By 11:04 the ICC had warmed to a subdued, official resonance, something that reverberated of inevitable decisions. The place held the upbeats of coffee hissing behind slate counters, pens scratching against papers and keys tapping. The lanyards drew thin lines across navy suits; blaring blue screens scrolling sponsors in authority. The atrium’s glass threw winter light into the aisles and flattened every face to a corporate sheen.

I took the long way like I belonged to none of it. East run, mid-row, third island from the glass that had slate banners in clean teal squares: NextCorp.

I slowed half a beat to make the approach look unplanned, then drifted into the aisle and let Kaitlyn Bishop arrive.

The stand was a rectangle of chaotic order. Two demo stations stood still, a polite lattice of cables, a tray of leaflets stacked so their edges made a perfect field. A bowl of mints nobody touched. The entirety of the setting looked like it promised competence, a bit too stiff with perfection.

I caught a glimpse of him, there, but not centred. Half a step back from the front rail, leaning against a waist-high demo plinth, talking to a man whose badge read PARTNER in a tired maroon. The coat from last night was gone. The exhibitor laminate hung on a black lanyard with red chevrons; the name block lay flat against his shirt: N. VOS.

Monroe’s brief had circled that name in red—suspected Hart alias, seventy-eight percent voiceprint; spectrogram drift, likely modulation.

I didn’t look at him first. I let my eyes catch on the nearest collateral: white paper, blue grid, title in a font that wanted to be inevitable—Network Telemetry at the Edge: Seeing What You Shouldn’t Miss. The copy beneath ran in short confident lines about “zero-trust posture,” and "anomaly scoring", the way a device walks on the wire, even when the traffic’s encrypted.

“Hi.” A woman in a NextCorp polo lifted her chin with the mundane brightness of someone six hours into a long day. Her dark hair was wrapped in a messy bun, loose strands falling across her face. “Looking for anything in particular?”

“Wireless crowding,” I replied, letting nerves smudge the consonants. “And how you handle, um, beacon jitter... without… you know, actually touching payloads.”

I’d rehearsed the acronyms enough to pass; I couldn’t afford him seeing the slip under my tongue.

That earned me a half-smile from the brunette. She glanced sideways; the man with the exhibitor laminate let the partner go with a minimal handshake and stepped into the front rail’s light.

“Beacon interval variance is one of our friendlier puzzles.” Nathan crossed his arms against his chest, his voice raspy from that unnaturally Brummie accent. Midlands rolled flat in it, faint but there. Hart carried himself like a metronome; Vos wore an accent. “You don’t need payload if your metadata model is honest. May I?”

He didn’t wait for permission obviously, his hand reaching out to take the leaflet from my hand. Then he offered a hand. “Nathan.”

Hart didn’t shake hands in the open, they said. Vos did. Camouflage, or confidence.

“Kaitlyn.” I feigned a nervous gulp. My own hand looked smaller in his. I let my grip be fractionally too earnest. “Bishop.”

He registered the name without showing it land. “What are you tracking, Kaitlyn? Coursework? Blog?”

“Postgrad,” I said, avoiding his dark grey eyes, intent and assessing. “It's a small paper about wireless crowding during high-density events. I’m supposed to sound smart about… Wi-Fi beacons, BLE chatter, and latching captive portals.” I made a face that admitted I’d memorised the terms and worried they’d slide away.

“You just did,” he said mildly, a ghost of a smugness playing across his features. “What’s your question under all that?”

He knew what this was: a first test. I gave him one he could grade without breaking a sweat and kept a better one behind my teeth. I let the silence run just long enough to hear my own breath, then pushed a question I’d practiced twice and trusted once.

“JA3 collisions.” I shifted my weight on my other leg as an anxious gesture, and then deliberately nudged my answer wrong. “How do you keep the fingerprints clean when DTLS and TLS collide... if you’re only watching the handshake?”

If the order of the letters betrayed me, I’d pretend it was nerves, not ignorance.

