She dragged the chain across the room and stopped mid-step.

She had most certainly heard an engine.

She strained for the window, caught a glimpse of color, recognized the car, and tried counting heads but didn’t have the view.

Footsteps tromped up the porch steps.

She crossed the room, leaned into the door to listen, caught movement and Jen’s voice in a few scattered words.

A door down the hall opened. The door shut.

Footsteps headed in her direction, and she backed away.

Knuckles rapped against the door—more of that respect thing, Jen treating her as if the space was hers, giving her the illusion that as captor, she couldn’t just come and go as she pleased.

Kara said, “Come in.”

Jen peeked her head inside.

She said, “You holding up okay?”

Kara shrugged. Just because she was grateful for the little things didn’t mean she had to be happy she needed the little things in the first place.

Jen said, “We’re going to have to go again soon. I just want to make sure you’re as comfortable as can be.”

“I’m okay,” Kara said.

“Also,” Jen said, “I don’t know if maybe you want to meet Jack?”

Kara’s stomach somersaulted.

Her brain hung up, and her mouth stopped working.

She wanted to meet him, yes. Had wanted to meet him since he’d followed her to her hotel in Prague, and had wanted to meet him every day since, wanted to meet him the way someone might want to meet Alan Turing or Katherine Johnson, but she didn’t want to meet him like this, hair greasy, two days since her last hot shower, sitting on a mattress on the floor with a goddamn chain around her ankle. But to admit to any of that opened her up to questions even she wasn’t ready to answer.

She shrugged again, said, “Sure.”

Jen closed the door. A minute later there was another knock, and then a pause, and Jack walked in alone, and seeing him up close, face-to-face, brought on a torrent of inner conflict that sent all the old disfluency rushing through her head.

She thought through the words, said, “I guess you won.”

He knelt so he was at eye level.

“This isn’t winning,” he said.

He glanced at her ankle. “May I?”

She nodded.

He ran a finger between shackle and sock, checking the spacing, looking for chafing, and, apparently satisfied, let her ankle drop. “You don’t deserve this,” he said. “There aren’t many people I’d say that to, but if I could have seen another way, some path to avoid this, I’d have done it.”

She said, “I’m worth nothing to them. Someone as smart as you has to know that, so what could you possibly hope to gain from all this?”

“Freedom,” he said.

Not the answer she expected.