“You know,” she said as she returned to her task, “it is important for people in a new relationship, exploring it, so to speak, to express themselves clearly so that the other person knows and understands their thoughts and intent.” She looked up again from the now quartered chicken, “Thank you for being clear on what I take to be two separate issues.” They smiled at each other.

  “Are you always so long-winded?”

  “Light or dark?” she answered, still smiling. Dinner continued with the same relaxed tone. Their easy conversation mainly kept to the food—Matt was particularly impressed by the apple slices in the potato salad giving it a light taste—the weather, and ranch politics. Shel heard more about Matt’s history and his feelings for Charlie, who would be coming for another long weekend in two weeks. Her parents were planning a week’s visit in October to see her new life in the West. Matt helped her clear the plates into the kitchen sink, and Shel unboxed a couple of small chocolate tarts for dessert.

  “Do you want an after dinner drink of some kind?”

  “What are you havin?”

  “I’m going to have a whiskey,” she replied. His eyes showed modest surprise.

  “Sounds good. I’ll have that too.” She brought out a bottle and a couple of tall shot glasses, poured, then sat down to dessert. “These are good,” he said after his first bite. “Did you make ’em?”

  “No. They have a crust, which, as I’ve said, means I didn’t make them,” she told Matt. “Baking has never been of interest to me, and the pies the ranch women bring to the socials are just to die for. I’m not even going to try to compete.” She took a sip of her whiskey. “Maybe this is a good time for me to be long-winded again,” she said, now more serious. Matt looked at her with uncertainty on his face. “When I came to Great Falls I was somewhat on the rebound.”

  Matt nodded, “You’ve said.”

  “Maybe I still am. Everything here has been new to me, and I’m still adjusting and figuring it out. I certainly was not in the mood for a relationship or a love affair or anything of the sort. Right now, today, I have no expectations, either of you or me, and no plans other than to see what each new day brings. I like you, like spending time with you, but I’m just in the moment. I don’t want you to have any expectation that we might be going someplace because I have no idea how I feel about that or what I want, as in Want with a capital W. That all being said, if you decide to tear my clothes off, throw me on this table, and have your way with me, I’d be fine with it.” She smiled, leaned back in her chair, and took another sip of her whiskey.

  “It’s natural,” Matt began to talk slowly, choosing his words with care, she thought, “for people t’ wonder about other people they meet or work with. T’ wonder what they might be like t’ know more closely. I’ve done that, and I’d guess you have too.” She was following him attentively and nodded. “I think I do have some Want with a big W. Living on the ranch can be lonely, and sometimes I think I’m a lonely guy. I like you too—quite a bit actually—but are you a person, the person, I could be with in the long term? I don’t know. But then maybe you never know till it’s too late. And I think about Charlie. What I really want most of all is t’ see a way I can be closer t’ him and have him more in my life.” She had a sense that he was really baring himself to her. She felt strong sympathy wash over her and in the same moment the coarse, grating hardness of her secrets.

  “When I can see a clearer path t’ that I’ll be more ready t’ think about other things,” he went on. “It comes down, I guess, t’ something like what you said—I’m takin it one day at a time. I’ll say it the same as you said, that you shouldn’t have expectations of me. But within that expectation-free zone, I promise I will always tell you how I feel and where I think I’m goin.”

  “Thank you, Matt. I understand that you do have that direction you’re wanting to go and I respect you for it. Perhaps we’ll go some of the way together. I’d like that, but for now I have nothing more to offer.” She felt confused and didn’t even know if her ambiguous statement meant anything.

  “That’s fine, Shel. It’s always nice t’ meet new friends along the road and share the journey.”

  She blew him a kiss across the table and mouthed the words “thank you.”

  “I know,” he continued with a smile, “that there’s times you thought I was puttin you down for being from back east, as if you didn’t know anythin at all, and I apologize.”

