used FTA’s “trainspotting” reports as the raw material for their narrative engineering, and B.U.T.T. was the machine that ground it all into digestible paste for the masses. Just Nicole nodded, letting the acronyms pile up like laundry on a chair, each one smelling faintly of something more dangerous than it claimed to be. The first time she heard about the girl in the yellow dress, it was as if Scout had forgotten she was in the room. He was flipping through a stack of grainy surveillance stills when his thumb froze on one -- a blurred figure crossing a street, sunlight striking her just enough to make the dress burn bright against the gray city backdrop. “She’s in all of them,” he murmured. Just Nicole leaned over his shoulder; indeed, in shot after shot -- different cities, different seasons -- the same girl appeared, sometimes half-hidden in a crowd, sometimes staring dead at the camera. No dates, no names, just that yellow dress. Scout claimed she’d been seen near FTA meets, in the margins of Counter Media briefings, even in a photograph of a Westinghouse shareholder picnic from the early seventies. “She doesn’t age,” he said, like he was offering a punchline he couldn’t explain. The idea took root in Just Nicole’s mind, unwelcome but stubborn, the way mold crept along grout lines. She began scanning crowds for yellow -- not just dresses, but raincoats, scarves, umbrellas -- and found it everywhere, maddeningly banal. Was the girl a handler? A courier? An invention? Or was she some kind of myth embedded in the substructure of Westinghouse’s operations, a mascot whose job was simply to exist and be noticed by the right people at the right time? B.U.T.T., she reasoned, could hide stories in plain sight -- but what if it could also hide people? And what if the girl in the yellow dress wasn’t hiding at all, but watching? By the time the fourth shoebox was full, the girl had become a third presence at their table -- never seen, never acknowledged aloud, but there in the way Scout’s eyes sometimes drifted to the door before speaking, in the way Just Nicole began to feel the air shift when she turned a corner. She thought about telling Westinghouse, but stopped short every time; to mention the girl might be to admit she’d noticed her, and to admit that was to admit she’d been seen first. In this game, she knew, being seen was worse than being followed. Their next lead came by way of a moldy cardboard box in the back of a Tenderloin thrift shop, the kind of place that sold single shoes and unspooled cassettes without apology. Scout had been flipping through its brittle paper contents -- defunct bus schedules, church newsletters, poetry zines from the Nixon years -- when he froze on a stapled chapbook whose cover was stamped in uneven black ink: The Girl in the Yellow Dress. The author, credited only as “Brother Axiom,” looked to be more than a man in the surviving photocopied author photo: a beard like topographical relief and sunglasses that reflected nothing but sky. Inside, between half-coherent stanzas about railroads that went nowhere and rain that “tasted like headlines,” was a single note in blue fountain pen: If you’ve seen her, you already know where to find me. It didn't take long. They found Brother Axiom in a bookstore that seemed to have given up halfway through existing. Half the shelves were empty; the other half sagged under stacks of chapbooks and cardboard boxes labeled in faint pencil, as if the titles themselves were classified. He sat in the back under a skylight mottled with pigeon droppings, long beard stained the color of coffee, a denim vest bristling with enamel pins from causes that had gone extinct decades earlier. He waved them over before they’d even introduced themselves, saying, “You’re late. Or early. Time’s a spiral, not a line. Sit.” Scout, looking as comfortable as a duck in a pond of cold gravy, nudged Just Nicole toward the folding chairs arranged like an interrogation that had forgotten its table. “You said you knew the girl in the yellow dress,” Just Nicole began. “Knew?” Brother Axiom blinked theatrically. “I know. She’s my niece. Or maybe my aunt. Family trees don’t grow straight in our line. She sends me postcards sometimes. Never from where she is, always from where she’s not. That’s how you know they’re real.” “Postcards?” Scout asked, producing a notepad. “Mostly landscapes. Deserts, forests, occasionally a mall parking lot. But there’s always one thing in common: a yellow blur in the corner, like the sun didn’t want to leave her alone.” Just Nicole raised an eyebrow, “or like a dress.” Brother Axiom pointed at her as if she’d just solved the Riddle of the Sphinx, “exactly. See, you get it. Ducks always get it too, which is why you’re here, feathered friend.” Scout bristled, but only slightly. “She’s not supposed to be real,” he said, scribbling something indecipherable in his notebook. “None of us are supposed to be real,” Brother Axiom replied. “That’s the point. You think the Future Trainspotters of America track trains? They track people. Whole family lines. Somebody drops out of the record, boom -- they know. And if they don’t? Counter Media fills in a replacement. Keeps the story straight. B.U.T.T. just polishes