He was the only person in the world who knew her. Not her face, not her name, not the sound of her voice—buther. The way her mind worked. The patterns she fell into. The person she was underneath the memory that made everyone else uncomfortable. Two years of messages, and he’d never once called her strange or unsettling or too much.
She couldn’t lose that. She couldn’t losehim—the only person who’d ever made her feel like her mind was a gift instead of a burden.
She pressed her fists against her mouth to muffle the sound, but the tears came anyway. She started reciting poetry to keep herself anchored—Dickinson first, then Frost, then whatever her mind reached for in the dark. The rhythm and the words were the only things that felt real.
“I dwell in Possibility,”she whispered,“a fairer House than Prose.”
The darkness didn’t answer.
Chapter 4
Two months ago:
Mercury: Have you ever really needed someone?
Binary: Need is a variable I try to eliminate.
Mercury: That’s not an answer.
Binary: I needed my cousins when I was young. They translated the world for me.
Mercury: And now?
Binary: Now I have better systems.
Mercury: Systems can’t hold your hand in the dark, Binary.
Morning arrived as the clang of metal on metal.
Light stabbed into the box. Morgan uncurled slowly, every muscle screaming from another night spent contorted against unforgiving walls. Three nights now. Three nights of her spine pressed into corners, her knees jammed against her chest, her body folded into shapes it was never meant to hold. Her back spasmed. Her neck had locked at an anglesometime around what she guessed was midnight and hadn’t released since.
The cuts on her forearms—she’d stopped counting them—had crusted over in layers, the oldest pulling painfully against the newest whenever she moved.
“Up,” Novak said. “Time to work.”
Morgan rose on legs that didn’t want to hold her. The cuts on her forearms tugged as she moved—a latticework of healing wounds in various stages. The oldest had scabbed over, tight and itching. The newest ones from yesterday still wept if she bent her wrists wrong.
Randall’s knife had come out six times yesterday. The first few had his logic behind them—she’d paused too long, let her attention drift. But the others came while she was working steadily, doing nothing wrong.
“Keeps you sharp,” he’d snickered at his own pun, wiping the blade clean. The rest of the time, he didn’t bother explaining.
She flinched now at every shadow. Every time Randall shifted in his chair. Every time his hand moved toward his pocket. Her body had learned what her mind refused to accept: there was no pattern, no way to predict, no behavior that guaranteed safety.
She could be perfect and still bleed.
She blinked as she walked into her main working area. The warehouse had transformed overnight. Yesterday had been smaller—two workstations, just her and someone at a computer who never spoke. Randall had fed her data for hours: strings of numbers, names without context, codes she didn’t recognize.
Practice, he’d called it. Preparation.
But today, there were six computer stations—a row of laptops glowing in the dim space, each one manned by someone Morgan had never seen before. They didn’t lookat her. Didn’t speak. Just typed with the focused intensity of people who knew exactly what they were doing.
A fire sale. She’d heard that term whispered between guards yesterday, and the scope of it became clear now. Multiple hackers, coordinated attack, hitting systems from every angle at once. These people knew what they were doing—their fingers moved with the kind of fluid certainty that came from years of experience.
Morgan didn’t belong here, at least not as any sort of computer expert. She could navigate a database, sure. Build a digital catalog. Find her way around a firewall if she had enough time and the right tools. But this? This was elite-level work. The kind of operation Binary could probably coordinate in his sleep.
Binary.
Three nights. She’d missed three nights of their nine p.m. exchange. Three nights of silence where there should have been poetry and code and the quiet comfort of someone who understood how her mind worked.
