Tight Lines

I've been cleaning trains for three years now, and I still can't fully explain to people at parties why I like it. Lindy, thirty-one years old, formerly a combat medic with the army, currently a woman who mops up other people's spilled coffee at one in the morning. Usually they hear the first part and then the second part and then they get this little wrinkle on their forehead, like I've fallen down some ladder and they're trying to figure out how far. The truth is simpler than that. After six years of patching people up in places where the stakes were life and death, wiping down seats and picking up lost gloves felt like a vacation my nervous system didn't know it was allowed to take.

So the routine is this. I clock in at ten forty, I get my cart, and I work the depot where the trains come in to sleep. Empty cars, fluorescent lights, that hum in the rails you can feel through your boots even after the power's been cut. I do maybe four or five trains a night, front to back, and I've gotten so I can tell what kind of evening a car had just from the debris. Confetti means somebody's birthday. A single shoe means somebody had a very good or a very bad night, no in between. And the last car of the last train is where people leave things, because it's the car nobody sits in on purpose, only by accident, when everything else is full and they're already half asleep.

That's where I found the tablet, on a Tuesday in March, wedged between two seats like it had been shoved there in a hurry. Black case, no scratches, and when I pressed the button the screen lit up and asked me for a passcode, which meant whoever owned it had their head on straight. I did the by-the-book thing. I logged it, tagged it, put it in lost and found, and figured that would be the end of it.

Except she came back for it that same night, which almost nobody does. It was nearly two when I heard heels on the platform, fast ones, and I looked up from my mop and there was this woman striding down the empty concourse like the building owed her money. Tall, dark hair pinned up, coat that probably cost more than my car. She was scanning the cars and she spotted me and her whole body did this thing where she stopped striding and started simply walking, like she'd caught herself being urgent in public and didn't like it.

"Hi. Sorry. Did someone turn in a tablet tonight? Black case, maybe half an hour ago, end of the last train."

"Should be in the office," I said. "You got ID on you?"

She produced it, and I will admit I read the name a little slower than I needed to. Julia Wren. Thirty-four. The photo looked like her but angrier, like DMV photos always do. I handed back the license and led her to the office, and on the walk she was quiet, and I noticed she was quiet the way people are quiet when they're doing math about something.

"You're the one who found it," she said as I unlocked the cabinet. It wasn't really a question.

"End of the last train. Safe and sound, nobody even sat on it."

She took it, checked the case, checked the corners, and I watched her thumb hover over the power button and not press it, and then she looked at me for the first time properly, and something in her face shifted. "Thank you. Seriously. Most people would have, I don't know, gone through it first."

"Some people would," I said. "I mostly find half a sandwich and gloves."

And she laughed, this short surprised laugh like it had gotten out before security cleared it, and I felt something in my chest I hadn't felt in a long time and didn't have a name handy for. She asked my name. I told her. She said, "Lindy. That's a good name for a woman who works nights," whatever that meant, and then she got in a black car that was idling by the north gate, and I thought it was over.

Except it wasn't, because here's where I have to tell on myself a little.

The next shift, when I was doing the last car of the last train again, I found a second tablet. Same case, same everything, and I stood there holding it for a good minute thinking, well, either she's lost two tablets in a week or this one is mine, in the sense that it was left where only I would find it. When I pressed the button it didn't ask for a passcode. It opened straight to a note on the screen. Five words: Ask me about it sometime.

Underneath the note there was an app icon I didn't recognize, grey, unlabeled, and I'm not proud of this part, but I'm not going to lie about it either, I sat down in a seat and I tapped it. It opened to a camera feed. Plural feeds. A lobby, an office, a car parked somewhere, timestamps running in the corner, and a label at the top that said PRIVATE MODE, and my heart did a whole drum solo, because this was either an accident, a test, or an invitation, and I genuinely could not tell which, and I looked at maybe ten seconds of a lobby with nobody in it before I closed the app and put the tablet face down on the seat like it had bitten me.

Then I logged it in the book, again, and I didn't sleep well, and I thought a lot about the difference between watching and being shown something.

She came back on Friday, three days later. I was hosing down the platform when the heels came back, and this time she wasn't striding, she was standing by my cart with two paper cups and an expression like a woman arriving at her own trial.

"Before you say anything," she said, "that second tablet was on purpose. And I need to explain, because I've been sick about it for two days."

"Okay," I said, and took the coffee, because I'm not an idiot.

"The app is mine. I built it. It's a security product my company runs, private networks, closed feeds, and the tablet you found Tuesday was my work one, with a demo account on it that I use for sales meetings. The second one was a spare I loaded with the same demo and left where you'd find it. I pulled the access logs afterward, and your name is on them, Lindy, you opened the feed for eleven seconds." She took a breath. "I'm not here to threaten you or report you. Nobody's in trouble. I'm here because I watched that log entry sit there and I realized I wanted to know who you were before I cared about the security breach, and that's a problem I don't usually have."

"So you left me a second tablet with the same app on it," I said. "That's a weird way to get to know somebody."

"It's an insane way to get to know somebody. I know." She laughed that short laugh again, and then it faded. "The feeds you saw are my own buildings, my own lobby, nothing and no one else. I look at empty rooms, mostly. That's the embarrassing truth. I sit in my office at night and look at empty rooms and it makes me feel like somebody's keeping an eye on things, and I don't love hearing out loud that my own product is a symptom."

We stood there on the dead platform, two women and a mop bucket, and I thought about what to do with all that. What I said was, "Eleven seconds. I saw an empty lobby and felt like a burglar and closed it. If you wanted me gone you wouldn't have brought me coffee."

"I didn't know what I wanted. I still don't, entirely." She looked out at the dark tunnel mouth. "Would you get something to eat with me? Coffee, eggs, whatever, if you're off soon. There's a place two blocks from here that stays open for night-shift people, I've driven past it a hundred times and never gone in."

"I'm off at four," I said. "It's three. If you can wait an hour, then yes, but you're going to learn I'm boring and smell like industrial floor cleaner."

She smiled, a real one this time, slower than the laugh. "I've spent the last week in a boardroom. Floor cleaner sounds like a vacation."

So she waited in the office while I finished the platform, and at four we went, and that's its own story, but the short version is that over coffee and eggs she talked more than she probably meant to, about the company she'd started at twenty-seven and the way nobody in her life asked her real questions anymore because they were all employees or investors, and I talked about the army and the night I decided I was done with blood and asked for this job instead, and she