A hair of surprise creased his mouth, gone before it formed. “We don’t fingerprint off DTLS,” he replied, his eyes falling to my lanyard, then back to me. Server-side print. Right. I kept my nod small, like I’d known that all semester. “Not for that class. And we don’t keep collisions from happening; we lean into them. Collisions under load tell you more about gait than a clean lab trace does.” Then a subtle pause, not long enough to be a concession. “And they’re JA3S here, not just JA3. We read the server’s print too. If anyone tells you JA3 fixed the world, walk away.”

Truth. Or the right kind of truth.

He set the leaflet down and smoothed its corner until it lay perfectly true against the table edge. “You were at AxisSec yesterday.”

A prickle found the back of my collar. Had I left more than a sticker? “I was.” I feigned excitement, as if glad to be noticed.

“You lost a sticker under a table,” he continued, not unkind. “Student heatmap project. You got two reads and pretended not to care about either.”

I breathed a smile that let him have the point. “I’m very committed to pretending not to care.”

“Most people are.” He tipped his head, the angle barely there. “You’ll do better if you ask me what you actually came to ask.”

The safe play was to be slightly more naïve than I was. The unsafe play was to step toward the line and see if he moved it.

“Okay,” I said softly. “How do you keep a captive portal’s keep-alive at thirteen seconds?” Thirteen again. The number that keeps turning up like a riddle you can’t explain.

His intimidating eyes flicked to the lanyard at my collarbone and back up. “We don’t.”

Too clean of a line, sanded until it shone. Or not a complete sentence perhaps.

“What are you hoping to see with that question?” he added, almost gentle.

“Whether you’re the one who set the clock.” I shrugged.

The next breath belonged to the room. Contractor jackets drifted by, both men reading the reflections in the glass behind me instead of the copy in their hands. The woman in the polo answered a query about throughput down the stand. The coffee bar’s steamer sounded like rain in a metal room. The watch nudged—once, not urgent. A new SSID slid quietly across the inside of my wrist: KAITLYN-E4. Not a network this time but a finger tapping my name on the glass. The letters felt like someone looking over my shoulder and choosing my chessboard for me.

Vos didn’t glance at his wrist; he didn’t have to. His attention stayed where it was and made staying feel inevitable.

“Who told you thirteen?” he asked.

“A poster,” I said, and he laughed, low and brief, a sound with no air in it.

“I like posters,” he said. “They never argue.”

He angled his body to include me and exclude the aisle without looking like a man sheltering a conversation. He stood where he could see both exits in the corner of his eye and anyone approaching at chest height in the glass.

“Walk me through your crowding paper,” he challenged, eyeing the portfolio in my clutch. “Tell it to me like you’re trying to convince someone who wouldn't bother with emails. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

I gave him twenty-nine. I kept it clumsy in the right places and precise where I wanted to plant anchors: beacon interval variance, BSSID churn under crowd, captive portal handshakes, MAC randomisation still bleeding OUI tells if you bait the right family. I said nothing about the hostel, or the stage flat, or the night, or the pub. I watched his hands instead. They moved only when they had to and brought objects into alignment: a pen, a card, a mint bowl turned so the label faced north.

“Good,” he replied, not sounding too keen. “You did the reading and you did the watching. You should stop hiding the second part.”

“Was I supposed to hide something?” I questioned back, eyes puzzled.

“Then here.” He reached under the counter and came up with a small card—plain, no brand, a QR in one corner and a phone number that meant nothing by itself. He didn’t hand it to me across the rail like a salesman would. He slid it to the end of the table and left it there, not quite mine until I made a choice. It was choice dressed as permission, the prettiest kind of trap. “If you want a tour of the box, be at Dock Hall B at 15:40. Back door. You’ll look like you’re lost; I’ll look like I mind. We’ll both be telling the truth.”

Monroe would call this the moment Hart stops tilting the board and picks up a piece.

If Vos is Hart, this is the handshake. If he isn’t, he’s the wrist that turns Hart’s key.

The time matched my fallback window. The door matched the exhibitor edge. The phrasing did not match any sales engineer I’d ever heard.

“I thought tours were for people with appointments.” I said.

“They are.” He held my eyes for a second longer than a booth exchange earns. “This would be a complaint about those.”

“Do you get many?”

“I accumulate them,” he said, deadpan. “It keeps me human.”

