Chapter 2

“Oat milk mocha,” Dana ordered tersely across the counter. She’d been coming to this café for a few weeks now, and she took her usual place next to the window. She the only customer this morning, partly due to how expensive and yet poor quality the coffee was, but mostly because she had arrived at open, while the sun still crawled its way up from the horizon.

She lounged in her corner booth sipping from the mediocre coffee, while idly looking out across the street, for all the world enjoying a beverage while taking in the sunrise. The cost of the coffee didn’t bother her, thanks to a lucky run of startup jobs, but she hated choking it down while pretending to enjoy it.

It wasn’t the coffee or the sunrises that drew her here- it was the unobstructed view of the apartment building across the street. The architecture was unremarkable, to be charitable. The walls were blocky and beige, the roof was fake Spanish tile that was poorly maintained, and the windows were cheap and shitty even when they were new; and they were certainly not new.

She watched a girl with brightly colored hair tend to some plants on the small concrete patio of a ground floor unit. The plants were not doing well; they showed signs of neglect and inexpert keeping. They were the plants of a woman that worked long hours and could barely see after herself, let alone an alocasia.

The girl finished watering and disappeared inside. The apartment’s lights went dark, and a minute or two after that, a beat-up Subaru pulled out of the garage.

Dana’s last IPO had left her with enough money that she no longer needed to work. She could pay for the surgeries she wanted out of pocket, without dealing with the hoops and hurdles of the American health system… and with those out of the way, she could dedicate herself to more personal pursuits.

–

Valerie had turned up on social media several months ago, and Dana had been learning about her ever since. It started with OSINT, putting together all of the information extant on the internet, and then correlating that with sources she could still access from her years working in computer security. The next steps were a little more intimate- breaking into the girl’s apartment one night when she was working late to install a key-logger on her computer, and from there getting access to her email and other cloud services.

Dana knew, from reading Valerie’s work email, that she’d be heading to work today even though it was Saturday, but that she’d be back around dinner time. A short day by her usual standards.

The remote access kit on the girl’s laptop told her that she’d spend the evening immersing herself in the internet to try and decompress from the stress of the week- usually through video games, social media, and pirated videos; sometimes a few hours reading erotica and performing self-massage with a Hitachi.

Last week had been a particularly memorable example of the latter, and Dana had risked involving herself directly (albeit still covertly) to ensure it was memorable for both of them.

Dana had reached a point where she thought she knew everything she needed to know- she was as close to Valerie as anyone else still in her life was, even if the girl didn’t know it.

There was risk- no plan is perfect- but waiting only increased the chance that she would be discovered- a camera would be found, antivirus would pick up her malware, or that she’d make a bit too much of an impression on a café regular. It was either act tonight, Dana told herself, or give up on what had become the singular focus of her life for much of the last year.

Dana was confident that Valerie was the right woman. The girl was brilliant and almost unfairly adorable, but she was a mess. Dana knew the girl’s job was hanging by a thread- knew better than Valerie did, since Dana had access to her boss’s email (his password was simple and asinine, like the man himself.) Valerie was newly single, barely employed, had no savings to speak of and mountains of medical and student loan debt, and a family of right-wing religious zealots that hadn’t talked to her in a decade, ever since she came out to them as trans, and a lesbian on top of it. They prayed for her soul like she was already dead.

Valerie’s job would be happy to see her go, and a forged email to her manager Bren giving notice effective immediately would seal the deal.

Nobody else would miss the young engineer.