“Faster,” Randall said.
“I’m going as fast as?—”
“Do it faster.”
She picked up as much speed as she could. But then she paused too long on the next manifest, trying to make sense of the routing codes.
Randall pulled a folding knife from his pocket. The blade was short—two inches, maybe—and very clean. He pushed up her sleeve, exposing the soft skin of her inner forearm.
“No, please?—”
The cut was shallow. Precise. A thin line of red welling up, no longer than her thumbnail. It burned like fire, and she heard herself making a sound—high and animal and nothing like her own voice.
“Every time you slow down,” Randall said, wiping the blade on his pocket square, “we add another. Every time you ask a question I haven’t invited, another. These will scar, Miss Reece. By the end of the week, your arms will tell the story of every mistake you’ve made.” He folded the knife and slipped it back into his pocket. “Or you can work efficiently, and we won’t need to have this conversation again.”
Twenty minutes later, her hand hesitated over the keyboard.
She didn’t ask the question. But he’d seen the pause.
The second cut was parallel to the first.
“Your mind is the only thing keeping you alive,” Randall said, not looking up from her arm. “I trust that’s sufficient motivation.”
Hours passed. The manifests blurred together, but every detail lodged itself in her memory anyway. At some point, Randall had left—she didn’t remember when, only that he’d added four more cuts to her arm before he went. Six thin lines now, parallel as railroad tracks. They weren’t bleeding much anymore, but the pain was constant, a low burn that flared every time she moved her wrist.
What would they do when they ran out of places on her arm? Where would they cut next?
When the work finally stopped, Novak led her down a corridor lined with rusted equipment and stacked crates. Industrial. Abandoned. The kind of place where things were stored and forgotten.
He stopped at a metal box bolted to the floor. Four feet by four feet, she estimated. A cube barely large enough to hold a person if they curled up tight.
Novak’s expression didn’t change. “Get in.”
“I can’t—there’s no room to?—”
He grabbed her arm and shoved. Morgan stumbled inside, her body folding awkwardly against metal walls that pressed in from every direction. She couldn’t stand. Couldn’t stretch out. Could barely breathe.
The door clanged shut.
Darkness. Complete and absolute. Not a sliver of light, not a hint of the world outside. Just black and cold and the sound of her own ragged breathing echoing off metal walls.
Morgan wasn’t claustrophobic. She’d never minded small spaces, tight corners, crowded rooms. But this was different. This darkness had weight. It pressed against her skin, filled her lungs, seeped into the spaces behind her eyes.
She had no sense of time. No window, no clock, no way to mark the hours except the rhythm of her own heartbeat. She started counting. Seconds to minutes, her internal clock ticking away in the void.
Nine p.m. It had to be close to nine p.m.
She’d missed last night. Unconscious either in that van or this warehouse while Binary waited for a message that never came. Had he worried? Had he assumed she was done, that their two years of coded poetry had ended without explanation?
And now she was going to miss tonight too.
She imagined him at his keyboard, typing their greeting into the void.“The binary stars have aligned.”Waiting. Refreshing. Waiting longer.
Mercury?
Two years. Not once had she missed their nine p.m.exchange. Now she’d missed two nights in a row, and he had no way of knowing what happened.
Would he keep waiting? Or would he decide she’d abandoned him and move on?