He pivoted a degree to allow a man with an OPERATIONS badge to ask about a feature. He didn’t dismiss me; he reweighted me, the way you shift a glass closer to the safe side of a table without looking at your hand.

I didn’t leave yet. I pointed to a diagram on the leaflet, let a student’s curiosity wrinkle my forehead. “Your anomaly scoring—are you pulling flow labels from NetFlow or using device-side eBPF?”

“Neither,” he said, too quickly for it to be casual. “And both.” He tapped the paper once with a knuckle. “We’ve found people behave more honestly when they don’t know which part of their honesty is being measured.”

One of the contractor jackets lifted his elbow just enough to show a laminate flash-secured to his belt. Facilities. Grey diagonal stripe. The same stripe I’d watched open a door last night. He wasn’t watching NextCorp’s pitch; he was watching the reflections in the glass—me, Nathan, the blue square logo, the leaflet grid.

Vos saw him too, or saw the idea of him the way you see a familiar shape under new paint. He didn’t change his carried rhythm. He turned a pen so the clip faced north and let the operations man finish a sentence.

“You were in the building last night,” I said, keeping it conversational. “After hours.”

“The building existed last night,” he said. “It has its own habits after hours.”

Another lie, or a courtesy: an acknowledgement delivered as misdirection so I could accept it without being seen doing so.

“Is NextCorp hiring?” I asked. “Hypothetically?”

“We don’t hire hypotheticals.” A hint of an amusement flashed across his features. “We hire people we can’t afford to ignore.”

“So—no,” I said, and let a small, embarrassed breath escape like I’d pushed for a yes and failed.

He looked at me the way you look at a file you’ve already read and intend to read again. “Bring your paper,” he said. “Fifteen-forty.”

“Fifteen-forty,” I repeated, as if putting a time in my head made me real.

He stepped back a fraction to allow another question from somewhere to my left. The woman in the polo reappeared with a leaflet and a plastic smile that held.

“Thanks,” I told the space between us, and reached for the plain card like I was only curious about the QR. I didn’t slip it into my coat; I let it ride half out of the notebook pocket where it could be read by any lens that needed to.

The watch nudged—KAITLYN-D4—then settled. The sticker under yesterday’s table answered from the atrium a heartbeat later, like a friend humming through a wall.

I moved away in an easy arc that made room for new faces and left a few polite metres of air I could claim later if I needed to. I didn’t look back, because tourists do and students don’t. At the corner of the next aisle I stopped to photograph a schedule I wasn’t going to keep and caught the reflection I wanted in the glass: Nathan folding the leaflet stack into a sharper rectangle, the laminate ghosting past behind him like a habit in a borrowed jacket.

I let Kaitlyn check the time like she had somewhere else to be and let Melissa count exits. The board had offered me a centre square. I wasn’t going to stand on it.

Eleven-ten had given me one truth, one lie, and an invitation.

Dock Hall B, 15:40. Hart or handler, he moves. And I choose the board.

...

Author's Note:

Sorry this took forever. As I had mentioned, I'm going through stuff lol and midway I wanted to give up on this book. (But I—Kaitlyn Bishop—never fails. So I have to live up to that ok? Ok)

Ik y'all must be thinking god this girl always going through something and I get it. I think that too . But oh well what can I say hahaha. (It actually reminds me of one of those aoc authors who write these fanfictions during the worst moments of their life, their family dying, while hospitalised, fighting cancer, getting into accidents while giving birth at the same time. It's crazy. Whenever I write a book, stuff like this also happens like stfu life ;-; lmao)

and yea it's happening to me too rn lol. There's a huge flood situation going on in my city, I don't have electricity, no proper WiFi, constantly raining (god I hate the rain sm), my mom is struggling with her physical and mental health, and so is my dad, I am jobless, my brother is annoying and I'm craving pizza for which i don't have money).

But it's okay. I'll survive. (I've been through worse hahahaha).

Okay sorry for the lil trauma dump. My author notes are my dear diaries ok. Lemme beeeee.

And if Ur reading this, ilysm bestie. And thank U from the bottom of my heart. ❤️ :")

The next chapter would be out in a few days time, just bear with me pls.

Byeeeee.

- Mishaal