Allies and Enemies

Ava’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking, even after a glass of seltzer backstage. The aftertaste was harsh and metallic. She watched Victor bask amid his entourage, the little coven of disruptors feeding off his energy. For a split second, she considered marching over and wrecking his perfect mask, but Raj’s looming presence reeled her back.

“We can’t just walk away from this,” Raj hissed, voice low as a confession. “The prod DB keys weren’t supposed to be pushed at all, let alone switched. Nobody outside the dev team should’ve even heard about our—”

“Don’t,” Ava cut in, strained. “You triple-audited our repo. I rotated the AWS creds twice since the last push. If this was just a screw-up, we’d see a trail.”

Raj’s shoulders sagged; resentment curled at the edges of his words. “Unless the trail’s what someone wants us to see.”

Ava inhaled sharply. The tension between them was new, but not entirely unexpected. A breach this surgical—it didn’t feel random. Not after Victor’s casual references to proprietary features. Not after the constant, gnawing feeling of unseen eyes.

She motioned Raj toward the exit. “Let’s not do this here.”

Raj hesitated. “We should be celebrating, not interrogating each other. Let’s go back to the office. Quietly.”

Outside, sunset glazed the city with molten gold, the Silicon Valley skyline jagged against the sky. The Tesla’s whine was barely audible as they sped back to their slot in Palo Alto. Raj pulled into their rented coworking lot—the only car left on a Friday night was their own.

Inside, Ava made a beeline for the war room—a drafty conference space cluttered by whiteboards, tangled chargers, and leftover takeout. She slammed the door and turned to face Raj, resentment fully in bloom.

“We need to lock everything down. Credentials, comms, even Slack. From now on, nobody pushes to prod without two approvals.”

Raj bristled. “We’re a five-person startup. You want to add bureaucracy right now, when we’re already stretched?”

Ava set her jaw. “Somebody handed Victor details. That doesn’t happen unless we’re bleeding somewhere inside.”

Raj wasn’t having it. “You want to point fingers at Maya? Jonah? You know they’d take a bullet for you.”

She exhaled, slow and sharp. “Would they?”

Raj’s silence stretched, brittle as spun glass. “I know what you’re thinking. But if you treat everyone like a traitor, what do we have left?”

She pressed her palms into her eyes, fighting for composure. “Maybe enough to survive.”

A moment, thick with hurt and accusation, passed before Raj stood. “I’ll ping Maya. We’ll trace the commit logs, deeper this time.”

“Thanks.”

After he left, Ava slumped into the battered chair, elbows on knees. The room felt colder. Her mind raced through possible suspects—Maya’s brilliance shadowed by recent absences, Jonah’s ambitions sometimes chafing against the company’s constraints. Little things that, on another day, she’d trust without question.

She needed advice. Somebody who’d seen this valley chew hopefuls into mulch and spit out shells of founders.

Karen Ellis answered on the third ring, voice gravelly with exhaustion. “Chen. You alive?”

“Barely,” Ava managed. “I need time. Tonight.”

Silicon Valley after dark was no one’s sanctuary, but Karen’s home—a hillside glass-walled cube—was as close as Ava felt to safe ground. The older woman poured bourbon into mismatched mugs, no ice.

Karen watched Ava over the rim. “I saw the pitch. Your deck was fine. The live demo? Not so much.”

Ava let out a weary laugh. “Victor sabotaged us—again. And this time I think someone from my team is leaking. I can’t prove it yet.”

Karen’s eyes went slate-cold. “Welcome to the jungle. If there’s money on the table and they can’t outbuild you, they’ll outmaneuver you. Or buy you. Or kill you—reputationally, sometimes literally.”

Ava tensed. “I never used to believe in moles.”

“You believe now?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Karen refilled her mug. “Don’t trust your instincts. Trust your data. But understand this: whatever you find, don’t alienate your team en masse. Once paranoia infects a startup, you’re dead. Be smart with your suspicion. Play dumb, act normal, but document everything.”

Ava nodded, mind racing through Karen’s advice.

Karen looked at her, a little softer. “You haven’t called because you wanted to hear this, have you? There’s something else.”

“Victor,” Ava confessed. “He keeps circling. He knew about our recall rates, threw it in my face. Today he hinted at a partnership.”

