The Disruptors 1.3

Her phone vibrated.

Unknown Number:

There you are.

Something brushed lightly against her shoulder.

When Jess turned, Victoria was already standing beside her.

Not across the room.

Right beside her.

The tightness started in her throat and worked its way down to her gut. There was something in the way this woman looked at her. She felt it earlier in the SUV. Slowly, she slipped her phone back into her pocket.

The woman stood a few inches taller. Jess lifted her chin and grinned, a step back already halfway executed.

“And now I’m not.”

“You’re not curious why you recognize me?”

That stopped her abruptly enough she almost stumbled.

“That field you used to ride those dirt bikes in; I lived right near that dead-end caution sign.”

The statement hit hard enough that Rook’s gargled transmission barely registered.

ROOK

“Its-… Idea… Now.”

Jess let herself fall against the door, no longer masking the shock crossing her face. In a split second she was back on that street in the early morning hours, standing near the caution sign waiting for the bus. She remembered the girl approaching her then. The height difference. The strange energy she never understood at the time.

She buried the confusion beneath humor.

“Ok, so you knew me as a kid. Lots of people do. You want me to get you a cookie?”

She laughed once.

Victoria lowered her voice as her eyes narrowed.

“I guess those reports your VA doctors are getting are true then. Earlier you jumped out of a car after destroying it for seemingly no reason; my dash cam shows that. And now here? Stalking me after trashing my vehicle while trying to attack me?”

Static scratched through her Bluetooth while Rook confirmed the obvious. No recording. No evidence. Just her word against theirs.

A slow smile crept across Victoria’s face the moment her anxiety surfaced.

She nodded once, stepped backward again, and exited the conversation before the woman could press further.

The bathroom made for a convenient excuse. If this night turned into anything like the last few, this might be the final chance she had to take a breath.

The warehouse doors shut behind her as she scanned the patio for somewhere calm enough to smoke. The music inside shifted into techno layered over seventies samples while muffled bass leaked through the walls into the night air.

Loading door.

Side corridor.

Rear service gate.

She clocked the exits by instinct before settling near the railing.

As the adrenaline eased enough for thought to return, Dorian approached. She vaguely knew him from art classes around town. He came in flirtatiously, fingertips brushing shoulders, eyes tracing her jawline like he was sketching her in real time.

“Your nose is so…”

“Yup. Some female clipped me with the ring on her fist after I laughed at her trying to embarrass me.”

His eyes widened theatrically, arms flailing wide.

“MY, MY, aren’t you the firecracker.”

She smiled, pulled a joint from her pocket, lit it, and let the silence sit a second before exhaling.

“I mean… I just lit the match. And we’re safe… right?”

Dorian shifted into a gentler, more performative stance, almost testing whether she responded to the energy he projected. Attractive, sure. But the whole interaction felt wrong in the same way everything else had for the last three days.

When her smile never changed and her demeanor never loosened, he drifted off.

Couldn’t get a read.

She pulled out her phone and noticed Rook was back online.

Text to Rook:

Were you able to record anything when Victoria approached?

Rook’s voice crackled through the Bluetooth.

“No go.”

She sighed heavily, carefully put the joint away, and turned toward the door.

Then she saw those eyes.

That casual demeanor screaming pay attention while simultaneously begging for the attention to become something she could manipulate.

Blue.

The excitement inside Blue mixed almost evenly with fear. Blue had studied Jess for years, having only spoken to her days before at the bar. Now she could really talk.

They told Blue she was their champion. The reliable one. The one who always held the line whenever Jess became a problem.

But something about Jess reached places inside Blue she didn’t know how to control. Every time it happened, she slammed the emotional door shut. Better to deny it. Better to stay useful. Better to stay safe.

They said they’d put her on a seventy-two hour hold if she didn’t fall in line. Blue scoffed. Better her than me.

Blue turned to step into Jess’s path.

Blue expected hesitation. A stumble. A step into her space.

Instead, the sidestep came instantly. Smooth enough that Blue wondered if she somehow sensed movement before it happened.

Then Blue remembered the conversations they had about this one. Jess caught patterns through text messages, random numbers, songs. Read emotional pressure through wording alone. Every attempt to corner her always somehow failed.

No one understood how.

They isolated her relentlessly. Filled her orbit with people hoping to discover who fed her information. Years of pressure and still nobody found evidence of anyone helping her.

Blue stepped into the warmth of the patio heaters and lowered her voice.

“You know,” she said, “for someone supposedly paranoid, your evaluations read pretty self-aware.”

When Jess paused and looked up at her, it wasn’t what Blue expected. The feeling of ease and trust was so unsettling she had to make a move to regain the upper hand.

