A pause. His footsteps coming closer, then retreating.
“The permanent facility is ready. We’ll move her there in a couple of days.”
Permanent facility.
“This location isn’t as secure as I’d like. Send transport to—” He rattled off coordinates, Morgan’s mind capturing them automatically. “I want her out of here by Thursday.” He paused briefly.
“No, she won’t be leaving. Ever. She knows too much at this point. She’s valuable, but she’s also a liability. Once we’ve extracted everything useful and established the new protocols, she’ll be retired.”
A soft laugh, almost admiring. “It really is extraordinary—she’s essentially a self-deleting hard drive. Very elegant solution.”
The footsteps faded. A door opened and closed somewhere distant.
A couple days.
After that, she’d disappear into a “permanent facility” and never leave. She’d become one more missing person, one more face on a poster that nobody would recognize.
Who knew if she ever would have access to a computer again. Right now was her only chance.
The browser was already open on the laptop. She stared at the screen, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat. Around her, the other hackers were messing around, their work done. Randall had stepped out for his phone call. Novak sat by the door, scrolling through his phone.
No one was paying attention to her.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. If she did this and got caught, Randall wouldn’t kill her—she was too valuable for that. But he’d make her wish he had.
But if she didn’t do this, she’d be living under Randall’s cruelty for the rest of her life.
There were so many risks here, but she had to take them. She opened the forum—theirforum, the one where Mercury met Binary every night at nine—and started to type.
Emily Dickinson. “Because I could not stop for Death.”
But wrong. Deliberately, carefully wrong.
Her fingers trembled so badly, she had to retype twice. She broke the meter in precise places, embedding her message in the syllable pattern. An SOS hidden in the rhythm of nineteenth-century poetry—three letters that meant everything, followed by the coordinates Randall hadrattled off on his phone call. A message that would look like nothing to anyone who didn’t know her?—
Novak’s chair scraped against concrete.
Morgan’s hand jerked toward the minimize button, but it was too late—he was already standing, already walking toward her. Her pulse roared in her ears. The poem sat on the screen, exposed, damning.
Please. Please don’t look closely.
He stopped beside her desk. Leaned over her shoulder. She could smell cigarette smoke and something sour, could feel the heat of him too close behind her.
His eyes scanned the screen.
The silence stretched for an eternity. Two seconds. Three. Morgan stopped breathing.
“The hell is that?”
“A poem.” Her voice came out remarkably steady, though she had no idea how. “Poetry helps me focus. I’m a librarian. I like words.”
He squinted at the screen. Emily Dickinson’s careful lines, the broken meter invisible to anyone who didn’t know to look for it. Just poetry. Just words arranged in lines.
“Huh.” He straightened, scratched the snake tattoo on his neck. “Weird.”
“What’s weird?”
Randall. Morgan’s stomach dropped. He’d appeared behind Novak, his gaze already on her screen.
