Filed Under
The lair smelled like solder and bad decisions.
Amy Atlas sat at the editing console with a cup of cold coffee and thirty-seven hours of stolen audio. The recordings were Tim’s. He didn’t know she had them. That was fine. Tim didn’t know a lot of things about Amy Atlas, which had always been, professionally speaking, her greatest advantage.
She pressed play.
– a woman like that, you don’t forget the first time she looks at you like you’re an obstacle. Like you’re a problem she’s already solved and filed. Caribbean, wasn’t it? The party. She was–
Amy stopped the recording. Let it sit.
The problem with Tim Brandt was that he’d always been precise about the wrong things.
Stacey stood near the door with a tablet and the expression of someone who had learned not to ask. Amy had acquired Stacey for her logical precision, her freedom from the inefficiencies of feeling. Stacey was watching her the way Amy watched Tim. A pattern Amy had established and not examined.
Later.
She pressed play.
– catalogue of small crimes, really. The Marchetti job, she used the gala as cover but the timing was wrong, she knew it was wrong, she went anyway because– I don’t know. Because she wanted to, I suppose. That’s Amy. Because she wanted to.
Amy’s hand on the wheel. Not moving.
He’d been doing this for years. Private recordings, no audience, no operational purpose. Just Tim Brandt in a room somewhere documenting Amy Atlas the way a naturalist documents something dangerous and rare. Her mistakes. Her stubbornness. The particular way she was petty when she felt outmaneuvered.
He’d been paying close attention.
She pushed the thought aside. This was not the time for that particular flavour of reckoning. There was work to do. Tim was in a private facility on the east side – cover story involving a climbing accident, plausible given the lifestyle, nobody would look too hard – and he’d lost things. How much, she didn’t know. The doctors were cautious. His people were cautious. Amy had stopped being cautious at some point in the last decade, she wasn’t sure exactly when.
She didn’t know what he remembered.
She couldn’t ask. That wasn’t – they didn’t do that. In thirty years of professional antagonism, awkward courtship, and mutual circumnavigation of the obvious, they had never once asked each other a direct question that mattered.
So she’d build him a map. His own voice, his own record. Annotated, the worst of it clearly marked so he could choose his own approach speed. Give it back to him when – if – he was ready. Let Tim Brandt remember himself.
Her brand of ethics had always been specific and inconvenient. She found this annoying.
– the thing about Amy, the thing you have to understand, is that she’s never wrong in the way people think she’s wrong. She’s wrong in much more interesting ways. She’s wrong about what she wants. She’s wrong about–
Three seconds. Maybe four.
– she’s wrong about whether it matters.
Amy’s coffee was cold. The console hummed. Somewhere behind her, Stacey set the tablet down. Stayed.
That pause. The exact weight of it.
She’d been paying that cost for thirty years.
He hadn’t examined it either.
She turned back to the console. The recordings were organized by year. She had been working backwards from the most recent and was now somewhere in the middle, ten years back, both of them younger and worse at this.
There were recordings that were unflattering. Her at her most petty. Her most obstinate. A version of Amy Atlas that Tim Brandt had witnessed and documented with the particular fondness of someone who found her ordinary smallness interesting rather than disappointing.
She could cut those.
She could give him the archive that made Amy Atlas look like what she was supposed to be – the worthy opponent, never small, never ordinary, never the woman who stood in her city lair at two in the morning holding a cold cup of coffee and something she had no word for.
Or she could leave them in. Give him herself, whole. Bet on him remembering what to do with that.
Both choices were very Amy. That was the problem.
She pulled up the file tree. Looked at it.
The recording ran out. The console clicked over to silence.
Amy sat with her hand on the wheel. The cursor blinked.
She did not get up.
