Chapel Hill is one of those perfect college towns, full of smart startups, principled academics, and excited (and excitable) students. Where you have a great college town, you get great independent bookstores, and Flyleaf Books is one of those great stores. I stopped there in 2010 on the For the Win tour and they were so kind to me, I never forgot it. Then, the UNC iBiblio people took me out for a barbecue lunch that was so unbelievably amazing that I forgot everything else.

Flyleaf Books: 752 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd (Historic Airport Rd.), Chapel Hill, NC 27514, +1 919 942-7373

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I was nearly convinced I had the wrong alley. I waited ten minutes, then fifteen, then I walked off. I got to the end of the block and I turned around and walked back. I looked down the alleyway. It wasn't much of an alleyway -- just a narrow space between two buildings, wide enough for the fire exits and trash cans. The fifteen minutes I'd spent standing in the alley had been enough time for me to memorize every single feature of the place, from the ancient, mossy urine streaks on the wall to the dents in the trash cans. And now I could see that something was different. Hadn't that trash can been over there? It had been. I took a cautious step into the alleyway and my palms slicked with sweat, because I could tell, somehow, that there was someone in there with me. I took another step.

"Back here," a voice said from behind the trash cans. I tried to peek over them, but couldn't quite see, so I went deeper in and came around them.

Masha was sitting with her back against the wall. She looked like she was on her way to the gym, in track pants and a loose T-shirt, her hair in a pink scrunchie, a gym bag beside her. Her hair was mousy no-color brown, and she was wearing big fake designer shades. She could have been rich or poor, teenaged or in her late twenties. I wouldn't have given her a second look if I'd sat next to her on BART. I wasn't sure it was her, until she lowered her shades on her nose and skewered me on her glare.

"Have a seat," she said, and gestured at the space next to her behind the trash cans. She'd put down a piece of new cardboard there, which was a nice touch and made me think this wasn't the first time she'd done this. I lowered myself into a cross-legged position.

"Nice to see you," I said. "A bit unexpected."

"Yeah," she said. "Zeb and I walked out of there a few days ago, but it's been busy."

"Walked out of there."

"Those Zyz people, they're mostly meatheads that couldn't cut it in the DHS, so they went private sector, tripled their pay, and set out on their own. They have a lot of faith in their systems. Like, say, if a vendor says a CCTV is secure, they believe it. Same with electronic door locks, tracking ankle cuffs, and perimeter sensors."

"Oh," I said. I'd always known that Masha was a million times more badass than I was, but in all this business about saving her, I'd somehow come to think of her as a damsel in distress. "Did you have to come far?"

"Are you asking where I was held?"

I shrugged.

"Are you sure you want to know that?"

I shrugged again. "Probably not. All this spy shit, I pretty much totally hate it, to tell you the truth. Is Zeb okay?"

"Zeb's as good as he has any right to expect. Better. He's doing some stuff on his own for a while."

I mentally translated this as We had a big fight and split up. "Oh."

"So I wanted to say thanks," she said. "You've done some stuff that needed doing, but you did it for me and Zeb and that was damned good of you. Even if 'spy shit' isn't your thing."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, glad to be of service, even if you didn't need me in the end."

"Oh, I needed you. Zyz's been in an absolute panic pretty much since the moment they grabbed us. I figured out pretty quick that you were behind it. They were awfully anxious to know what had gotten out, what else might come out, and how they could stop it. They had a lot of really sincere questions for me. But it was an excellent distraction, and from what I can tell, all the people who supplied me with that material are happy with how it's gotten out. There was a lot more material waiting for me when I got back online. Enough to keep me busy for a really long time." She was being super macha, but I was starting to see that there was something wrong with her. She rooted in her gym bag for a water bottle and took a slug of it. I saw big, ugly bruises -- no, welts -- on her wrists and at her throat. I swallowed.

"Well, glad to be of service. Wish I'd known, since I happened upon some more 'material' of my own recently." I told her about Carrie Johnstone's d0x and the source of them.

"I see," she said, in sober tones. "And where are these files now?"

"I emailed them to Zyz corporate headquarters," I said.

I have to admit, I was a little proud of the silence that followed. She might have been James Bond-meets-Spiderman, but I'd managed to do something so heroically crazy-stupid-brave that I'd rendered her speechless. But the silence went on, and on, and on. I peered at her shades, trying to see if she'd fallen asleep behind them.

"Um?"

"Shush," she said. "I'm figuring angles."

"Oh."

She lowered her head for a moment, and I heard her muttering to herself. There was a raw ligature mark around the back of her neck, which disappeared beneath her chin.

"So if I have this straight, you've sent all this in to Zyz and to Johnstone personally. You've implied that you're ready to publish it at the drop of a hat, but as far as they know, you haven't actually done anything about getting it published, right?"

"Pretty much. I've locked down the server my blog is on six ways to midnight, because I figured they'd be after it with everything they had. I'm half-convinced they're going to come after me personally again, but that was always a certainty. They've tried to snatch me twice now. There's nothing I could do that would stop them from coming a third time."

