Mercury never got Dickinson wrong. She could recite the entire collected works from memory. She’d proven it once, during a three-hour exchange that had left Lincoln genuinely awed. He didn’t know how she did it, but in two years, she had never made a single error.
Unless the mistakes were intentional.
His fingers were already moving, muscle memory taking over. Extracting the pattern. Counting syllables. Mapping the breaks against what should be there.
Three short. Three long. Three short.
SOS.
His chest went cold.
“Linc?” Bear had moved closer, reading the tension in Lincoln’s shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
Lincoln didn’t answer. He was already running the rest of it—the deliberate errors forming a secondary pattern, a sequence of numbers that resolved into coordinates.
His other hand pulled up a map. Cross-referenced the location. Industrial district. Denver.
A warehouse.
“Linc.” Bear’s voice had sharpened. “What’s going on, man?”
Lincoln stared at the screen. At the SOS buried in broken poetry. At the coordinates leading to a concrete building in Colorado.
She hadn’t left. She hadn’t ghosted him. She’d been taken, and she’d found a way to tell him—a message that would look like nothing to anyone who didn’t know her, didn’t know their codes, didn’t know that Mercury never made mistakes with Dickinson.
Three nights of silence. Three nights of thinking she’d abandoned him while she’d been?—
He couldn’t finish that thought.
Lincoln looked at his cousin. “I think we’re going to need to stage a rescue.”
Chapter 6
Seven months ago:
Binary: Why do you drink tea instead of coffee?
Mercury: Tea requires patience. Coffee is just impatience in a cup.
Binary: That’s not chemically accurate.
Mercury: Yes. But not everything needs to be.
The warehouse sat at the end of a dead-end street in Denver’s industrial district, surrounded by chain link fencing and the kind of darkness that swallowed sound.
Lincoln adjusted the thermal imaging scope and swept it across the building’s east face for the fourteenth time in the last hour. Same heat signatures. Same patrol patterns. Same single figure curled impossibly small in what his brain kept insisting couldn’t actually be a box.
Two hours. They’d been watching for two hours, and that figure hadn’t moved more than a few inches. Shifting position, his tactical mind supplied. Trying to find comfort where none existed.
“Anything new?” Bear’s voice came through the comms unit, low and steady. His cousin was positioned thirty yards to Lincoln’s left, behind a rusted shipping container.
“Negative. Two guards still on an eight-minute rotation. Four signatures stationary on the second floor. One isolated target, northeast corner.”
“Still in the box?”
Lincoln’s jaw tightened. “Still in the box.”
Two hours of watching that heat signature. Two hours of calculating patrol patterns and entry points, while somewhere inside that building, someone was curled in a space too small to stretch, too dark to see, too isolated to hope for rescue.
