A Valentine's Algorithm
Copyright© 2026 by Tantrayaan
Chapter 8
Inna tried to fall back into her routine.
Day one. She pushed paperwork at her desk. Checked her phone seventeen times. Typed a text. How’s it going? Deleted it.
Day two. She took a double shift on a domestic. Came home wired and exhausted. Sat in her kitchen staring at the kettle. Checked her phone. Nothing.
Day three. She woke up and the silence was a weight on her chest. The professional distance she used to take pride in was gone. Compromised.
She missed him. Missed the man who looked at a bookshelf like it was a puzzle and the man who’d briefly held her like she was the only thing keeping him on earth.
On the third day her phone buzzed. A text from Vikram.
I think I broke it. The file. Can’t figure out what’s wrong. Sorry.
That was it. No follow-up. No response when she texted back.
She waited an hour. Then called. Straight to voicemail. She tried again. Same thing.
By evening she couldn’t take it. She drove to his apartment and buzzed. No answer. She tried the handle. Unlocked.
The smell hit her first. Stale coffee. Unwashed clothes. The ozone scent of overworked electronics. The apartment was a tomb. Vikram was slumped in his chair. Face grey in the flicker of three monitors. He looked like he’d aged five years. His hair was matted and his shirt was stained.
He didn’t look up when she entered. Just kept scrolling through lines of code that meant nothing to her.
“Vikram.”
“It’s broken.” He rasped. “I’ve run every cipher. Checked the headers. Tried to rebuild the partitions. It’s just noise, Inna. She left me a broken key.”
He looked destroyed.
Inna didn’t argue. She walked into the kitchen and started bagging takeout containers. Moved through the apartment like a ghost. Picked up discarded socks and stacked books. She didn’t think about it. She just did it.
“Go shower.” She ordered. Pointed down the hall. “I’m making you a sandwich and tea. If you want to solve this you need a brain that isn’t running on fumes.”
He looked at her then. Startled. He didn’t fight. He stood on shaky legs and retreated toward the bathroom.
“Wait.” He said. Finally registering his surroundings. “How did you get in?”
“You left the door unlocked, genius. Now go shower before you kill me with your BO.”
While the shower hissed, Inna sat at his desk. She looked at the screen. At the pages of frantic notes. She didn’t understand the math but she understood patterns. Cops lived on patterns.
She stared at the hex dump on screen. Random garbage supposedly. But there was something ... She tilted her head. The file size kept catching her eye. Vikram had written it in his notes. 341KB. It wasn’t rounded. Not 320. Not 350. Exact. Like it was cut.
She flipped through his notebook. He’d tried everything. Every cipher. Every encoding. But he’d been trying to decrypt a complete file.
What if it wasn’t complete?
She remembered a case last year. RICO. Drug cartel. Organized Crime had warned them about it. Data split into junk-looking chunks. Shards, they’d called it. Nothing made sense until you had all of them.
She grabbed a pen and did quick math on the margin of his notes. 341KB. It’s not a normal file size. It’s a piece size. If this was one third ... about a megabyte total.
Three pieces. Three locations.
When Vikram emerged, smelling of soap but still looking frail, she pointed at her calculations.
“It’s not broken, Vikram.”
He sat down. Wrapped a towel around his neck. “Then what is it?”
“It’s a fragment. Last year Organized Crime ran into this. Data split into shards. You can’t read it because it’s not all there. It’s like having the middle five minutes of a movie. Doesn’t work without the beginning and end.”