Jess shrugged and half rolled her eyes before trying to move past Blue again.

Close enough now for the gesture to appear natural to everybody except her, Blue reached up and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. Fingers grazing the side of her neck half a second too long as she spoke.

“That pause before you look at somebody,” Blue continued. “You always do it when you’re calculating.”

Jess glanced at Blue’s hand before easing away from the contact.

“I don’t remember telling you enough about me for ‘always’ to exist.”

Blue smiled on reflex.

The nearby crowd quieted in subtle stages once they sensed tension worth watching.

“There it is again,” Blue thought.

That calm.

Blue spoke aloud.

“…your VA doctor, what was her name? They want you in for another eval?”

Vera stepped beside them.

“Blue.”

“What?” Blue laughed. “She knows I’m joking.”

Jess kept her eyes on her.

“You know you’re not.”

Vera looked between them, uncertainty flickering across her face just as Jess asked:

“You all really rehearsed this together first?”

A few people nearby laughed on instinct before realizing the question carried an edge.

Blue’s smile flickered as Jess looked past her to Vera.

“This one I can understand; who is she to me? But you? That lands different.”

The atmosphere shifted suddenly. What started as curiosity in the crowd began to feel hungry.

Jess began to recognize the sensation. Social blood in the water.

Blue stepped closer again, smile tightening.

“You always do this?”

She tilted her head.

“Do what?”

“Act smarter than everybody in the room.”

Jess leveled her gaze between Vera and Blue.

“Usually people just hide the coordination better.”

The silence stayed heavier this time. Vera broke eye contact first, shifting her whole body away from the tension as best she could.

Blue felt the shift too. The tension. The “why” she was curious about her target aside from the obvious reason.

The way Jess looked at her told Blue she wasn’t slick. This one had called her bluff long before she’d ever admit it, and the fact that it caused her to falter in her mission… it ate away at parts of her she didn’t think were weakness.

With a small knowing nod, and a glint in her greenish-blueish eyes, Jess stepped backward toward the far side of the patio and out the gate.

“See y’all.”

Jess was already disappearing into the alley before anyone fully decided whether stopping her would expose too much.

With a push of the side doors, she was back in the warmth and chaos of the warehouse party. With a glance to where J had been, she saw him layered in women. No doubt they thought he was overwhelmed, stricken, and though there was a real chance this was the case, J had never failed her because she’d never failed him. They never agreed to it formally. It just always happened that way.

With another glance around the room, she spotted a clear route to the bathroom and cut through the crowd like a hot knife through butter.

When she shut the door, the silence hit first. The bass in the walls felt good, but most of the rest of the noise was gone. The mirror, her reflection, and some rust… all the contenders in the room.

Not real silence though, which was comforting. The bass still vibrated through the walls while muffled voices bled beneath the music. Compared to the patio? It felt underwater.

When the adrenaline caught up she braced the bathroom sink and lowered her head. There was a trick she learned to deal with stress: tense all your muscles for twenty seconds or so, then release. Rinse and repeat until ya feel better. It worked better than the ice trick. Or the counting. Or the five senses thing… just get tense, relax, and do that repeatedly.

She squeezed her eyes shut as the crash rolled through her system all at once. The shaking started in her hands before settling into her arms.

Too many moving parts.

Too many people pretending not to coordinate while coordinating perfectly.

Her breathing staggered unevenly for a few seconds before she laughed through her nose.

“Cool,” she muttered to herself. “Very cool.”

She let herself have the moment. No performance, no audience, no pretending she wasn’t exhausted.

The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed while she splashed cold water against her face, wiped herself down with a paper towel, and readied herself for another round. The objective was to find out what the connections here were to her past, or her present situation.

With a few movements she clicked off the bathroom light and made her way toward the bar, letting herself disappear into the flow of the crowd until a woman stepped into her path.

The woman who approached her had short dark hair, was mixed race, a few inches shorter than her, and pretty in an understated way.

“Susan,” the woman said warmly, extending a hand.

Jess shook it by reflex.

Something about her energy felt… flattened.

Not fake exactly.

Just disconnected from the room around her.

“We couldn’t find you during the donor announcements,” Susan continued. “They still have your gift in the back.”

Jess studied her for a second.

“Gift?”

Susan smiled.

“Everyone who donated got something.”

The explanation sounded normal enough.

“This way.”

When she looked back, Susan was already motioning toward the hallway near the storage rooms.

As Jess followed, she glanced once toward J again across the warehouse. Still surrounded. Still managing. Such a lush.

