Dora was waiting outside, sitting in the passenger seat of an old electric bike with the engine off. When Mateus came out through Gate 9 at a forced walking pace—too fast to be natural, too slow to be a run—she read something in his expression and started the engine without saying a word.
They were two blocks away when the sirens began.
"What did you do?" she shouted over the wind.
"I got Renko's file," he shouted back.
"And?"
"And another one."
Dora turned her head to look at him while driving. It was the kind of thing she did that always terrified him—looking sideways while speeding, as if traffic were an irrelevant detail.
"What other file, Mateus?"
"I don't know. Something from AURORA. Something about the sighting."
"Helios? That story about the space object?"
"Dora, watch the road—"
"Answer the question."
"Yes. Helios. But there was more. There was an AURORA analysis. Just three lines, but…"
He stopped. How do you explain three lines like that to someone? How do you explain the feeling of having read something that shouldn't exist, something written to never be seen by human eyes?
"They know we were there," he said. "They must already know."
"They don't know anything. The credentials were perfect."
"The credentials wouldn't open that file. I had to force my way in. They're going to trace it."
Dora didn't answer for a moment. They turned onto a side street, slipped into an unlit alley, slowed down.
"How much time do we have?" she finally asked.
"I don't know. Hours. Maybe less."
"We need to go to Renko now."
"We can't go to Renko. If the Consortium traces the credentials back to him, we hand him over."
"If we don't deliver the file to Renko, Gordo comes after us on Friday."
"Dora—"
"MATEUS." She stopped the bike and turned to him. The orange neon from the street painted half her face in rust-colored light. "I need you to think. Not panic. Think. What did the file say?"
He took a deep breath. Looked at the empty street. Above them, through the polluted clouds, there were stars—or what looked like stars. Sometimes they were just the Consortium's surveillance satellites.
"It said the alien ship is not moving," he said slowly. "That it's observing us. And that it detected us first."
Dora stayed silent for three, four seconds.
"Is that a big problem or a small problem?"
"Dora, that's the biggest problem in the history of humanity."
"Great," she said, with a calm that he found genuinely unsettling. "Then one thing at a time. First Gordo. Then the aliens."
She started the engine again.