Karen’s grin was all teeth. “A fox offers partnership to a hen just to find out where the eggs are. Don’t give him an inch. If he’s fishing, you’ve still got leverage.”

A knock at the door sent Ava’s mind flashing to worst-case scenarios, but it was only Karen’s neighbor, dropping off wayward mail. Still, her adrenaline didn’t recede.

“Be careful,” Karen said quietly once they were alone again. “Keep your enemies where you can see them—preferably chained to something heavy.”

Saturday arrived with blinding clarity: the post-pitch hangover, the relentless Slack notifications, Raj’s terse updates from the trenches. Ava barely slept, half her brain stuck in incident logs, half on Karen’s words: Don’t let them smell blood.

At ten, as she parsed audit logs in the rickety office kitchen, Maya wandered in. Her eyes were rimmed with red. “You wanted a look at the last push?”

Ava steeled herself. “Yeah. Sorry for being blunt, but did anyone else use your laptop after hours? Or see you inputting build keys?”

Maya shook her head, frown deepening. “Nobody. I always lock my screen. Why?”

Ava dialed it back. “Just standard hygiene. There might be a bad actor—anywhere. Did you notice odd IPs in the logs?”

Maya shrugged. “Some, but there’s a lot of trash traffic. Want me to do a full diff on the infra commits?”

“Would you?”

Maya nodded, gaze clouded by something Ava couldn’t quite read—resentment? Or exhaustion?

A ping on her phone buzzed urgent: Stone: meet me, 11am, Red Bay Cafe. Come alone. Need to discuss our future.

Every rational cell in Ava’s body screamed No—but curiosity won. She texted Raj, vague: Running an errand. Will check in later.

Victor had chosen a table at the back, perfectly lit for plausible deniability, laptop closed but phone faceup.

“Ava,” he greeted, voice warm as poison. “Sit.”

She obliged, refusing to touch the coffee he’d pre-ordered for her.

“I’ll make this brief. Our little… rivalry isn’t sustainable forever. We both know SecureStack can’t last the year, not in your current form. The Valley rewards eaters, not survivors.”

She kept her face neutral. “You asked me to come here for a lecture?”

He leaned in, dropping the smile. “I know you think I sabotaged your demo. Maybe I did, maybe I just knew it would fail. Doesn’t matter. What matters is, my board wants your threat-detection module for our next platform. You—your team—have talent. But you’re outgunned, outspent, outmaneuvered.”

Ava seethed. “You want to buy us out?”

He smiled—pitying, almost. “Or ‘merge’. Or fold. Publicly, you’d look like a big winner. Privately, I’d keep what works, cull the rest. Don’t make me an enemy, Ava. You’ll lose.”

She stood, hands tight at her sides. “I hear your offer. It’s not enough.”

Victor watched her, lips curling. “No hurry. But leaks can be corrosive. Sometimes they start at the top. Think about it.”

He let her storm out. Out front, she stilled herself, willing the tears not to come. Not now.

Back at the office, Raj flagged her down. His voice was tight, urgent. “Audit log’s weird. There was a push from Maya’s commit ID at 2am—but she was offline. She swears she was at home. The IP’s from a San Jose node. VPN, maybe.”

Ava’s skin prickled. “And?”

Raj licked his lips. “Whoever it was, they pulled not just the build keys, but our full pilot data. That’s how Victor got the recall rates.”

They stared at each other, a silent verdict passing between them.

“That’s not the worst,” Raj continued, voice barely above a whisper. “Cursory check—the packet timestamp correlates with the window Jonah’s badge pinged the office door. He stayed late ‘to finish QA’.”

Ava’s heart hammered. Jonah? Ambitious, dependable—overly eager to please. Sometimes too eager.

Raj’s mouth was grim. “If it’s him, we have a traitor in the nest.”

Ava looked from Raj to Maya, busy at her terminal. One of them—maybe both—had reason to distrust. But if Karen was right, accusations would only breed more rot.

She forced a calm she didn’t feel. “From this minute on, we trust the logs more than our guts. Quietly. Until we know for sure.”

But Ava Chen realized, for the first time truly, how thin the ice beneath her had become—and just how many of the sharks, even those closest to her, might be circling with blood already on their teeth.