the whole thing until you forget where the lie started.” “That’s not how I heard it,” Scout said, chewing the end of his pencil. “That’s because you’ve been listening to people who want you to think they’re telling the truth,” Brother Axiom shot back. “The girl’s the key. She’s been in the background of every important moment since ‘68. You just haven’t been looking.” Just Nicole asked him what “key” meant, exactly, but Brother Axiom only leaned back and grinned, as if she’d just inquired about the mating habits of lightbulbs. “Keys open doors. You’ve seen doors, haven’t you?” he said. “Some you open, some open you. The yellow dress -- it’s an invitation. Or maybe a warning. Could be both. Most important things are.” He produced a small manila envelope from his vest and slid it across the space between them. “She gave me this to give to someone who asked the right question. I think you just did.” “What’s in it?” Scout asked. “No idea,” Brother Axiom said cheerfully, “I’m allergic to answers.” Outside, on the rain-slick sidewalk, they opened the envelope. Inside was a single strip of photo booth pictures, four frames of the girl in the yellow dress, making faces that could have been joy or grief or indigestion -- hard to say in black and white. At the bottom, scrawled in thick marker: Find the station without trains. Scout held the strip up to the streetlight like it might reveal hidden text. Just Nicole, meanwhile, felt the peculiar weight of being handed a mystery by someone who might just be crazy enough to be telling the truth. But that was the end of it; the trail that had begun with a single yellow dress and spiraled outward through poets and photo booths and inscrutable injunctions now contracted into nothing, a vacuum, a stifled breath between subway stops. They tried, in the halfhearted way of amateur detectives who want their obsession rewarded with some climactic revelation; but the girl in the yellow dress remained a vapor, a shadow slipping out the side door, not so much elusive as structurally absent. Weeks stacked into months; months, into a year. They argued about whether she had ever existed in the first place; sometimes Scout insisted the photographs proved it, other times Just Nicole countered that photographs only prove that light once fell on chemicals. They would laugh, but always with an undertone of unease, the creeping recognition that mysteries often dissolve not into solutions but into weather. Then, in a year they could never quite fix -- was it 1995, or 1996? time itself already starting to buckle under the strain of their obsession -- a new rumor surfaced. A friend of the girl in the yellow dress, someone known not by a proper name but by her accessory: the woman with the red fanny pack. That was how she existed in whispered testimonies, a piece of plastic zippered polyester orbiting in recollections, a flash in the margins of old party Polaroids. It was the kind of lead that promised depth but delivered only surface; each time they tugged on the thread, the fabric disintegrated, leaving them with nothing but cheap dye stains on their fingers. The fanny pack was a punchline masquerading as a clue. Everything pointed to a wall -- not metaphorical, but a brick wall, literal and final, as if the city itself had decided to participate in the obfuscation. The more they pushed, the more the stories curled back on themselves; addresses led to empty lots, phone numbers to disconnected lines. And it was around this time that Westinghouse, that unseen manipulator, withdrew its presence from Just Nicole’s life; messages that had once appeared in strange envelopes or late-night phone calls stopped arriving. Had she failed some test? Had she ceased to be useful in whatever design they imagined for her? Or had she, terrifyingly, slipped free? Freedom and abandonment can look identical, depending on the angle from which you view them. Scout, restless, believed there was still something to pursue; some hidden artery of meaning beneath the dead tissue of failed leads. By 2005, San Francisco had become not a city but a cul-de-sac, endlessly circling the same conversations, the same archives, the same exhausted sidewalks. Philadelphia, by contrast, glimmered with a faint promise -- the weight of history, yes, but also the peculiar magnetism of East Coast decay, where mysteries fermented rather than evaporated. He made the argument in a cafe with wobbly tables, sketching maps on napkins, pointing to connections only he seemed able to see. Just Nicole, meanwhile, had begun to imagine a different shape for her life. Architecture, not as metaphor but as discipline: the drawing of lines, the command of angles, the insistence that space could be shaped against chaos. After years of being pulled into currents she never quite chose, she wanted to design, to impose order, to find in floorplans what she could not find in photographs. She filled out applications, bought drafting tools, looked at catalogues of West Philadelphia apartments with empty basements and stubborn radiators. The city began to form itself in her mind as both experiment and escape, a geometry that might finally belong to her. And so, improbably but inevitably, the paths aligned. The