Bear yanked the vehicle door open. Lincoln climbed into the back seat without letting go of Mercury. Derek was already behind the wheel, engine running. Theo piled in on Lincoln’s other side, pulling the door shut as the tires screamed against pavement.
They were moving. They were clear.
Lincoln looked through the rear window. Figures spilling from the warehouse, but no vehicles. No chase. They’d gotten out clean.
The adrenaline was still coursing through him—fight-or-flight chemicals that had nowhere to go now that the fighting and fleeing were done. His hands were steady on Mercury’s back, but something underneath was shaking. Something that had been wound tight for four days was finally, terrifyingly, starting to uncoil.
In his arms, Mercury had gone still. Eyes closed. Breathing shallow. Her body finally surrendering to the exhaustion it had been fighting for days. But her fingers were still tangled in his vest, still holding on like she was afraid he’d disappear if she let go.
“Is she okay?” Bear twisted in his seat.
“I don’t know.” Lincoln looked down at her face—the sharp line of her jaw, the flutter of her pulse in her throat, the way her brow creased even in unconsciousness. “I don’t know what they did to her.”
“Hospital’s twenty minutes.”
“No.” The word came from Mercury, barely audible. Her eyes didn’t open, but her grip tightened. “No hospital. They have—people. Everywhere. Please.”
Bear and Lincoln exchanged a look.
“Okay,” Lincoln said. “No hospital. We’ll figure something else out.”
Derek accelerated onto the highway. Denver’s lights faded behind them, swallowed by darkness and distance. The cab was quiet except for the hum of the engine and Mercury’s shallow breathing.
Lincoln looked down at the woman in his lap. Two years of coded poetry. Seven hundred and forty-three messages. He knew the rhythm of her typing. Knew whenshe was laughing by the speed of her responses. Knew she hummed when she was thinking because her keystrokes shifted into waltz time.
But he’d never known her face. Never heard her voice. Never touched her.
Now she was here—real and breathing and broken in ways he couldn’t yet calculate—and his brain still hadn’t come back online. The equations were still silent. The frameworks were still dark. All he had was the weight of her in his arms and the terrifying, unfamiliar sensation of not knowing what came next.
He didn’t know what they’d walked into. Didn’t know who those people were or what they wanted with her or why she’d been kept in a box like something to be stored and forgotten.
But she wasn’t in the box anymore.
For now, that was enough.
Chapter 7
Fourteen months ago:
Mercury: What does home feel like to you?
Binary: Reduced variables. Predictable patterns. Absence of chaos.
Mercury: That sounds lonely.
Binary: Does it? I find it peaceful.
Mercury: Maybe peace and loneliness feel the same when you’ve had too much of either.
Binary: That’s surprisingly profound for 9:47 p.m.
Mercury: I contain multitudes. Whitman said so.
Binary: Whitman said that about himself. You’re misattributing.
Mercury: Maybe I’m just borrowing.
The world came in fragments.