The music faded the farther they moved from the main floor. Soon only muffled bass remained beneath the hum of industrial lighting overhead.

The hallway smelled of dust and overheated electronics.

That caught her attention first.

Then the wires.

She slowed.

Massive black cables snaked along the concrete floor and disappeared through partially opened utility doors farther down the corridor. Thick enough to power construction equipment. Server racks maybe. Definitely not the kind of setup needed for the art displays she saw outside.

Her eyes followed the lines by instinct.

Too much load capacity.

Too much heat.

Too much infrastructure hidden behind a room full of recycled sculptures and projection mapping.

Susan noticed her looking.

“Event equipment,” she said.

She nodded once.

But the explanation landed wrong.

The cables continued far past the direction of the main exhibit hall.

Deeper into the building.

Susan opened the door and motioned her inside with the same polite smile she’d worn since the hallway.

When the door opened things began to feel wrong. It wasn’t anticipated, but the pressure in the room when she stepped in and Victoria was there changed matters.

Cold fluorescent lighting hummed overhead while server fans pushed stale heat through the space in uneven waves. Thick black cables ran along the concrete floor and disappeared behind racks of equipment far larger than anything needed for an art event.

Jess’s eyes followed the infrastructure by instinct.

Signal routing.

Battery backups.

Audio equipment.

Camera feeds.

Not art installation wiring.

Vera and Blue stepped around her in silence while, from behind a half-completed miniature model home, Victoria leaned near the equipment racks.

No dramatic entrance.

No weapons.

Just. Pressure.

Susan folded her hands after setting a tin can in front of her, then leaned against the massive art table in the center of the room.

Jess picked it up, looking at it confused.

“What’s this?”

Blue chimed in.

“The gift for your donation. It’s a variety of teas, specifically ginger.”

Jess leaned against the table instead of sitting.

“Mmm. Another set up?”

Blue watched Jess from the back wall, as irritated as she was an unstable mixture of fascination and resentment.

Victoria whispered as someone else picked up her sentence, louder now.

“Paranoia runs deep you know?”

Jess grinned.

“You hide strange things in art warehouses.”

Vera looked less comfortable now that there wasn’t a crowd buffering the interaction.

Victoria motioned toward one of the monitors.

“At a certain point,” she said calmly, “truth becomes less important than consistency.”

The screen flickered.

Then she saw herself in the images they painted of her. Security footage of her inside a convenience store she’d never been to, wearing different clothes, yelling at someone off-screen as security approached.

Another cut.

A parking structure brawl where a man was shoved backward into a pillar as two guards yanked her off him.

Another cut.

Blurred footage of her arguing violently outside some apartment complex she didn’t recognize.

The edits happened quickly.

Too quickly.

Designed for emotional impact over scrutiny.

Blue watched the monitor like she expected it to break her apart emotionally.

Victoria stayed calm.

“Do you understand the problem?”

She studied the footage silently for several seconds.

Not fear.

Observation.

That unsettled Blue.

Jess tossed the small tin can of tea bags in the air like a ball.

Victoria stepped closer to the monitor.

“You already have documented instability. Escalating incidents. Witness statements. Evaluations.”

She kept watching the screen.

Then:

“You’ve got an editing error there.”

Silence.

Tiny.

Sharp.

Blue’s eyes shifted toward Victoria before she could stop herself.

There.

That fracture again.

Victoria stayed composed.

“What?”

Jess pointed toward the monitor.

“The parking garage footage.”

“The lighting direction changes between cuts, but the camera angle doesn’t.”

Nobody moved.

She tilted her head.

“The compositing’s off, and your screen direction is worse.”

When Susan looked at Victoria, the confusion on both their faces broke the mask momentarily.

Jess didn’t look afraid.

She looked concerned.

Blue stepped forward defensively.

Jess laughed.

“That might get you into court, but it’ll get tossed just as quickly.”

Victoria’s smile thinned almost invisibly.

Then J’s voice echoed from somewhere outside the hallway.

“YO— why does this place got enough wiring to resurrect Frankenstein?”

The rhythm inside the room broke.

Not chaos.

Disruption.

J’s voice rumbled the dirt from the walls.

“There is a bat down here? I was told?”

The way he pushed energy always forced people to become human again instead of coordinated.

As Jess stepped backward beside and past Susan toward the rear door she watched every reaction happen at once.

Susan startled.

Blue irritated.

Vera anxious.

Victoria calculating.

J laughing as the women tried to usher him out for being so disruptive.

Too many rehearsed people suddenly improvising.

That’s when she understood.

The whole beautiful thing only worked if everyone played their role, and they had accidentally thrown a wrench into the machine’s gears.