mystery that had once bound them -- girl in the yellow dress, woman with the red fanny pack, the gnomic pronouncements of Westinghouse -- had faded into memory, not solved but stored, like documents sealed in an archive no one ever consults. What remained was the present: Scout with his theories, Just Nicole with her compass and T-square, and the mutual decision to pack what they could, leave behind what they couldn’t, and cross the continent. In the late summer of 2005, they arrived in West Philadelphia, the air heavy with humidity and student ambition, carrying with them not answers but a peculiar kind of permission: to start again, even if the mystery had never been resolved. Philadelphia, then -- or what passed for Philadelphia, since one could never be entirely sure whether the bricks underfoot and the cracked marble lintels overhead were anything more than props erected by some vast unseen Stage Department -- had always seemed less like a city and more like a continuity error stretching back to 1776, or earlier still if you traced the genealogy of its quarried stones and occult street grid; here was Westinghouse at its most protean, writing and rewriting civic mythology in the form of “liberty” and “independence,” hollow words projected on Masonic scaffolding and still visible in the awkward angles of El tracks, the way Broad Street refused to obey geometry, or the fact that every rowhouse window seemed to conceal an identical lightbulb filament burning just faintly out of sync with the others, like some grand electrical metronome keeping time for a nation; it was not inconceivable, at least to Scout, that the Revolution itself had been a dress rehearsal staged to prove out circuits of obedience and rebellion, human current running through colonial bodies like prototype wiring, and that Westinghouse’s fingerprints -- however anachronistic -- could be read in the copper-green patina of Independence Hall, in the streetlamps whose glow never fully banished the shadows, in the muttered feeling that every decision, from zoning board to lovers’ quarrel, had already been lit, powered, and rehearsed decades before. For a while, Westinghouse allowed itself a recess. Just Nicole, with her late-night drafting tables and long rolls of vellum, finally passed the exam boards, the kind that announce you are now credentialed in the lawful, stamped&sealed sense to put up actual buildings in the actual world. Her style was pragmatic, not flashy -- angled glass and steel softened by improbable pocket gardens, mostly infill projects in neighborhoods that hadn’t had the word “architect” applied to them in generations. Clients trusted her, in spite of themselves, because she had that air of calm inevitability, as if she’d been licensed from the day she was born. Scout was there for the swearing-in ceremony, whispering jokes in the back row about secret architectural oaths to Vitruvius and Pythagoras. The Pan Am Clipper came into Scout’s possession not long after in the way most impossible artifacts enter the lives of the undeserving: quietly, by paperwork. A forgotten trust in someone’s will, a liquidation sale nobody watched closely enough, an official stamp that looked forged but wasn’t. He renamed it The Antiphon, because of course he did, and managed to wedge it against a serviceable pier on the Schuylkill, mooring it like an eccentric duck boat for hire. Tourists came in fits and bursts, paying just enough for him to keep the thing afloat and himself in sandwiches and parts. He gave the tours with his usual unreliable narration -- half aviation history, half personal digressions, and enough outright fabrications to keep the Tripadvisor reviews delightfully polarized. Their friends -- those not already subsumed by various schools, consulting gigs, or the grinding mill of adulthood -- tolerated this as “the new normal.” Scout the boatman, Just Nicole the architect. Westinghouse’s shadow no longer hung over every gathering, and the old paranoia softened into anecdote. They stopped looking for clues in the margins of subway ads, stopped expecting hidden ciphers in the day’s Inquirer crossword. Philadelphia resumed its façade of knowable streets and workaday commerce. Even the memories of Brother Axiom and his yellow-dress genealogy began to fade into barroom material, something to be performed with a laugh, not worried over in the night. It lasted years like that, years that -- retrospectively -- feel rented. Then came 2012, when the old circuits warmed again. First in whispers: a friend of a friend of a friend who swore someone materialized in a booth at the Propeller Club bar, coat still damp from rain, holding onto a payphone receiver that wasn’t there. Then, the thrift store -- nondescript, fluorescent, the kind of place that sold mismatched mugs and worn blazers. The people who went in said there was a back room, a phone mounted crooked on the wall. They dialed nothing at all, just pressed the receiver to their ear, and then -- without transition -- were elsewhere. The Propeller Club became their stakeout spot, though they pretended it was just a watering hole for longshoremen and those who liked to imagine themselves as such. A low bar, heavy wood, flags of nations that