She nodded along with me and held up her hand as I came to the end. "What if I could stop them?"

"What do you mean?"

"What if I could negotiate something with them, so that they made a meaningful promise to leave you alone, and you agreed to leave the Johnstone d0x alone?"

"Just so I'm clear on this: you've just escaped from a secret prison run by these goons, and now you're proposing to negotiate with them for my safety? As we say on the Internets: double-you -- tee -- eff."

"Oh," she said. "Marcus, come on. I'm not doing this to negotiate for your safety. I'm negotiating for mine."

Derp. "Right," I said. "Right. And Zeb's."

"Zeb, you, me, your little girlie, all of them. Zyz is stupid and evil, but it's a business. Money talks and bullshit walks. What you're about to dump, it will cost them plenty. If we give them a chance to cut their losses, they're going to do that."

"What about Johnstone? Won't she come after me after she's fired?"

"They won't fire her," she said. "Whatever reasons they have to fire her, you can be sure she has amassed a fat dossier of reasons why they shouldn't fire her. That woman's got the survival instincts of a cockroach. She only goes when she's ready to go. The U.S. Army only fired her once she was ready to be fired, once she'd set up the Zyz deal to step into. She let them fire her."

"You sound almost like you admire her," I said.

"The only day I wouldn't piss on Carrie Johnstone is the day she caught fire," Masha said, without the slightest hesitation or expression. "But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant. I've paid for every lesson that Carrie Johnstone has taught me, and I'm going to get my money's worth."

Sitting with Masha was like sitting on a razor's edge. On one side was my old life: safe little Marcus with his safe little life, in the system, applying for jobs, building his little electronics projects. On the other side was the life that I'd have if I followed Masha: violence, secrecy, poverty -- but also power, strength, and adventure. I could disappear from the world, become a ghost and a legend, a fugitive who only gave the system what I deemed it deserved, not what it demanded.

After all, wasn't the system the problem? No matter who we voted for, the government always seemed to win. What was the point of living out my little fantasy of democratic change and justice when the real action was being fought out in secrecy, with anonymous envelopes of cash, encrypted whispers, secret bunkers, and secret deals?

Masha got to her feet and I was alarmed to see how slowly and painfully she moved. I was even more alarmed by how heavily she leaned against the wall. "Gimme a little help here," she said.

I hastened to stand beside her and let her put her arm around my shoulders, putting a lot of weight on me. Her hair tickled my cheek. It still smelled of her hair dye, a smell I remembered from being a kid who tried a different hair color every week. Back when I felt like I could express who I was and what I felt with my hair.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go use your network connection to do some negotiating before they scramble the black helicopters and nuke your ass."

"I haven't agreed to the deal," I said. I was practically holding her upright at this point, and I was amazed by how light she was, how little there was to her under her exercise clothes.

"Yeah," she said. "And what else are you going to do, dipshit?"

"Yeah," I said. "All right. Let me go get my bike."

"Screw that. If it's locked up, you can get it later. If it's not, someone else will get it and you won't have to worry about it. Get us a cab. I've got money."

Mom and Dad had left me a note saying they'd gone to a meeting with their accountant and telling me they'd be home for dinner. I raided the fridge for Masha while she used the shower and settled in in my room. I sat down on the end of my bed and watched her gnaw at a hunk of cheese and a tray of cookies while her fingers flew over the keyboard. She stopped typing after a while and spun around on my chair, her wet hair whipping around her shoulder, leaving watermarks on her T-shirt. "Okay," she said. "Now we wait. I gave them an hour, so let's assume they'll get back to us within two hours."

"I don't like the idea of Carrie Johnstone just getting away with this," I said.

She looked at me like I was a simpleton. I hated that look. "People like Carrie Johnstone always get away with stuff, until someone shoots them or they retire to some distant dictatorship where no one can get at them. She's not going to court. She'll never go to court. No one will ever arrest her. No one can afford to arrest her. You need to get past this romantic idea of justice and realize that some stuff just is."

"I hate that," I said. "It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?"

"Yeah," she said. "Well, that's a nice fairy tale. Have you got any juice or soda, something with sugar? I'm crashing here. Maybe some coffee."

I made her an epic cup of coffee. I may not be a ninja secret agent, but that's one thing I could most certainly do. She drank it with something approaching the proper reverence, sent me for another, drank that, and said, "Okay, this'll do." But the way she said it, I could tell that it was Masha-ese for HOLY CRAP THAT IS */AWESOME/* COFFEE.

Then she typed some more. Then she typed some more. Then she made a face like she smelled something bad and her fingers bounced over the keys like a troupe of ten meth-addled acrobats on eighty-nine little trampolines. Then some more typing, her teeth bared like an animal. I tried to peek over her shoulder -- I used a polarized laptop shield that made it impossible to see the screen unless you were looking at it straight on -- and she batted me aside without even seeing me. More typing.

"Yeah, that'll do it," she said, and pulled out the plug and the battery in two smooth motions, thoroughly nuking the virtual machine she'd been working inside of and erasing all the passwords and keys she might have entered. I didn't even bother to object. I wasn't even particularly offended.

