She checked the time again. It was almost 1900 hours, so she had ninety minutes to finish the tasks she had set for herself today. The screens surrounding her kept scrolling information she had requested, data fields overlaid on data fields. Anja’s interruption had pulled her out of the flow of her Acheroni language lesson, and Solveig decided that she didn’t have a mind for data analysis anymore. The lesson had been on food—ordering in a restaurant—and it had put her in the mood for something spicy. She waved all the screens above her desk surface out of existence with a single gesture and got out of her chair to stretch.
“Vigdis, I’m stepping out for a bit. Run the dine-in protocol until 2130 hours, please.”
“Understood. The dine-in protocol is in effect. Have a good evening,” the AI replied. Solveig had made a few tweaks to the way her personal AI reported her presence in the office to the network whenever she wanted to go out for a bite to eat without a security entourage. If Marten or any of his underlings checked her location in the system, it would still show her in her office, with a privacy flag enabled so they’d know not to disturb her in person. If they came close to the office anyway, the AI would have her seem to wander off to the canteen or one of the exercise facilities downstairs. Her access pass to the building was now temporarily assigned to a fictitious ID so she could leave and return without getting an earful from Marten about security protocol. It wasn’t bulletproof—all that had to happen to blow her little sleight of hand was for Marten to give closer scrutiny to the surveillance data or cross paths with her in one of the entrance lobbies of the building—but she figured the fallout would be tolerable. After all, she was just going out for Acheroni food, not plotting with the competition or trying to steal the company’s cash reserves.
The summer evening was warm and humid. Solveig walked away from Ragnar Tower on streets that were still busy with activity—people heading home from work late or heading out to enjoy their diversions.
There was a street nearby where the eateries were closed during the day but open all night, catering to the leisure crowd and the busy people looking for an easy dinner on the way home. There was no theme or system to the agglomeration of food stalls and tiny sit-in places here—Gretian comfort snacks, Oceanian seafood, Acheroni stew shops, all peacefully coexisting shoulder to shoulder on the same strip of real estate. Solveig’s favorite place on this street was an Acheroni joint so narrow that it could only fit a single row of tiny tables inside next to the counter, and on busy nights she had to wait a good while for her turn to order, but she had never been disappointed with the food. She knew that Magnus would have a fit if he saw her in the middle of the evening crowds without a bodyguard. But nobody cared. Nobody knew that her name was on the side of the nearby office tower that stood tallest among all the ones around Principal Square. There was a freedom to her occasional clandestine dinner excursions that made her feel a little like she was at university again, when the weight of responsibility and expectations hadn’t yet settled on her shoulders. There had been no security detail back then. She had just been one of the students, and her father seemed to have deemed her too valuable to venture out into public only when she was of legal age, with a degree that finally qualified her to start at Ragnar and step into the role he had intended for her.
Solveig ordered her food, then stood in line to wait for its preparation. It was a busy evening, and all the little tables inside were taken. She kept an eye on them as she moved along the line to the pickup station. Sometimes the timing was in her favor, and another guest got ready to vacate their table just as she was ready to claim it.
The person sitting at the last table in the back had a familiar face. It took her a moment to recognize him because she had only seen it once, three months ago. It was the young police detective who had questioned her on the day before the Principal Square bombing. She had never heard from him again. The police probably had other things to do after the worst terrorist attack in the planet’s history. Just as she started to turn her head away so he wouldn’t recognize her, their eyes locked, and he gave her a friendly nod.
So much for anonymity, she thought.
When she had received her food container, the layout of the place required her to make a turn at the very back and walk past all the guest tables on the way out. Nobody was going through the telltale motions of preparing to leave yet.
“Miss Ragnar,” the detective said when he saw her scanning the line of tables as she walked by. “You can sit here if you want. No offense taken if you don’t.”
He gestured at the empty seat across the table from him. She knew that on Acheron, where space was always at a premium, it was perfectly acceptable and necessary to share a table with a stranger. But Gretian customs were very different. Offering someone a seat at one’s table was a gesture of high courtesy. Solveig didn’t want to be rude. Besides, eating her food while sitting down was better than eating it on the walk back to the office. She placed her food container on the table and sat down across from the detective.
“Thank you. Berg, isn’t it? Criminal Detective Berg.”
“You have a good memory,” he