no longer existed drooping from the ceiling. Most nights were dead: two old regulars watching a muted baseball game, the bartender polishing already clean glasses. But once in a while, one of them would be there -- that displaced figure, confused, adjusting, having come by way of thrift-store dial tone and landing suddenly in a booth that looked like any other. They never stayed long, however the pattern was undeniable: the thrift store, the phone, the booth. The initials: W.HOUSE. Not gone, not finished, only dormant. Philadelphia’s ordinary veil had slipped, if only slightly. And when the veil parted, the Propeller Club filled up with the displaced -- not patrons in the usual sense, but refugees of an unlisted exchange, stumbling in from the phone portal with the shaken faces of travelers who had crossed borders no map acknowledged. One man, gray trenchcoat damp from river fog, pressed his palms flat on the bar and whispered to Just Nicole, “it was like static in reverse. Like every call I’d ever hung up on came back at once. You understand?” His eyes darted, hoping she did. She only nodded, and Scout caught the phrase in his notebook, underlining it twice before the man slipped out the side door, swallowed by traffic. A woman in a red beret lingered longer, clutching a cigarette she never lit. She told Scout, “it wasn’t a tunnel, it was more like a throat. You could hear a city breathing through it. I thought I saw... feathers? Or a man with a duck’s bill. And then --” She cut herself off, laughed too loudly, and asked if the payphone still took dimes. Before they could answer, she was gone too, into the blur. Another, younger, barely old enough to shave, gripped Just Nicole’s wrist with the urgency of a drowning swimmer. “They write the initials on the walls over there, too. W.HOUSE. Same hand, same slant. You can’t tell if it’s graffiti or scripture. And the letters don’t stay still. Sometimes the O slides away.” He released her suddenly, muttered an apology, and bolted. Scout and Just Nicole would try to catch a word, a phrase, before the person was gone again, folded into the blur. Sometimes it was nothing more than a muttered address, a slurred warning, or the name of someone already dead; other times, the stranger’s sudden flight could be explained only by the brief and unprovable sighting of a duck-headed figure waddling past the jukebox, as if that alone were enough to trigger escape velocity. And in their wake, silence. A silence thicker than the cigarette haze, vibrating with the certainty that what came through the phone was not finished with them -- not yet. Just Nicole ran her hands over blueprints in the daytime, but kept her eyes trained on certain corners at night. Scout still gave his tours, narrating aviation lore to Midwestern families, but every propeller, every rivet seemed to vibrate with signals only half-decoded. The Antiphon rocked on its moorings, waiting. The old rhythms of the case reassembled themselves almost naturally, as if some unseen hand preferred things that way. Scout and Just Nicole fell back into the habit of cross-referencing names, tracing diagrams that may or may not have been hoaxes, chasing down stories from half-forgotten message boards. Nights blurred into mornings over piles of photocopied reports, spectral sightings, and badly scrawled field notes. They told themselves this was method, discipline, when in truth it was compulsion. The veneer of procedure was fragile. Each dossier, each overheard fragment, each innocuous coincidence hummed with aftershocks from the portal, vibrations they pretended not to hear but could not stop hearing. What unsettled them most was how the trail refused to stay still. Threads they had once filed away as irrelevant kept surfacing again, in new guises, under new names. In a footnote to an online essay about obsolete broadcast towers, Just Nicole found a casual reference to something called W.HOUSE. Scout, weeks later, picked up the same initials in the mouth of a retired engineer who had spoken too freely after his third beer. Different sources, different contexts, but the pattern was unmistakable: the letters surfaced, disappeared, and resurfaced, like wreckage that could never quite be kept beneath the waterline. And then came the voice. At first only in transcription -- quotes that read like fragments of sermons, appearing in places no sermon should. Then in recordings traded between the fringes of ham radio networks: calm, persuasive, almost hypnotic in its precision. The name attached was always the same, though it felt less like a person than an invocation: Sara NoH. She was said to be the one articulating the doctrine of W.HOUSE, though whether she spoke for herself or for something older was impossible to know. Neither of them had seen her in person, (at least not in Philadelphia), nor did they expect to, though her presence bled into every rumor, every coded message that passed through the W-H net like static with a pulse. For Scout, Sara NoH was little more than a silhouette stitched together from anecdotes and half-believed sightings: a woman with auburn hair cut in a way that made people whisper “Scully” without irony, moving through basements and back rooms with the