“She’s writing poetry.” Novak jerked his chin toward her monitor. “Says it helps her focus.”
Randall stepped closer. Read the lines. Morgan’s heart stopped—actually stopped—as his eyes moved across the words she’d so carefully broken.
“Emily Dickinson,” he said. “Because I could not stop for Death.” He looked at her with something like amusement. “Morbid choice, Miss Reece.”
“I like Emily Dickinson.”
He studied her carefully. Then he turned away. “Let her have her poems.”
Morgan minimized the forum with shaking hands. For a long moment, she couldn’t see the screen—her vision had narrowed to a tunnel, edges dark and pulsing. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
The message was sent. Either Binary would see it, or he wouldn’t.
And even if he saw it, what then? She didn’t know who he was. Didn’t know his name, his face, his life. He could be a teenager typing from his parents’ basement. He could be eighty years old. He could be on the other side of the world or in a wheelchair or have nothing but a laptop and good intentions.
Two years of messages, and she’d never once asked him for anything real. Never pushed past the safe boundaries of their coded exchanges. He struck her as someone who kept the world at arm’s length—brilliant but removed, more comfortable with data than people. The kind of person who solved problems from behind a screen, not someone who kicked down doors.
She’d just sent an SOS to a stranger who might not want to get involved. Who might not be able to get involved, even if he wanted to.
But he was all she had.
When Novak took her back, the box didn’t feel smaller—it felt emptier.
The first night, the darkness had been a weight. Something pressing in, trying to crush her. She’d fought it with poetry, with counting, with thoughts of Binary waiting at his keyboard.
Tonight, the darkness felt like an absence. Like pieces of herself were dissolving into it, edges blurring, boundaries fading. She couldn’t tell where the metal walls ended and her own skin began.
Morgan curled into the only position that fit and tried to remember.
Binary’s messages. Their first exchange.
“Your code is inefficient. Line 347 could be compressed.”
“Not everything is about efficiency.”
“Explain.”
The words were there. But when she reached for what came next—the part that mattered, the part that had started everything?—
“Sometimes beauty IS the…”
What was it? The next word. She’d said it. She’d gone back and read this exchange a thousand times. Why couldn’t she remember it?
“Sometimes beauty IS the…”
Her breath came faster. This wasn’t possible. She remembered everything. She’d remembered every word of every book she’d ever read, every conversation she’d ever had, every face and date and moment of her entire life.
The word was there. It had to be there. She could feel the shape of it, the weight of it, but when she reached?—
Function.
“Sometimes beauty IS the function.”
Relief flooded through her, so intense it was almost painful. She clutched the reconstructed sentence like a lifeline, repeating it in the darkness until the syllables lost meaning.
Sometimes beauty IS the function. Sometimes beauty IS the function.
But the terror remained. For twenty-eight years, hermemory had been absolute. Perfect. The one thing she could count on when everything else failed.
