“Gone, how?”
“I don’t know. Three nights ago, just nothing.” His voice came out emotionless, despite the feelings roiling inside him. “She’s never missed our exchange. Not once in two years. Never even late. And then…gone.”
Bear nodded slowly. “You try to find her?”
“I could. I have the skills.” Lincoln shook his head. “But that would violate everything we built. We stayed anonymous for a reason. It was the foundation.”
“So, you’re just…waiting?”
“I was waiting. Now I think she’s done. She made a choice, and the choice was to leave without explanation.”
Bear was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful. “Linc, that sounds like it hurts.”
“That’s irrational.” The response was automatic. “Sheand I never met. I don’t even know her name. There’s no logical reason for—” He stopped. Started again. “I can’t focus on work that should interest me. Six federal systems got probed simultaneously, and I don’t care. I keep checking the forum, even though I know nothing will be there. And there’s this…hollow sensation. In my chest. It serves no biological purpose.”
“That’s grief, cousin.”
“Grief is for loss. I didn’t lose anything. I never had anything to lose.”
“Two years of connection isn’t nothing.” Bear’s voice was gentle in a way that made Lincoln’s throat tight. “Your brain works different from most people’s. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel things. Just means you don’t always recognize what you’re feeling.”
Lincoln turned that over. The hollow sensation. The inability to focus. The way his eyes kept drifting to the third monitor, hoping for something that wouldn’t come.
Ithurt.
“It’s irrational,” he said again, but quieter this time.
“Feelings usually are.” Bear clapped him on the shoulder—brief, grounding. “Doesn’t make them less real.”
They sat in silence for another minute. Then Bear pushed himself to his feet and offered Lincoln a hand.
“Come on. Let’s get some water. You can show me this mysterious forum.”
Lincoln took the hand. Let his cousin pull him up.
Upstairs, the command center waited. Monitors glowing, servers humming, the dark web portal still open on the third screen from the left.
Lincoln settled into his chair. Bear grabbed a water bottle from the mini fridge in the corner and leaned against the wall, watching.
Seven hundred and forty-three messages. Two years ofcoded poetry and mathematical sequences and the closest thing to real connection Lincoln had ever found outside his family. He’d saved every exchange, archived them with more care than he’d ever given his company’s financial records.
It was time to let go.
His fingers moved to the keyboard. He’d delete the archive first. Then close the forum account. Clean break. Logical. Efficient. No point holding on to 743 messages from someone who’d left without a word.
He opened the forum.
The message was there.
Lincoln’s hand froze over the keyboard. Time stamp from hours ago—he’d missed it somehow, too distracted by Treasury calls and hollow chest sensations to check. The format was familiar: Emily Dickinson, one of Mercury’s favorites.
“Is that from today?” Bear straightened from the wall. “That’s good, right? She’s back? More poems?”
Lincoln didn’t answer. His eyes were moving across the lines, and everything in him had gone still.
Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me?—
The words were right. The structure was right. But the meter was wrong.
