Every Credit Card She Owned

Chapter 3: Every Credit Card She Owned

Nora did not sleep that night.

She sat cross legged on the floor of her apartment with the leather folder open in front of her and a pot of black coffee at her elbow, and she photographed every page with her phone. Then she photographed the evidence file she had saved from the powder room, the muffled recording of Gordon and Ethan's voices, and backed it up three times, in three different places.

[Host is advised to rest. Cognitive function declines after twenty four hours of wakefulness.]

"I have six days," Nora said, scrolling through her bank app. "If I sleep, I lose eight hours of them."

[Eight hours is four point six percent of the remaining time. Rest improves the success rate of every subsequent action by an estimated thirty one percent.]

She glared at the blue panel. "You argue like an accountant."

[Thank you.]

Despite herself, she laughed. It was a thin, tired sound, but it loosened something in her chest. She closed the folder, set it aside, and finally let herself check the phone that had buzzed in her pocket at the Cole house.

One missed call from an unknown number. One voicemail, eleven seconds long.

She pressed play and held the phone to her ear.

For the first six seconds there was nothing but quiet, the soft hush of an open line. Someone breathing, slow and controlled. Then a man's voice spoke, low, rough, and so quiet that she had to press the speaker against her ear to catch it.

"Do not go back to that house."

A click. The line went dead.

Nora played it again. And again. The voice was unfamiliar, deep and unhurried, with the particular flatness of someone who had practiced not sounding afraid.

"Who would call me?" she whispered. "Who even knows I was there?"

[Unknown. The signal detected yesterday originates from the same area as this call. Probability that they are connected: eighty nine percent.]

A chill slid down her spine. She set the phone down, and for a while she simply sat there, watching the light change at the edge of the curtains from black to gray to pale rose.

Then she stood up and cracked her knuckles, and said, "All right. Let us go shopping."

* * *

By nine in the morning, Nora had a list.

It was a tidy, ruthless list, written in neat accounting handwriting on the back of a utility bill, and it ran to three pages. She had spent two years as a volunteer at a free clinic, and four years in an accounting program, and a lifetime of being the person who planned for things that went wrong. Now every skill she owned snapped into place like gears in a clock.

Water. Food that did not spoil. Medicine. Fuel. Filters. Warm clothing. Batteries. Tools. Seeds. And weapons, though she did not like thinking about that part.

Her bank balance read forty one thousand, two hundred and six dollars.

Her credit limits, when she added them up, came to another thirty one thousand across four cards.

"The world ends in six days," Nora said, standing in the parking lot of a giant wholesale warehouse store with a flat cart in front of her. "Nobody is going to collect the debt."

[Correct. However, the Host is advised that the Lifeline Storage Space will only unlock after the starter task is complete. For now, purchases must be physically stored.]

"I know. I rented a storage unit this morning. The big one, on Delancey Road. Forty feet by twelve."

[Impressive. You are operating at approximately two hundred percent of expected efficiency.]

"Are you flattering me?"

[Negative. I am reporting a statistic.]

Nora snorted and pushed the cart through the sliding doors.

Inside, the warehouse hummed with cold light. She moved down the aisles like a woman who had been rehearsing for years. Flats of bottled water went onto the cart, then pallets, which she paid a bored employee fifty dollars to wheel to the loading dock. Rice in forty pound sacks. Dried beans. Lentils. Oats. Salt, ten bags of it, then ten more. Honey. Canned fish. Canned vegetables. Powdered milk. Multivitamins, boxes and boxes of them.

The checkout clerk, a heavyset woman with a name tag that read *Dolores*, watched the totals climb with widening eyes.

"Honey," Dolores said, "are you opening a restaurant?"

"Something like that," Nora said. "A very large family."

"Lord." Dolores shook her head and kept scanning. "I have been here nineteen years and I have never rung up a cart like this."

"Then I hope it is a good memory."

The first card went through. The second. On the third, the machine beeped and blinked a warning, and Nora handed over the fourth without blinking. Eleven thousand dollars, then fourteen, then nineteen. She signed her name again and again in a hand that had stopped shaking.

[Ding. Starter task progress: thirty percent. Reward preview: Insight function unlocked at fifty percent.]

"Fifty percent," Nora muttered. "Let us go find the other twenty."

She spent the next three hours leapfrogging across the city. A hardware store for hand tools, crowbars, rope, tarps, duct tape, work gloves, axes. A sporting goods store for tents, sleeping bags, thermal blankets, camp stoves, fuel canisters, a pair of hunting knives that made her palms sweat. At the register she added a twenty dollar motion activated camera, the kind sold for garden sheds, and dropped it into the bag with everything else. A pharmacy, where she bought antibiotics she was allowed to buy over the counter and a small mountain of bandages, antiseptic, painkillers, and water purification tablets. An outdoor outfitter, where a young salesman told her she had excellent taste in boots and she said, "I intend to walk a long way."

By two in the afternoon her storage unit was stacked to the ceiling and her feet were bleeding inside her new boots.

[Starter task progress: fifty one percent. Insight function unlocked.]

A new pale icon blossomed in the corner of her vision. When she focused on it, the world slid sideways. Floating beside the passing strangers on the sidewalk, small translucent tags appeared, like labels on museum pieces.

*Man in gray jacket. Trust toward Host: neutral. Threat: low.*

*Woman with stroller. Trust toward Host: neutral. Threat: none.*

*Teenager on skateboard. Trust toward Host: neutral. Threat: none.*

Nora sucked in a breath. "This is incredible."