  “No, Matt, you have really been friendly and helpful and put yourself out for me. I am very grateful. You’ve made it easier for me to start to fit in here.” She smiled broadly because all that was true.

  “Here’s what I’ll do t’ let y’know I’m not some crude, rough-edged frontier guy.” He raised an eyebrow as if to ask permission, and she leaned forward. “About that thing on the table you mentioned? I’ve got a quarter in my pocket, and I’m willin t’ flip for who gets to have their way with who first.” She laughed out loud at his offer.

  “You are a very generous man, for sure, and clearly committed to equality between men and women. But before we start gambling with real money I’d like to take a walk in the evening air.” She knocked back the last of her shot and slapped the glass down on the table as she looked into his brown eyes. They were as eager and lively as she felt her blue eyes were.

  **

  Shel was at the office at eight on Monday. She made the coffee, sorted through her incoming messages, and got started on the day’s work in good time. Sue, the wife of one of the ranch hands, came by to drop off some paperwork related to employee benefits on her way to her off-ranch job. She and Shel had become friendly, and this morning they struck up a conversation about the big party the previous week and mildly gossipy news around the ranch. After a couple of minutes she finally got to what was apparently her point.

  “You and Matt looked pretty friendly at the party. Are you two, like, interested?”

  Shel had been preparing herself for this moment, which she knew was inevitable. “I would say we are friendly. He’s helped me out with riding horses and shown me around the ranch.”

  “Yes, he’s a very pleasant guy. Good-looking too, wouldn’t you say?” She raised an eyebrow to Shel, who smiled and nodded slightly. “Problem is, Shel, if you start something here on the ranch with another employee and it goes bad, one of you may have to leave. I’ve seen that a couple of times. You want to be careful.”

  “I understand that, Sue, but I don’t think it’s a problem.”

  “Just keep it in mind is all I’m saying,” continued Sue. “I like you, and you are making a place for yourself here, but the big picture is that Matt is a lot more valuable to the ranch than you are. If management has to choose, it won’t be you.”

  “I can understand that. I certainly wouldn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize the position Matt has worked hard to have here at the B.a. nor would I want to cause trouble for the ranch. We’ll see if anything comes of it, but thank you for your concern.” Shel terminated the discussion with a smile but not quite as smoothly as she would have liked. What she had wanted to say was that it was none of your goddamn business. Still, it was not a surprise, and Shel expected more conversations of that sort would occur. It was a small place, and people paid attention to one another’s doings. Were people going to look at her differently now? He’s a good lover, she thought. I hope he thinks I am too. And we put some issues and limits on the table—that was good. Who knows what’s going to happen on the ranch, but I think we can be OK in the near future. I can manage that. I hope.

  **

  The ant-farm work occasionally came across her desk as requisitions, minor contracts, or notes on work performed by ranch personnel to be reimbursed by PAS. All this had been going on in one way or another for a couple of months, just there was more at the moment. She copied some of these surreptitiously with her camera glasses and sent them to Colin from home. He said the ranch security software wouldn’t notice, but, after her run-in with Jean-Pierre she was less sure.

  It was also becoming common for deliveries for the ant farm to get routed through Shel first. Arlen came in on Tuesday and asked about a shipment of electrical equipment he had ordered. They went out to the main shed.

  “Back your truck up to the door,” Shel said. “I’ll get the forklift to put the pallet in your truck bed.” Once it was done and Arlen had complimented her on her forklift-driving skills, she asked him, “Is there a hardwired connection from here to the ant farm? I’m getting all this stuff for the project, and it would be a lot easier for me if I could send it on directly instead of copying and forwarding and having to store the originals.”

  She hoped Arlen wouldn’t see through her made-up explanation. If AstroGene wanted her to have access to the ant farm, they would check a box in a systems menu somewhere, and she’d have it. But if there was an actual live cable, maybe Colin’s hackers could sneak in that way.

