Derek's apartment door was the specific silence of a door that had someone behind it who wasn't going to answer it.
Travis knocked again. "Derek. I can hear your television."
The television was audible at low volume — news, which had been on every screen in the country for four days running with different faces saying essentially the same thing. The particular quality of ambient news coverage in a small apartment at 8 AM was its own kind of data.
A long pause. Then the deadbolt.
Derek looked like a man who had been managing his deterioration carefully and had recently stopped managing it. The apartment behind him had the organized chaos of someone who'd been dealing with their problems the way they had the supplies for — empty bottles on the coffee table, not scattered but arranged with a precision that suggested the arranging had been a deliberate activity rather than accumulated accident. He had the suit jacket on over a shirt that was yesterday's. His eyes were doing the calculation that people's eyes did when they were trying to assess how bad they looked to another person and had very little recent comparison data.
"You didn't answer your phone," Travis said.
"I know."
"The audit window closes at—"
"I know." Derek stepped back from the door.
The apartment was warm and too quiet underneath the news anchor's measured delivery of a story about Vought's Senate subcommittee response. Travis crossed to the kitchen and ran the tap cold.
"Shower," he said.
"Travis—"
"I'll make coffee. Twenty minutes."
Derek looked at him with the expression of a man receiving instructions from someone who was the reason he needed the instructions and who was also the only person currently present.
He went to the shower.
Travis made coffee from the pod machine on the counter and turned the television off and sat at the kitchen table and waited. The apartment's silence was better without the news. He looked at Derek's arrangement of empties on the coffee table and understood it as the kind of coping mechanism that looked nothing like a coping mechanism until you understood what had replaced it — the administrative precision Derek brought to his worst nights because the precision was the only professional muscle memory that still worked at 11 PM.
Derek came back in clean clothes with wet hair and the improved but not resolved quality of a man who'd used the shower for its functional purpose rather than its metaphorical one.
Travis put coffee in front of him and didn't comment on anything about the morning.
Forty minutes of near-silence, Derek with the coffee and then a glass of water, until the trembling in his hands settled to the intermittent rather than the continuous. Travis had seen this settling period before — at the bar, when he'd ordered the water after the knife appeared. The body's negotiation with its recent decisions, the specific timeline of it.
"Okay," Derek said. Not a statement of readiness. A statement of awareness that they were going to do this now.
Travis opened his laptop to the remote session and walked Derek through it step by step: the IT security digest, the sub-folder structure, the weekly audit queue where the flag was sitting at priority level three, which was the priority level of things that would be reviewed by a human only if the level-one and level-two queues were cleared first, and the level-one and level-two queues were not going to be cleared this week because Vought was managing a congressional inquiry and an active PR crisis simultaneously.
Derek's hands on the keyboard were the hands of someone relearning a motor skill — slower than competence, but the competence was in there. It emerged in the middle of the maintenance log template: his fingers found the right format without being prompted, the backdated timestamp entered with the efficiency of a man who'd done documentation work long enough that the mechanical knowledge lived somewhere below the layer that alcohol reached.
The flag disappeared from the audit queue.
"Done," Derek said. His voice had the flat quality of a man watching something happen to him rather than doing something.
Travis checked the audit monitor. The flag was gone — replaced by a maintenance record that explained the deletion as a routine server cleanup of corrupted case files during the PR system migration that had begun four days ago as part of the V scandal response infrastructure. Plausible. The timing was even better than Travis had manufactured because the migration had actually happened — Derek had included it in his access log naturally, without Travis's direction, because it was accurate.
Travis checked the login timestamp on the current session.
Derek's credentials showed a weekend login at 8:47 AM from his apartment IP address.
For a PR executive managing a crisis, weekend logins weren't unusual. But combined with the pattern of irregular accesses Derek had been generating for the past three weeks — the late-night sessions, the off-hours queries, the access from non-office IPs — a weekend login from his apartment was not nothing. It was a data point. Small, contextually explainable, easily disregarded by anyone who wasn't specifically looking for a pattern.
Travis couldn't explain to Derek why it mattered without explaining how comprehensively he understood Vought's security architecture — which was not knowledge a logistics coordinator should have.
He closed the monitor window and looked at Derek's back.
"That's it," Travis said.
Derek was still looking at the login screen. "I used to be good at this job," he said.
The sentence had the tone of an inventory item said aloud — the kind of thing you say when you're checking whether it's still true by hearing yourself say it.
Travis recognized the tone. He'd heard it in a different register from Gary four days ago, sitting at a desk with a compliance report and a lanyard he couldn't quite put back on. The specific frequency of a competent person watching themselves in the process of no longer being the person who was competent at the thing they'd built their identity around.
"You're still good at it," Travis said. Which was technically true in the narrow sense that Derek had just done the work correctly.
"You know what the funny thing is." Derek hadn't turned around. He was addressing the laptop screen. "I keep thinking — if I'd told someone. When the Mesmer thing happened. If I'd been the person who said something." He paused. "I don't know. Maybe I'd have lost the job. Probably I would have. But—" He stopped himself.
Travis waited.
Derek didn't finish the sentence. He closed the laptop.
Travis left him on his couch at 10:14 AM with two glasses of water on the coffee table and the sound of the elevator arriving from downstairs.
He stood in the elevator and checked his phone.
Gary had texted at 9:52: Something weird going on with the PR division, want your eyes on it. Monday morning, early?
The weekend login anomaly sat on Vought's servers like a print left in wet concrete. Still fresh. Not yet hardened into the record.
He typed: Sure. I'll be in early.
The elevator opened to the lobby and the city outside was doing what April cities did on Saturday mornings, which was going about its business with the complete indifference of something too large to notice the specific problems of any individual moving through it.
Travis walked to the subway and thought about Derek saying I used to be good at this job with his back to the room, and the particular way the past tense had arrived in the sentence the way past tenses did when the speaker was the one who'd closed the door on the time period in question.
He'd caused that. He'd measured the cause precisely and chosen it deliberately and it was tracking accurately to predicted outcomes.
The subway car smelled like coffee someone had brought on the platform and the recycled approximation of air. Travis stood by the door and ran the updated operational picture: original flag cleared, weekend login existing, Monday audit starting, Gary's question waiting for 8 AM.
He had two days.
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