Dead Drop Protocol

# The Dead Zone The vinyl hums wrong. Rory notices it first as a vibration against her sternum—the needle skating across grooves that shouldn't exist in a 1978 pressing of *Rumours*. Most people wouldn't hear it. Most people don't spend their nights listening for the spaces between the music, the ghost frequencies that live in the gaps. Most people aren't hunted. She's in Stall 47, wedged between a wall of defunct synthesizers and a stack of Betamax players that will never play again. The fluorescent light above flickers in that particular way that makes moths stupid with want, their papery wings beating against the plastic diffuser like they've forgotten what living means. She watches one die mid-flight, dropping to the concrete floor beside her work boots. The signal on the vinyl is coordinates. She's decoded enough of them to know the shape of conspiracy—how it lives in the spaces between what's recorded and what's real. "You're grinding your teeth again." Rory flinches. It's Marcus from Stall 51, holding two cups of terrible coffee and wearing the expression of someone who's learned not to ask questions. His left eye is always slightly unfocused, like he's looking at two versions of the world simultaneously. She's never asked why. "Just concentration," she says, accepting the coffee. The cup is warm. Everything in the bazaar is either too cold or too warm, never quite human temperature. Marcus settles onto the stool across from her. "Heard some people asking about you. Couple of guys. Professional-looking. They said they were from the building inspectors." The coffee tastes like blood. Or maybe that's just her mouth—she's been biting the inside of her cheek for three days straight. "There's no building inspection." "That's what I figured." Marcus sips his coffee, unbothered. He's the kind of person who understands that survival is mostly just not asking the wrong questions. "So. Not your real name, then?" It's not a question. It's an observation. The bazaar trades in observations like currency. "I don't know what you mean," Rory says, but her voice sounds thin, distant, like it's coming through bad speakers. "I'm not asking." Marcus sets down his cup. "I'm saying: whatever you need, I can help you build. I've been here since 1982. I know every dead zone in this building. Every corner the cameras can't touch." She wants to tell him he's wrong. She wants to say that she's careful, that she covers her tracks, that the false identities she's constructed are airtight—three of them, each with years of digital breadcrumbs, each with credit histories and school records and library cards. She wants to believe in the wall she's built between herself and discovery. But the men asking about her weren't real building inspectors, and they won't stay fooled for long. "The coordinates," Rory hears herself say. "They're real?" "Probably." Marcus stands. "There's a storage unit on the north end. Section B. The electrical grid doesn't reach there—the wiring's too old. Dead zone. Nobody's phone works. Nobody's camera sees anything. You need to move fast, though. Your hunters are good." --- The coordinates lead to a warehouse three miles away. Rory takes the bus with her head down, watching the city slide past the window like a film she's not part of. The numb feeling has started—that familiar dissociation that comes when the walls are closing. She can feel her mind beginning the work of forgetting itself, preparing to abandon whoever she is now and become someone else. This is the part she's good at. She's constructed the identity carefully: Sarah Vance, freelance data analyst, divorced, no close relatives, works remotely. Sarah has a LinkedIn profile with 847 connections, none of whom she's met. Sarah has filed taxes for four years. Sarah has a gym membership she never uses. Sarah is invisible because Sarah is everyone. The warehouse is industrial, all rusted metal and broken windows. The dead drop is exactly where the vinyl said it would be: a loose brick in the south wall, beneath the third window. Her hands shake as she retrieves the envelope. Not fear. Just the body's way of registering that she's at the edge of something. Inside: photographs. And a name. Not a suspect. Not a lead. A name she knows. Director Elena Blackwell, Federal Intelligence Agency. Her mother's name. The photograph is recent—her mother in a government building, shaking hands with someone Rory recognizes from news broadcasts. One of the coordinates from the vinyl had been marked in red: latitude 38.8951, longitude -77.0369. Washington, D.C. The heart of everything. Rory's vision swims. The moth-logic takes over—she understands suddenly why they can't leave the light, even as it kills them. The attraction is bigger than survival. The need to understand is bigger than fear. Her phone vibrates. Unknown number. She answers anyway. This is also the part she's good at—the moment of commitment, the instant where you stop running and start fighting. "Rory." Not a question. Her actual name, spoken with the kind of certainty that comes from knowing everything. "Or should I say Sarah? Or Michael Chen? Or the other three?" The voice is female. Calm. Professional. Everything she expected from the people who were coming. "Who is this?" "Someone who understands that you're very good at disappearing. The question is: why are you trying to disappear from me?" Rory's throat closes. "You're CIA." "Worse. I'm the person who sent the vinyl records." A pause that stretches like taffy, full of things unsaid. "I'm the person who's been trying to keep you alive long enough to find them." --- The truth arrives like a sudden brightness—the moment before the fluorescent light dies completely, when it flares so bright it blinds you. Her mother didn't disappear in 1998. Her mother had gone deep, had buried herself in a conspiracy so large that the only way to protect her daughter was to let the daughter believe she was dead. The vinyl records had been a breadcrumb trail, left over decades, each one hidden in the bazaar's network of vendors who understood discretion. The people hunting Rory weren't hunting her at all. They were hunting the proof of what her mother had discovered: that the government had its fingers so deep in the machinery of information that truth itself had become a liability. "Your mother's been watching you build those identities," the voice says—and only now does Rory understand: this voice has her mother's cadence, her way of breathing between sentences. "Waiting to see if you were clever enough. Patient enough. Brave enough." "To do what?" "To become what she couldn't. To be so invisible that you can see everything." The numb feeling transforms into something else—a desperate grasping, like the moths finally understanding what the light is offering: transcendence, or death, or maybe they're the same thing. Rory looks at the photograph in her hands, at the woman whose face she's inherited, and understands that she's been dead her entire life. Dead to the world, to herself, to any normal version of becoming. Now, finally, she might be allowed to live. "When?" she asks. "Tonight. There's a car waiting outside the warehouse. The driver knows your real name—your actual real name, the one nobody's called in twenty years. You're going to get in that car, and you're going to come home. And then we're going to teach you what it means to disappear completely." The line goes dead. Rory walks to the window and looks out at the city—at the vast, humming machinery of it, all those lives stacked on top of each other, all those secrets waiting to be found. The moths have stopped beating against the light. They've accepted something, finally. Some wisdom about the cost of illumination. She thinks about Marcus, waiting in his stall. About the false identities she'll never use again because they'll soon be hunting for a woman who doesn't exist. About her mother, patient in the dark, waiting for her daughter to understand that sometimes the only way to survive is to stop being yourself entirely. Rory folds the photograph and tucks it into her jacket. She walks toward the car waiting in the shadows. The electric hum of the city surrounds her—that labyrinthine maze of machinery and anonymity—and for the first time in twenty years, she stops fighting against the current. She lets it take her under.