  “There was, at one point,” he said after a moment’s thought. “They put an optical fiber cable in when the ant farm was being built, but I haven’t looked at it in years.” Shel hid her excited reaction to this possibility. “They might even have pulled it out.”

  “How would we know?” she asked.

  “It was on the south wall in here, I recall,” he said. He started walking between the equipment toward the opposite wall of the building, and Shel followed. When he arrived at the wall, Arlen looked first one way then the other along it. “That’s it,” he said, pointing to a column with a metal box attached to it. They walked around some pallets of irrigation supplies. The box was stainless steel, as big as a large Kleenex box, with a conduit going down into the concrete floor. To Arlen’s surprise, it was not locked. There was a plastic label on the face of the box that said “R. C. Data.”

  “Let’s take a look,” he said and opened the box. Inside was a single wire, about as thick as a pencil, with a white cap on the end. “This is it. I don’t see any glow on the cap so it’s probably disconnected at the other end. I think they had a temporary office here when the research center was getting off the ground and this was connected t’ servers in that.”

  “That’s really interesting,” Shel told him. “Thanks for showing me. I’ll ask Steve if it would be worth hooking up so we’d be able to communicate directly.” After Arlen left, Shel returned and took pictures with the hidden camera in her reading glasses to send to Colin that night.

  **

  On Wednesday morning a flatbed truck loaded with a few large plastic-wrapped bundles of thick flat panels, painted structural steel, and pallets of what Shel thought looked like air conditioning equipment arrived at her door. It was all for the ant farm. Shel was always pleased to see these deliveries, chat with the drivers to find out what they had, and then give them the directions Steve had provided to the ant farm. It happened often enough she had a map she could message to their tabs to help them on their way. She would usually call Daniel or Matt to tell them something was coming. If it was a small package, she’d take the delivery and let them know to pick it up from her desk.

  She chatted up this driver to squeeze all the information she could from him, then called the ant farm and sent the driver on his way. She sent Colin a special report when she got home that night.

  July 11, 2040

  Interesting delivery to the ant farm today. A prefabricated meat-storage room, twelve feet square. Driver said it is designed to store about three thousand pounds of meat and even has an overhead trolley so you can get full sides of beef in. Or you can have shelves and store cut or boxed meat. It is not designed for freezer storage, just kind of a big refrigerator. Thought you might be interested.

  MP

  She sent her regular report on Sunday, and Colin responded in his standard grumpy fashion:

  I’m sending you a signal detector for that cable you found. It’ll tell us whether it’s live or not. You’ll get it tomorrow. Let me know ASAP.

  The meat storage room is weird. Try to find out if they have a surgical room at the ant farm. Maybe they are going to be dissecting the ants or the new animals and it’s a sort of morgue.

  Also, I still can’t get into the system. I hope you’re making progress on your end.

  CE

  When she read that Sunday night after a pleasant day out riding with Matt, she rolled her eyes. I’m not a systems person, she thought, just a bookkeeper with some understanding of data and applications. Colin and his hackers should be able to figure it out. Or maybe they’re all just bullshit.

  **

  Monday evening Colin’s anonymous agent came to Shel’s apartment. The device he brought was a featureless black one-inch cube with a short wire, the same size as the one in the box in the warehouse, she guessed, with a connector on the end. It was in a resealable copper-colored plastic pouch.

  “Don’t take it out of the pouch until you are ready to install it,” he told her. “It emits a detectable level of RF, and the pouch blocks that.” He took a small pack of surgical gloves from his pocket and handed them to her. “And don’t touch it except while wearing gloves. I’ve wiped off any fingerprints from manufacturing, and you don’t want yours on it if someone finds it. Connect it to the wire at the ranch for twenty-four hours, then back into the pouch, bring it back here, and it will automatically link to your communication tab and let us know if the wire is live and what it’s doing.”

