JACOB
One license plate. Two stripped screws. Seven years, ninety-one thousand miles, and not one of them I could tell you a story about.
That was the problem.
The DMV at 8:14 on a Tuesday morning ran like every underfunded operation I’d ever audited — one bottleneck, four idle stations, a queue discipline that would’ve gotten a supply officer relieved of duty.
Fluorescent tubes hummed at a pitch you stopped hearing after ninety seconds and started feeling instead. Somebody had burned the coffee at the self-serve station, and nobody had thrown it out, so the whole room smelled like a decision no one would take responsibility for.
The number board clicked. B-247 became B-248.
I set the plate on the counter at Window Two and slid it across. Seven years of my life in stamped aluminum. The clerk took it without looking up, logged it with the enthusiasm of a woman entering her fourth decade of Tuesdays.
“Sold the old ride.” I flattened the surrender form against the counter. “Time for something with actual soul.”
She grunted. Stamped the form. Her name tag sat crooked on a cardigan the color of the walls.
“Appreciate the enthusiasm, Denise.”
Nothing. Not a flicker. I respected it, honestly — a defense system built over decades, tested daily, zero known breaches.
She pushed my paperwork back with two fingers and looked past me at the room like I’d already left. In her workflow, I had.
The surrender was a walk-up job. The Blackwing was not — title, registration, plates for a car this state hadn’t met yet, a dealer folder in my jacket thick enough to stop small-arms fire. That got a number, same as everybody.
I took my slip — B-252 — and turned around.
Habit ran the room for me before I’d taken a step. Two exits, one alarmed. Forty-odd plastic chairs bolted into rows. A security mirror in the far corner, convex, covering the counter and the door.
A man asleep with his mouth open. A kid running a toy truck along the seam of the floor tile while his mother filled out a form against her knee.
And a woman in a cream silk blouse who did not belong to the room’s color scheme.
Everything in that building was gray or beige or the particular green of government furniture ordered in bulk during a previous administration.
She was none of it.
Blonde — actual blonde, the kind that doesn’t come off a shelf — and she’d made an effort for a morning at the DMV. Either vanity or discipline, and I’ve been wrong before about which is which.
Compact build. Runner’s posture, even sitting. She held her phone the way people hold things they aren’t looking at.
She was looking at me.
One second of eye contact is an accident. Two is information.
We were at three.