Voices first—low and steady, the particular cadence of men who were trying not to wake someone. Morgan caught words without meaning:compound,secure,she’s been out for twenty minutes. The hum of an engine beneath her. The smellof leather seats and something else, something clean and unfamiliar that her exhausted brain couldn’t categorize.
A hand adjusted a blanket around her shoulders, and she flinched.
“Easy.” Binary’s voice. Close.Real. “You’re safe.”
Safe. The word slid through her consciousness like water through fingers. They’d used it hundreds of times in their sign-offs.Stay safe, stranger.But her body didn’t understand the concept anymore. Her body only knew the box, the knife, the endless flood of data she couldn’t stop absorbing.
She tried to open her eyes. The darkness behind her lids was gentler than the darkness of the box—no metal walls pressing in, no latch she couldn’t reach—but her eyelids felt weighted. Heavy. Like someone had filled them with sand when she wasn’t paying attention.
“How much longer?” A different voice. Deeper. The one Binary had called Bear, she thought, though she couldn’t be certain of anything right now.
“Forty minutes to Linc’s place. Maybe less if we push it. Annie is waiting at the house.”
“We’re not being followed.” Binary again. “We’re clear.”
Morgan wanted to tell him thatcleardidn’t mean safe, but the darkness pulled her back under before she could respond.
The next fragment was colder.
Wind against her face. The sudden absence of the vehicle’s warmth. She was being lifted—arms under her knees, behind her back—and her body went rigid before her mind caught up.
“It’s me.” Binary’s voice in her ear. “Just me. We’re home.”
Home. Another word that didn’t compute.
She forced her eyes open.
Lights. Motion sensor lights, flooding the darkness with harsh white illumination as they triggered one after another. A driveway that seemed to stretch forever, winding through trees she couldn’t identify. Gates behind them—she’d heard them open, metal grinding against metal—and ahead, a structure that her tired brain could only process in pieces.
Stone. Glass. Multiple levels rising against a sky full of stars. Security cameras mounted at intervals she automatically cataloged: twelve degrees of coverage overlap, no blind spots visible from this angle. Reinforced doors. A garage that looked like it could hold six vehicles, maybe more.
“You live in a fortress,” she said. Her voice came out wrong—scratchy, thin, like it belonged to someone else.
“I live in a secure residential compound with adequate defensive infrastructure.”
“Same thing.”
The front door opened as they approached—automatic, keyed to something she couldn’t see. More lights inside, warm this time instead of harsh. Morgan’s brain kept cataloging even as she tried to make it stop: hardwood floors, high ceilings, minimal furniture arranged with geometric precision. No clutter. No photographs on the walls. Everything functional, everything in its place.
It looked exactly like she’d imagined Binary’s space would look. Except much bigger.
The other men filed in behind them. She heard their footsteps, their voices, but the words blurred together. Someone called out a name—Bear again, she thought—and another voice responded. How many of them were there? Four? Five? She couldn’t make herself care enough to try to actually count.
Her brain had spent four days absorbing everything, whether she wanted to or not. Names, numbers, coordinates,the exact pattern of cuts on her arms. Now it was doing something different. Now it was keeping informationout, like a door slammed shut against a flood. The men’s faces wouldn’t stay in her memory. Their names slipped away as soon as she heard them.
Everyone except Bear. That name stuck because it didn’t sound like a name at all. It sounded like what he probably was—big and solid and dangerous in a way that should have frightened her but didn’t.
“Aunt Annie’s waiting in the study.” One of the others. She couldn’t see his face.
“Good.” Binary’s arms tightened around her, just slightly. “Tell her we’re coming.”
Footsteps retreated. A door opened and closed somewhere else in the house. Morgan let her head fall against Binary’s shoulder because holding it up required energy she didn’t have.
“Who’s Aunt Annie?”
“Dr. Anne Mackay. She’s not actually my aunt—she’s Derek’s mother-in-law. Wife of Zac Mackay, one of the men who founded Linear Tactical.” He paused, seeming to realize this information meant nothing to her. “She’s a doctor. She’ll help.”
Doctor.