"That'll do it, huh?"

"You just nuke any copies you have of those files, starting with the darknet site you gave them details on, and you can forget about Zyz and Carrie Johnstone forever. I've taken the precaution of emailing myself a full set of docs, so that's that. They want to know if you want your old phone back."

"Huh?"

"They burgled some Egyptian girl's house after grabbing your old handset's location from the carrier's network."

"Jesus. Did they hurt anyone?"

"They didn't mention, so I'm assuming no. They're capable of some subtlety. Sounds like it bought you some time, in any event. You want it back? They've probably filled it with every bug and trojan known to the human race, of course."

"Forget it," I said.

"Smart guy," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "Well, thanks, I guess." It felt like something simultaneously monumental and boring had just happened. Once again, someone else had solved my problems for me. People thought M1k3y was some kind of action-hero, but I was just a player in someone else's plot.

She climbed painfully to her feet, faced me. "You did pretty great, Marcus. I gave you a lot of shit, but you did great. I relied on you, and I got you into trouble. I'm glad I was able to clean up my mess. And I saved my own ass, too, I think." She wobbled a little on her legs, then put her arm out to steady herself and caught hold of my shoulder in a death-grip that I barely noticed, because she was staring at me with huge, liquid brown eyes.

It was one of those moments, those girl-boy moments, where there's breath passing between you, gazes locked, a kind of falling feeling from every nerve ending, inside and out. I let the moment move me and her together, and let the kiss that had been waiting inside us come out. It went on for a long, long time and she squeezed me like I was the only thing holding her up. We came up for breath and she went on holding me, turning her face into my chest. I could feel the dampness from her hair, but I could also tell by the little shaking movements of her back and chest that she was crying. Hey, so was I.

She snuffled up her snot and wiped her cheeks on my T-shirt and let go of me. "Well," she said, with a sad smile, "nice to see you again, Marcus. I'll look you up the next time I'm in the neighborhood."

"Yeah," I said. "Sounds good."

The door opened downstairs and my parents' voices came up through the vents, talking about money worries and what to have for dinner. We stood, eyes locked, until they moved into the kitchen, then we descended the stairs in silence. I opened the front door and Masha slipped out into the street, limping down Potrero Hill with her gym bag over her shoulder. I watched her until she turned onto 24th Street, but she never looked back at me.

Then I went inside and told my parents I'd lost my job.

Ange could tell something was up from the minute I called her, I could hear it in her voice, and she met me at a burrito joint around the corner from Noisebridge, coming straight to the table and sitting down opposite me without a hug or a kiss or any of the other normal pleasantries.

"I saw Masha," I said. "And she spoke to Johnstone's people, and they say it's over."

"Over," she said, flatly.

"As in, we don't have anything to do with them, they don't have anything to do with us. Over."

"Oh," she said. She bit her lip, the way she did when she was thinking hard. "Over. You believe her."

"Yeah," I said. "I do."

"Oh."

I'd thought about this next part a thousand times, rehearsed every way it could go, hated all of them, decided I needed to do it anyway.

"Ange," I said.

She started crying before I said anything else, so I guess my voice must have conveyed some secret message to her in the cipher known only to our bodies and subconscious minds.

"What comes after this?" I said, trying to keep my voice even. Other people in the restaurant were staring at us, even though I'd deliberately staked out a place in the back corner.

"What do you mean?" she said, taking napkins out of the dispenser on the table and wiping at her eyes.

"I mean, do we just keep dating forever? Do we get married?"

"You..." She blinked. "You want to get married?"

"No," I said. "Do you?"

"No," she said.

"Ever?"

"Well, I don't know. Maybe."

"But not to me."

"I didn't say that, Marcus. Jesus, you're being such a freak. Are you breaking up with me?"

I willed myself not to flinch away from her angry gaze. "I just feel like there comes a point where you have to ask yourself: is this going to go on forever, or isn't it? Are we doing this for the long haul, or is this just something we're doing for now?"

"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard," she said. "This isn't binary. We can be boyfriend and girlfriend without being husband and wife. We're young. What the hell is this all about?"

I thought about the weird silences with Van, the kiss with Masha, the times I'd woken up next to Ange and just watched her breathe, in love with every curve and angle of her face. "I --" I thought about being a person who did things, instead of someone that the world did stuff to. I thought about the system and how broken it all was. "Look, it's been intense lately. I don't know what I'm feeling anymore. I'm just not sure about anything anymore."

"That's it? You're not sure? Since when was anything sure? Listen, you lunk, you say that you're not sure about anything. Are you sure that you're happier when you're with me than when I'm not there? Not all the time, but on balance, most of the time?"

It was such a weird, Ange way of framing the question. But I gave it thought. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I am sure about that. But, Ange --"

She wadded up the napkin and dropped it on the table. "That's something I'm sure of, too. But you're clearly going through some crazy mental crap, and if you need to work it out, you need to work it out. Give me a call when you've sorted it out. Maybe I'll still be around."