Turn 199 of 226

Cal, the old fighting tournament organizer, is wondering what happened to Lena and Diane. He finds out. He decides to help. Good thing he is able to hack into the military channels and disrupt their communications and data collection on them. Lena and Diane have no idea

In a rented room above a auto repair shop in Sacramento, Cal Medina sits in front of three monitors and a laptop he should not have. The laptop is military-issued. He took it from a National Guard sergeant outside Reno two weeks ago, after the sergeant left it in a truck at a staging area that never reported back. Cal is not a hacker. Cal is a fight promoter who learned to scrape together a living from amateur brackets and side bets. But twenty years around the kind of men who run underground circuits means twenty years around the kind of men who know things, and one of those men owed Cal a favor and taught him how to access the channels that the laptop's credentials still opened.

The thermal satellite feed is what breaks him. He has been watching for eleven days — since Lena stopped answering emails, since Diane's phone went dark, since the tournament forums started buzzing about two fighters who vanished mid-circuit. He expected injury. He expected arrest. He expected the kind of trouble that follows fighters who get too good too fast. What he did not expect was two heat signatures in a valley in the Cascade Range, each one larger than the helicopter wreckage he watched burn on the same feed three days ago.

He watches the thermal bloom in the valley for six hours. The signatures do not move. They are underground — the heat pattern is diffuse, rising through soil, consistent with two large bodies resting beneath the surface. The military size estimates on the channel he is monitoring say 15'6" and 1,250 pounds. The thermal data says otherwise. Cal was a math teacher before he was a fight promoter. He runs the numbers on the heat output, the ground coverage, the thermal mass. The numbers do not match 1,250 pounds. The numbers match something he cannot make himself write down.

He begins working at 2 AM. The military channels are encrypted but the encryption is standardized across National Guard units, and the sergeant's credentials have not been revoked because the sergeant is dead and no one has checked. Cal introduces noise into the satellite uplink — not enough to trigger a security alert, enough to degrade the thermal resolution from individual signatures to ambiguous background heat. He corrupts the size estimate data in the field reports being transmitted to the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, replacing the updated figures with the original 15'6" and 1,250-pound estimates that the first staging area recorded. He does not know if it will hold. He does not know if someone has already seen the real numbers. He knows that the gap between what the military thinks and what is actually in that valley is the only thing keeping the valley safe, and he widens that gap with shaking hands and a stolen laptop and the kind of stubbornness that made him a fight promoter in the first place.

Underground, eight feet below the surface of an old-growth valley 800 miles north, Lena's heart beats thirty times per minute. Diane's beats thirty-two. The warmth in Lena's stomach is the wish, still building, still spreading, still saying *more*. She does not know about Cal. She does not know about the laptop or the channels or the noise in the satellite feed. She does not know that the gap she believes is luck is partly a man in a rented room above an auto repair shop, working past 4 AM, erasing the evidence that she exists.