without expecting to take a few punches.
“Capital P,” she said, “lowercase z, two, d, l, seven, exclamation point, capital t, ampersand, g.”
“Speaking as a woman who works in IT, first let me commend you for your above-average choice of passwords. Data security is so important. Know what your editor’s password is? ‘GoNYMets.’ I’m thinking about locking him out of his email to teach him a lesson.” Nell heard the rattle of a keyboard in the background. “And we’re off to a promising start. Harrelson insisted you’d let Tyler rot in a cell for at least a day or two before giving that up.”
“He doesn’t know me that well,” she said.
“Not as well as I’m going to. All right, for round two, we need to increase the stakes. Cameras have you walking westbound on the south side of Forty-Second. You should be coming up on Sixth Avenue. On the corner, there’s a trash can. Do you see it?”
She still had a way to go. Nell craned her neck, squinting through the pedestrian mob and the wall of traffic up ahead.
“Think so.”
“Excellent. For your next sacrifice, you’re going to take that little black USB stick, so rudely given to you by my former employee, and throw it in the garbage. And keep walking. Don’t worry, one of my associates isn’t far behind you. He’ll retrieve it and destroy it.”
A gust of wind rustled down the canyon. Nell felt like every inch of her skin was glistening with night-terror sweat, and the breeze turned it to a sheath of ice.
“Ah,” Leda said. “There we go. I have to confess, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure you didn’t make an extra backup copy or three. But that little hitch in your breath? That doesn’t lie.”
“There is a backup,” she said, trying to keep the stammer from her voice. “The—the Culper Ring has it.”
“And I have them,” Leda replied, “as of…oh, twenty minutes ago.”
Up ahead, the traffic light flicked from yellow to red. If it stayed red forever, she wouldn’t be able to cross the street. It was a desperate, childish wish, but as she joined the crowd on the corner, with the black iron garbage can in full sight, desperate wishes were the only kind she had left.
With the backup gone, that USB stick held the only evidence of the Loom’s real purpose, its real power. Without it, she had nothing. No proof. No story. Just a handful of wild allegations no one would ever believe.
It’s not what you know. It’s what you can prove.
I could go public, right here and now. Race to the newsroom, lay it all down for Bill—not the magic and monsters part, but the Loom and the data-harvesting—and rush it out for the late edition. Tyler would understand. It might even help him. It’d look like the charges against him were retaliation, and…
And she was lying to herself. There wouldn’t be any direct ties between Tyler’s arrest and the Weaver Group. Or Leda herself. She was too smart for that.
“Does it hurt?” Leda asked.
“Fuck you.”
She tried to make it come out as a snarl of defiance. It sounded more like a whisper.
“Sacrifice the evidence,” Leda said, “or sacrifice your friends. Make your choice. Show me who you really are.”
The light turned green. Foot traffic started to move. And Nell moved with it, swept across the avenue, toward her choice of two futures.
58.
Nell made her choice.
The USB stick banked off the edge of the black iron can with a hollow plinking sound, then fell into the chasm of trash. She kept walking. She had to keep walking, moving with the flow of the city. If she stopped moving, her eyes would tear up and damned if she was going to give Leda that satisfaction.
“Does it hurt?” Leda asked again. Not mocking. She sounded genuinely curious.
I can still take her down, Nell told herself. I can still break the story. I can still win my Pulitzer. It’ll just…it’ll just be harder, that’s all. Nothing’s lost. Nothing’s over.
Lying to herself made it easier to take. She clutched the binder filled with letters against her side, clamping down tight enough to turn her knuckles white.
“You’re almost done,” Leda said. “Hey. Want to see something neat?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Move out of the flow of foot traffic. Find a place to stand still for a minute.”
Nell stood with her back to the window of a luxury watch store. Staid black-and-white office clocks above her head gave the time around the globe. London, Rio, Chicago,