“I’m serious, Lincoln. I’m not going to become someone easier to live with.”
“I don’t want someone easier.” He said it like he was stating a mathematical truth. “I want you. The Mercury who types in waltz time when she’s thinking. The Morgan who quotes Dickinson when she’s scared.” He reached for her hand. She let him take it. “I don’t want you in spite of the things that make you different. I want you because of them.”
Morgan looked at him. Let her memory do what it did—preserve every detail. The sharp line of his jaw. The way his pulse jumped in his throat. The particular arrangement of his features that had somehow become the face she most wanted to see when she woke up.
“Yes.”
His whole body went still. “Yes?”
“I’ll stay.” She squeezed his hand, watched the tension drain from his face. “Not because I’m hiding. Not because it’s safe. Because I love you. Because I think I loved you for a long time before we met face-to-face.”
The expression that moved over his features wasn’t something she could name. Wasn’t something she needed to name. It was just his—the particular way Lincoln Bollinger looked when something too large to contain finally found room to exist.
“Yes. My feelings are…the same.”
It was enough. She didn’t need flowery words; she had the man.
“Also,” she added, “your command center has better processing power than anything I could afford on a librarian’s salary, and I have plans for it.”
He almost smiled. “What kinds of plans?”
“I have two years of data about federal evidence storage procedures memorized. Someone should probably use that information to improve security protocols.”
“That’s actually a viable consulting business model.”
“I know.” She let herself smile back. “I’ve been calculating some variables.”
Now he did smile. Small, barely there, but real. The kind of smile she’d learned to treasure because he gave it so rarely and meant it so completely.
Later that night, they sat side by side in the command center.
Monitors glowed in the darkness, cycling through theirquiet protocols. Security feeds and data streams and all the digital architecture Lincoln had built to make sense of a chaotic world. Morgan’s workstation hummed beside his—the chair she’d claimed a couple weeks ago now permanently hers, though neither of them had ever discussed it.
The clock in the corner read 8:59.
Neither of them had spoken for several minutes. They didn’t need to. This was the silence they’d built across two years of messages—comfortable, complete, requiring nothing but presence.
9:00.
Lincoln’s fingers moved over the keyboard. Morgan watched him type into the dark web forum that had started everything, the interface glowing against the darkness of the room.
The binary stars have aligned.
She stared at the words. The way they had started seven hundred and forty-three messages. All those nights at nine o’clock, reaching for someone she couldn’t see, trusting that the connection was real even without proof. And now they were here. Same room. Same air. Close enough that she could hear him breathing.
She reached over and typed her response.
And the mercury rises to meet them.
They looked at each other.
Two years of being Binary and Mercury. Strangers who understood each other better than anyone. Words on a screen. Patterns in code. A connection built on nothing but trust and the rhythm of keystrokes across a void.
Now they were Lincoln and Morgan. Real. Present. Whole.
“Stay safe, stranger,” he said out loud, the ending to all their interactions.
“Stay strange, safety,” she whispered back.