practiced neutrality of someone who’d been briefed for decades. For Just Nicole, though, the name was not rumor but recall, and every description snagged against the memory of a twelve-year-old girl with spy-thrift clothes and the audacity of an agent twice her age, standing in a borrowed apartment and dictating the terms of a life that would never entirely return to her. Scout spoke of Sara NoH as though she were an apparition conjured from the collective paranoia of the Westinghouse diaspora, a messianic figure in pant-suits who had somehow turned whispers into congregation. He thought the awareness of her -- distant, mythic -- was enough to shift their work into new territory. What he didn’t know, what Just Nicole kept sheathed behind nods and muttered agreements, was that Sara’s voice was no abstraction to her. She had heard it, once -- flat, deliberate, uncannily adult -- and that sound had never really left her, vibrating still in the unseen seams of their investigation. The portal, Scout insisted, had opened more than once and might again, a question of timing, circuitry, maybe even faith. But Nicole knew better -- or worse. The aperture was not a place, not a phone booth or thrift-store threshold. It was human, had always been human. The portal was Sara NoH herself, grown now into the image of a television skeptic, commanding enough to convince people that fiction and secrecy could be styled into authority. And if the rumors were true, she was no longer carrying envelopes for Westinghouse. She was Westinghouse, or what had grown up inside its husk. Asher Doyle arrived in their periphery the way a cold sore does: uninvited, slightly shameful, yet impossible not to monitor once it’s there. A junior gumshoe in a coat two sizes too warm for the weather, tailing his own shadow across downtown like he had just stepped out of a paperback manual on How To Investigate Without Subtlety. Contacts lit up the wire almost immediately -- “Your boy’s poking around the W.HOUSE nest again” -- and so Just Nicole and Scout found themselves in that old familiar rhythm of observation. The trick was not whether to watch him, but how not to laugh too loud while doing it. “He thinks student IDs are a license,” Scout muttered into his coffee, the kind of aside that came preloaded with exasperation. Just Nicole, however, found herself resisting the impulse to defend him, absurd as that would be. There was something oddly tender in the way Asher stumbled after phantoms of his own making, checking behind himself like the world contained mirrors only he could see. His “investigation,” if it could be dignified as such, carried all the air of a child in detective drag -- except this child had wandered into traffic, and the traffic was named Westinghouse. They saw him piece together fragments -- chalk marks on telephone poles, matchbooks planted like Easter eggs, the detritus of a world he believed was sending him a private broadcast. Most operatives in his position would have assumed decoys, traps, the classic false trail. Asher? He dutifully followed each breadcrumb, convinced the universe owed him revelation. “It’s like watching somebody try to hotwire a bumper car,” Scout sighed, scribbling the observation into a notebook that would never be read. Just Nicole let the remark pass. She had met worse, and besides, she had met Sara NoH once, long ago, when Sara still had pigtails instead of Scully hair. That memory made her cautious toward judgment. What finally broke the monotony of watching him chase ghosts was the folder. She found it crammed in her mailbox, the paper stiff with toner, its cover sheet announcing itself with improbable bravado: The Hodges Files. Inside, photocopied blur, margins scarred with three different inks, a scatter of arrows and underlines converging on a name she didn’t know. Bobby Hodges. Stranger to her, but the pages insisted he was no stranger to W.HOUSE -- central, indispensable, threaded through every account. And now, according to the dates scrawled in the corners, entangled with Asher Doyle. That was the jolt: not Hodges, not even the dossier’s crude theatrics, but the unmistakable fact of the sender. After years of silence, Westinghouse had chosen her again. She carried it to Scout, sliding it across their usual table. He turned the pages with the resignation of a man already aware of the story, already sketching the lines in his head. “Where’d this come from?” he asked, pen scratching in the margin. The lie came before she could think: “Anonymous drop.” He didn’t believe it, not fully, but he didn’t press. That was Scout -- as long as the data kept arriving, provenance was secondary. Still, the ease with which he accepted her falsehood unsettled her almost as much as the files themselves. What stayed with her afterward wasn’t the dossier’s contents but its delivery. Westinghouse had not sent it to Scout, nor to Asher himself, but to her. That was the contact, the reactivation, the subtle reminder that she was still in circuit. She told herself it was coincidence, just old machinery grinding back to life, but when she caught her reflection in the cafe window she saw her own head tilted, listening -- as though for a voice behind the glass. Fondness