  Shel nodded. That would be easy enough. She had a couple of perfunctory questions, mainly what to do with it after she brought it back. His answer was something close to “guard it with your life.” Her immediate thought was that they could have mailed it to her but she was playing Colin’s game and she’d do what he wanted.

  Tuesday she had to walk to the ranch mechanic shop, so she installed the device in the warehouse as she was on her way. Wednesday she retrieved it at lunch, and in the evening she sat on her toilet as she started up the secure tab and set the little cube next to it. The tab screen acknowledged a connection, giving the cube a long alphanumeric name, and told her to wait five minutes.

  She was eager to know what it might have found, but in the end the tab screen told her to put the cube back in its bag, and that was that. Spying, she concluded once again, was about doing things where you don’t know what you’re doing and then not being told how any of it turned out. She put the cube back in its bag, hid it in the back of a drawer, and wondered.

  **

  The following weekend, Charlie came again for a visit.

  Matt had invited Shel to have dinner with them Friday night, so she drove her car to his place after work and was making a salad when they came in the door. Matt was first in, with the sound of wind and thunder behind him.

  “Hi Shel. Thanks for comin.” He turned to hold the door open for Charlie, who was lugging his sleeping bag up the steps onto the landing and in the door. “Charlie, you remember Shel from last time you were here? She’s going t’ have dinner with us tonight.”

  “Hi,” Charlie said.

  “Hello, Charlie,” Shel replied with more enthusiasm than he had. She wasn’t sure if he was surprised by her presence or just tired after a long travel day. “I’m glad to see you again. How was your trip?”

  “OK. I slept some and played Galaxy Explorers on my game tab.” He seemed not in a talkative mood. Shel decided to back off a little. Maybe he was confused because she was new and in what Charlie probably regarded as Matt’s private space.

  “That sounds fun,” she said and turned to Matt, “I have the salad ready to go, potatoes in a couple of minutes, and the meat out on the counter. You can light the grill anytime, and I’ll be ready when you are.”

  “Thanks.” He smiled and blew a kiss at her as he walked into the kitchen. “Somethin t’ drink, Charlie? I’ve got those juices you like.” Charlie came over to the kitchen, now more interested, and chose a container from the refrigerator as Matt held it open. “Shel? Want somethin?” he asked as he took a bottle of beer out. “I think I’ll wait on the grill for a few minutes for this storm t’ blow through.”

  “Sure, I’ll have one of those,” she indicated his beer and turned to open a cupboard. “Here are some crackers, and I’ll get some carrots and dip so we can have a snack and unwind after a long day.” She reached for the beer he was holding out to her and smiled, happy to be with him. The storm blew through quickly, leaving only traces of rain. The winds were down in half an hour or so.

  They went out on his deck in the warm evening as Matt cooked the steaks and then they ate outside, too. Charlie came out of his cocoon as dinner went on, and he started telling Shel about all the camping, fishing, and exploring he and his dad were going to do—including looking for caves. Matt didn’t put on any kind of special show for Charlie, and he made no demands for acceptance or gratitude from the child. She enjoyed watching their relaxed interactions.

  “Are you going to be my stepmom?” Charlie asked Shel during a pause in the dinner conversation. “Bobby’s dad got one for him.” Shel froze, staring first at Charlie, then turning to Matt, who also appeared surprised.

  “No, Charlie,” he said, breaking a moment of tense silence. “Shel’s a friend who works at the ranch, that’s all. She doesn’t live here.” Charlie seemed satisfied, but the brief exchange left Shel on edge.

  By nine Charlie was dozing, so Shel got ready to leave. Matt walked her out to her car.

  “Where did that stepmom thing come from?” she asked the moment he closed the front door. “What did you tell him in the truck before dinner?”

  “I said you’re a friend. Nothin else.”

  “It freaked me out.”

  “I’m really sorry. I was surprised too. He’s a seven-year-old kid and I guess he gets ideas from his friends. I swear I didn’t say anythin like that t’ him.”