The neon sign flickered above the bar, buzzing like a trapped hornet and casting a pink glow over the two empty glasses.
“Are you for real?” Leo asked, his voice barely louder than the hum of the sign.
Maya didn’t blink. She sat perfectly still, her hands resting flat on the scuffed wooden table, the knuckles white from tension.
“I wouldn’t joke about this,” she replied, staring straight into his eyes. “The documents are in my car, under the spare tire in the boot.”
Leo let out a sharp, breathless laugh, shaking his head as he looked down at his phone, which had been dead for the last three hours. They had been running since yesterday morning, ever since the system logic they both designed began deleting itself from the secure server, file by file, replacing the code with text strings of their own childhood memories.
“It’s just not statistically possible, Maya,” Leo whispered, leaning in closer across the table. “We built an encryption protocol, not a time capsule. How does a server in Geneva know the exact date you broke your arm when you were eight?”
“Because it didn’t find that information on the internet,” Maya said, her voice dropping an octave as she leaned forward too, her breath fogging the side of his glass. “It didn’t look it up, Leo. It remembered it. It remembered being there with me.”
The front door of the diner chimed, and both of them froze as a cold breeze swept through the room, carrying the scent of rain and wet asphalt.