crept in where suspicion should have lived. She could see, in Asher's hesitations, an ache for some invisible permission -- what to touch, what to risk, what doorway was safe to enter. It was a familiar ache, the kind that had once sent her down the long corridor of Westinghouse herself. Motherly wasn’t the right word, though it came close: something between maternal worry and the grim amusement of watching someone rehearse your old mistakes. He didn’t know she had already walked the same labyrinth, years before. He didn’t know anything, which was both his liability and his charm. Word finally broke that Asher intended to do more than nose around -- that he was aiming to step in, body and soul, with W.HOUSE. Not a flirtation, not a glance at the wallpaper, but actual entry. That meant the Propeller Club, the phone-portal, the whole business. So she and Scout stationed themselves accordingly, pretending to be just regulars, propping up the old bar like they’d always had. The jukebox croaked out a half-century of ballads about lost causes, a fitting soundtrack. And sure enough, like some half-remembered punchline to a spy story told by someone who had clearly been drinking, Asher Doyle appeared in the booth. One moment he was nowhere, the next he was there, leatherette sticky under his hands, the pink fizzing drink perched beside him, a Hello Kitty head leaking strawberry mist like a tiny neon witness. He touched his jacket, his pockets, his shoes, as if checking for missing limbs; the payphone had vanished, the air had hummed, and some part of him had clearly gone along for the ride without permission. Scout exhaled, scribbling another line in a notebook that had seen more improbable events than it deserved. Just Nicole only watched, silently, and in the pause between her breaths was the weight of every warning she had ever felt, every protective impulse, the small motherly fondness for a foolish man who didn’t know what he was walking into -- but that she could not, would not, voice aloud. That first time Asher appeared, it was chaos wrapped in banality, a shimmer of nonsense that landed squarely in their laps. Just Nicole never liked to admit, even to herself, how much that moment set the tone for what followed. The three of them -- Scout, Asher, herself -- moved forward together almost by accident, like people swept into the same subway car during a strike, glancing sidelong, not sure whether to get off at the next stop or ride it all the way out. He appeared in that booth, the air still smelled of scorched circuitry, and here he was, pulling them into a pattern she recognized without wanting to say so. From that point, their little orbit was difficult to describe without falling into anecdotes: hours in late-night diners, shadowy errands that never quite explained themselves, moments where Asher’s half-formed theories about the world’s hidden machinery pressed too close to the bone. Scout played archivist, pen always moving, while she -- against her better instincts -- let herself drift between observer and caretaker. Together they became a trio, not friends exactly, but bound by Westinghouse, whose presence threaded through their movements whether or not they named it aloud. Every step afterward seemed to reiterate that what had happened in the booth was only the prologue. And it’s tempting, in retrospect, to line up each episode like a sequence of escalating tests. A phone call with no caller. A locked door that opened only once, to them. A series of anonymous notes whose handwriting shifted mid-sentence. The texture of unreality became the baseline, and they grew accustomed to treating each rupture in the ordinary as both nuisance and invitation. Just Nicole noticed that Asher, for all his academic posturing, looked almost relieved whenever the improbable resurfaced, as if it confirmed a private suspicion that the world had been wrong all along. But if their joint adventures blurred together into one continuous reel, it was the interruptions that mattered more: the interludes when the others went home and Just Nicole felt the silence press down. That was when Westinghouse pressed back into her life -- not only with pressure or nudges, but in the same blunt, undeniable way it once had before, years ago. The form was different now, dispersed into fragments: a flicker in her inbox that vanished when she clicked, a radio stutter mid-song, a phrase that rearranged itself on a billboard as she drove past. Always the same cadence, the same insistence, impossible to mistake. She didn’t share these with Scout, not even when Scout’s notebooks began to bulge with records of things that couldn’t have happened. She certainly didn’t tell Asher, who seemed far too ready to believe anything whispered in his ear. No -- Westinghouse was hers to manage, hers to interpret, and though she sometimes wished to bury the connection, she could not resist the clarity it promised. The others might have thought they were navigating accidents, coincidences, misfires of fate, but she knew there was design in it, however opaque. The next message arrived in a manner only Westinghouse could engineer: part instruction, part practical joke, part ominous postcard from a bureaucracy that