He ended the call before Hawkins could respond.
The command center hummed around him—six monitors glowing, servers cycling through their quiet rhythms, everything functioning exactly as designed. Lincoln had built this room to be the one place his brain could operate without friction. No social variables. No unpredictable humans. Just data and logic and problems that had solutions.
The third monitor had no solutions.
He’d checked the forum forty-three times in three days. Not that he was counting. Except he was always counting—his brain didn’t know how to stop.
She was just gone.
He could find her. Three nights ago, she’d mentioned Montana—the first real location she’d ever given him. With that thread to pull, he could probably have a name within hours. He’d thought about it. More than thought about it. His fingers had hovered over the keyboard a dozen times, ready to begin the search.
But that would violate everything they’d built. Two years of trust, founded on the understanding that their connection existed outside the real world. Safe in shadows, she’d called it once. Their anonymity was the architecture that held the whole thing up.
So he’d respected the rules.
And she’d left anyway.
The perimeter alert chimed—Bear’s truck on the drive, signature already verified by the gate system. Lincoln glanced at the time. 3:47 p.m. Their sparring session. He’d forgotten.
He was still staring at the silent forum when Bear appeared in the doorway, gym bag over his shoulder.
“You know there’s a whole world outside these screens, right?”
“I’m aware of the world. I prefer my screens.”
Bear crossed the room and dropped into the chair beside him, uninvited but not unwelcome. That was the thing about his cousin—Bear never waited for invitations, but he also never pushed where he wasn’t wanted.
“You look like hell, cuz.”
“That’s not quantifiable.”
“It is when I’ve known you for thirty years.” Bear nodded toward the monitors. “Another government contract?”
“Nah. Just people reaching out. Treasury. They think they’ve been hacked.”
“Have they?”
“No.” Lincoln closed the Treasury data. Left the forum open. “Someone accessed their systems without taking anything. Same pattern across six agencies in the last day. It’s reconnaissance, not theft.”
“Sounds like something you’d usually find interesting.”
“It should be.”
Bear was quiet for a moment. His eyes moved across the monitors, cataloging, assessing. Lincoln could feel the questions forming. Bear had always been too observant for his own good.
“Come on.” Bear surprised him instead. He stood, slinging his gym bag back over his shoulder. “You need to hit something.”
The gym occupied the entire east wing of the basement—mats, heavy bags, a full weight setup, a sparring ring in the corner that Bear had helped him install three years ago. Lincoln had designed the space for efficiency: climate-controlled, soundproofed, every piece of equipment positioned for optimal workflow.
Bear had called it “aggressively functional” and thenproceeded to leave his gear scattered across three different benches.
They wrapped their hands in silence. Stretched. Bear moved through his warm-up routine with the easy grace of someone who’d been training since childhood. Uncle Finn had started teaching them both when they were barely old enough to make a fist.
Lincoln’s body knew the movements, but his mind kept drifting. The silent forum. The empty space where Mercury should be.
“You ready?”
He wasn’t. He stepped into the sparring ring anyway.
