He’d probably given up on her by now. Decided she’d ghosted him. No explanation. No goodbye. Just silence.
The binary stars have aligned.
Was he still typing it? Still waiting for her response? He’d probably already written her off.
She shoved the thought down. Grief was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
She knew why Randall had taken her. The article. Her memory. A human hard drive that left no digital trail—that part, she understood. But she didn’t understand why she was here forthis. A room full of elite hackers who didn’t need a librarian stumbling through firewalls beside them. They were doing the real work. She was just…sitting here. Absorbing whatever they put in front of her.
Randall guided her to her usual station with a hand onher shoulder—light pressure, almost paternal, far more unsettling than if he’d shoved her. “Big day, Miss Reece. Let’s make it count. My computer experts are ready to do their part.”
Morgan sat. Around her, the hackers waited in perfect stillness—coiled, ready, watching Randall.
“I don’t know how to hack,” she said. “Not at this level.”
Randall didn’t look at her. “You won’t need to. They open the doors. You walk through and remember what you see.”
He stood at the center of the room, phone pressed to his ear. Listening. Then: “We’re green.”
Six keyboards erupted at once.
Randall appeared at Morgan’s shoulder. “At most, we have a twelve-hour window before the systems lock us out. You’re going to absorb more data today than most people see in a lifetime. Don’t waste my time.” His fingers tapped once against his pocket. “The punishment for that would be much more than just a few cuts on the arms.”
The screen in front of Morgan flooded with information.
And didn’t stop.
The data kept coming. Each hacker fed information to her screen—a constant stream from six different breaches, six different systems. She caught glimpses of headers as the files flashed past. FBI. DEA. US Marshals. Treasury Department. Federal Reserve. Homeland Security.
The security protocols weren’t triggering. No lockouts, no alarms, no frantic system responses. It took her longer than it should to figure out why.
Because nothing was being downloaded. Nothing was being copied or transferred or saved to external drives—all things that would cause the systems to crack down.
Shewas the download. Her eyes on the screen, her mind absorbing the data—that left no digital footprint. The systems had no idea they were being robbed.
Her memory took it all, whether she wanted it or not. Every name. Every number. Every file.
Some of what they gave her had structure. Case files with names and dates. Financial records with account numbers. Server architectures with access protocols. She could see the shape of it, even if she didn’t understand the purpose.
But other times, Randall simply read to her.
“47.6062, -122.3321. 39.7392, -104.9903. 38.9072, -77.0369.”
Coordinates. She recognized the format. But coordinates to what?
“November 3rd. November 8th. November 15th.”
“What happens on those dates?”
The knife came out. She didn’t ask again.
“KILO-SEVEN-TANGO. ECHO-FOUR-NOVEMBER. BRAVO-NINE-ALPHA.”
Codes. Military-style designations that meant nothing to her. She filed them away in her memory palace—a room full of locked boxes she couldn’t open.
Names came next. Dozens of them, no context attached.
“David Thornton. Rebecca Vance. Miguel Santos. Karen Whitmore.”