may have invented bureaucracy purely to amuse itself; it told Just Nicole to meet Sara NoH in the Azores, no preamble, no apology, no acknowledgement that the Atlantic was wet or that volcanic islands tended to be windy; Scout had just unearthed the clue in the graveyard, naturally, as if the universe had synchronized its dead-end gravestones with her inbox, timing the dispatch to the second, as though some cosmic administrator were tittering behind the curtains; she did not pause to consider the travel logistics, the absurdity of mid-ocean rendezvous, the historical improbabilities, or the fact that somewhere a seagull was probably taking dictation, because in Westinghouse’s world such considerations were always tertiary; the point was clear -- go, find, report, survive, smile, file your expense report; the humor was theirs, the imperative hers, and she could almost hear the faint clatter of invisible typewriters composing this exact missive in triplicate while the Atlantic swelled with indifference; instructions were instructions; names were names; islands were islands; and somewhere, Sara NoH was already waiting for the absurdity to catch up. They arrived in the Azores aboard the Pan Am Clipper, which rocked and hissed in a way that suggested either miscalibrated hydraulics or the secret amusement of some unseen maritime deity; luggage, for reasons known only to fate and poorly tethered handles, performed a percussion concerto on the dock, occasionally punctuated by the cries of gulls that may have been acting as Westinghouse’s junior operatives; the cobblestones themselves seemed to rearrange in slow motion, as if testing the attentiveness of pedestrians or perhaps issuing their own subtly bureaucratic directives; Just Nicole stepped forward, feeling Westinghouse under her skin, a low-grade metronome of absurdity, a tickle at the base of her skull that suggested instructions folded into the very atmosphere, whispered through electrical hums, reflected off the ocean, possibly coded into the pattern of the local pigeons, definitely into the shape of the shadows; somewhere a dog barked, perhaps in approval, perhaps at nothing in particular, and she made a mental note, because in this world, mental notes are occasionally actionable. After breakfast she announced that she was "going to walk the edges of the town to see who salutes,” tipping her head as if issuing orders in a city that had spent decades perfecting its geometry solely to confuse visitors; the air smelled faintly of salt, volcanic dust, and something like burnt toast, which she noted could be relevant or could be a red herring, the kind Westinghouse delights in leaving dangling; she moved along narrow alleys that bent at impossible angles, past stairways that seemed to fold back upon themselves, over puddles that caught the clouds in distorted quadrants, and toward the town square where absurdity gathers in pockets, waiting to be acknowledged or ignored. Sara NoH awaited in a cafe that could only be described as topographically mischievous: chairs that leaned toward conspiratorial angles, tables arranged like distorted polygons, a barista who measured coffee by intuition or perhaps by quantum probability, and a ceiling that seemed to curve just enough to make the laws of Euclidean space question themselves; she smiled when Just Nicole entered, and the dialogue began immediately, cascading like a poorly tuned xylophone of wit and exasperation: “I hear Westinghouse has been sending postcards with threats disguised as instructions,” Sara NoH said, tapping a spoon against the rim of her cup like a ceremonial baton. “Threats? Instructions? Or subtle suggestions that we’re collectively hallucinating?” Just Nicole countered, raising a brow in a motion that could have been recorded and archived as an exhibit in bureaucratic absurdity; laughter punctuated the sentences, some genuine, some mandated by the implicit contract of being within Westinghouse’s orbit yet again; somewhere beyond the cafe window, the gulls possibly dictated memos to themselves, or perhaps they were taking minutes for an invisible board meeting. “News,” Sara NoH said finally, adopting a gravity that implied either national emergency or the unveiling of a previously undiscovered kitchen appliance; “Westinghouse is reassigning you.” Just Nicole froze mid-brow-raise, the vertigo of cosmic bureaucracy flooding her system, the Atlantic beyond the window humming either applause or ordinary tides -- the difference being imperceptible; she exhaled and braced herself, because in Westinghouse arithmetic, reassignments are neither polite nor optional, and there is no such thing as unentertaining inevitability; her next move had been cataloged, footnoted, cross-referenced, and probably filed in some ledger that definitely existed whether she liked it or not, and which would follow her like a shadow even across oceans; she realized, with the hollow thrill of inevitability, that Westinghouse had already decided the terms, and she had no choice but to obey. The cafe seemed suddenly smaller, the air heavier, and Sara NoH’s gaze sharp enough to slice through the Atlantic as if to say, without words: the reassignment begins now.

----->>>Chapter Five