[Insight allows Host to perceive the baseline disposition of nearby individuals. It cannot read thoughts. It cannot predict decisions. Use it carefully.]

"I will."

She walked on, and the thought that had been turning in her mind since the powder room finally rose to the surface, calm and sharp as a blade. She needed one more thing, and it was the most expensive thing on her list. Power. Without it, a refuge was a cold box. Solar panels, a battery bank, an inverter, a small generator, a hand crank charger.

There was only one wholesale supplier in the city that stocked industrial grade solar systems. A warehouse in the industrial district, just off the river, called Westbrook Energy.

She hired a delivery van and rode in the passenger seat with her list in her lap, watching the city slide past. People walked their dogs. People argued into phones. A man on a corner sold soft pretzels from a cart. The sky was a bright, blameless blue. Nobody looked up.

In the side mirror, a gray sedan turned every corner the van turned. Nora watched it for three blocks, then told herself it was a coincidence. The system did not argue, which was somehow worse.

*Six days,* she thought. *And not one of them knows.*

Her chest ached. It was the oddest sensation, grief for people she had not yet lost. She pushed it down. She could not save all of them. She could barely save herself. But she had a list of names in her mind, a very short list, and she meant to keep every person on it alive.

Westbrook Energy was a long, windowless building painted a flat institutional gray. A single forklift crawled across the loading dock. Inside, rows of steel shelving stretched into the shadows, stacked high with crates of photovoltaic panels, battery cells, and coils of heavy cable.

A bearded man at the counter looked up from his screen. His nametag read *Walt*.

"Help you?"

"I need a complete off grid system," Nora said. "Eight kilowatt, battery storage, hybrid inverter. Whatever you have in stock."

Walt blinked. Then he laughed, a short, rueful bark. "Ma'am, I wish I could. We had six systems in stock on Friday. Now I have none."

"None?"

"A single buyer came in Saturday morning and cleaned me out. All six systems. Plus every spare cell, every inverter, every roll of cable on the property." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I have never seen a man buy that much in one go. He paid cash, too. Well. A wire transfer, but you know what I mean."

Nora's pulse ticked upward. "Who was the buyer?"

"Can't say. Company account. Ashford something. Ashford Industries, I think." Walt shrugged. "Delivered it all to some tower downtown."

*Ashford.*

The name hit her like a stone dropped into still water. Gordon Cole's voice slid into her head. *He has been buying generators, steel, and filtration units for weeks.*

"Do you have anything left at all?" she asked, keeping her voice light. "Even one panel?"

"Hold on." Walt tapped at his keyboard, frowned, then straightened with a grunt. "Actually. We had a return come in this morning that has not been logged yet. One portable unit. Four kilowatt, folding panels, a lithium bank, a built in inverter. It is the last one on the shelf."

"I will take it."

"It is not cheap. Nine thousand four hundred."

"Run it." Nora slapped the last of her cards on the counter.

Walt ran it. The machine hummed, chirped, and spat out a receipt. Nora tore it off, her fingers trembling with triumph, and turned toward the loading dock.

And stopped.

A man stood in the doorway.

He had come in without a sound. He was tall, with the lean, controlled build of someone who spent his days in motion, and he wore a dark overcoat over a charcoal suit that looked as though it had been cut for him alone. His hair was black and a little too long. His face was all hard planes and hollows, as though someone had carved it in a hurry and decided against softening it.

His eyes were the strangest part. Pale gray, almost silver, and utterly still.

They were fixed on the receipt in her hand.

[Ding. Insight triggered.]

A translucent tag bloomed beside him, glowing a pale, steady gold.

*Caleb Ashford. Age: thirty one. Trust toward Host: ...*

The text stuttered. Flickered. Corrected itself.

*Trust toward Host: one hundred.*

Nora's breath caught in her throat.

One hundred. Not neutral. Not wary. A hundred percent. From a man she had never met. From a man who, as far as she knew, had no reason to know her name.

*Threat: unknown. Additional data restricted.*

"Miss Whitaker," Caleb Ashford said.

His voice was low, rough, and quiet. The exact voice from the voicemail.

Walt looked back and forth between them, then quietly slid down the counter and found something very interesting to do with a clipboard.

Nora set the receipt down on the counter very carefully. "You are Mister Ashford," she said. "I do not think we have met."

"We have not." He took one step closer, not threatening, only deliberate. His gaze moved over her cart, the sacks, the boots, the dark smudges beneath her eyes. "You have been buying for six hours. Water. Rice. Salt. Antibiotics. Tools. A tent. And now the last portable solar unit in the county."

"Are you following me?"

"I have been watching the same suppliers you have." He did not smile. "It is not difficult to notice when someone else is doing it."

Her mouth went dry. "I am preparing for a camping trip."

"No," said Caleb Ashford. "You are not."

The warehouse was very quiet. Somewhere deep in the shelving, a fluorescent tube flickered and hummed.

"You bought a month of stored food in a single afternoon," he said. "You bought it with credit cards you have no intention of paying. You bought water purification tablets in quantities no hiker has ever needed. You did not ask a single clerk where the shelter in this city is, because you already know what the answer will be."

Nora said nothing.

"And you did all of it with a precision," he said quietly, "that I have only ever seen in someone who has the same information I do."

She stared at him. A hundred possible answers tumbled through her mind, and every one of them was a lie that would fall apart under those silver eyes.

"What do you want?" she said at last.

Caleb Ashford looked at her for a very long moment. Then, so softly that she almost thought she had imagined it, he said:

"I want to know how you knew."