(**I had quickly written down a dream I had last night and fed it into Gemini. I told it to Write a scene from a spy novel in the style of John leCarre.)

The air was thick with the low rumble of lorries and the greasy tang of diesel. I walked the shoulder of the A3, keeping as close to the verge as the crumbling asphalt allowed, but the road itself seemed to conspire against me. The white line, a thin scar of paint, was the only thing separating me from the screaming traffic.

Further on, the mountain pressed in, a sheer, gray cliff face that forced me to hug the line even closer. Every few feet, a new calculation had to be made, a new risk assessed. I was a professional, a specialist in tradecraft and exfiltration, and yet here I was, playing a fool’s game of chicken with a road I should have avoided altogether. My original plan, a simple walk to a dead drop at a service station, was a shambles. I’d misjudged the distance, the terrain, the entire miserable equation.

I considered retreat, a humiliating retreat back to the car I’d foolishly left a mile or two back, when the cliff face seemed to give way. It was a trick of the light at first, then I saw it: a fracture, a gash in the rock revealing a rusty chain-link fence and a dizzying view. I was perched halfway up a mountain, the highway a narrow ledge carved into its side. Below, a river, a thin silver ribbon, snaked through the valley. A perfect trap.

Tucked into the break in the cliff was a small, ramshackle structure, a forgotten railway shack from a different era. The kind of place you’d find a long-lost secret. The hum of the road faded as I stepped inside, the silence a heavy blanket. The air was stale, smelling of dust and damp earth. A small creature, a pug or a piglet—it was hard to tell in the gloom—scuttled away from me, its eyes wide with fright. I knelt, extending a hand, and gave it a scratch behind its ears. It relaxed, a small, trusting weight against my palm. We settled in, a brief moment of quietude in a world gone sideways.

It wasn’t long before the quiet was broken. Two young men, all nervous energy and ill-fitting jackets, appeared in the doorway. They weren’t from the Service, that much was clear. They set up an old VHS player, its gray plastic shell scuffed and worn. The tape spooled, a low hiss of static before an image came into focus. A man in a stained work shirt, his face flushed with triumph, held up a lottery ticket. The narrator, a disembodied voice from a forgotten time, explained their origins, a strange folk tale of a man who won the lottery and used his winnings to create a quiet rebellion, a secret brotherhood of the disillusioned. As the film played, the young men looked at their watches, their eyes darting nervously toward the door. “They’re onto us,” one of them whispered, his voice cracking. “The military. They’re tracking our movements.”

The film ended, the screen a sudden blur of static. A question hung in the air, heavy and unspoken. The two young men looked at me, then at each other. They’d been told to meet someone, but they were as lost as I was. They didn’t know what to do with the man who was so far off his mark. My fate was theirs to decide. Was I to go with them, to join their life on the run, a ghost in a forgotten movement? Or was I to be set free, to find my own way, a bit less fumbling, a bit more sure-footed now that I had some of their intelligence? I was an unknown variable in their carefully planned equation, and they had to solve for X.