Code was easier than people. It always had been. Code followed rules. Code could be debugged, optimized, understood.
But Morgan wasn’t code. And Lincoln was beginning to realize that understanding her would take something he’d never been good at.
Time. Patience. The willingness to make mistakes.
He closed the archive and stared at the security feed. The guest room door stayed closed.
She was worth figuring out. Even if it took him years. Even if he failed.
Some things were worth the effort of learning.
Chapter 9
Eleven months ago:
Mercury: What’s the first thing you reach for when you wake up?
Binary: My phone. I check system alerts.
Mercury: Not coffee? Not a person?
Binary: I don’t have a person to reach for.
Mercury: Neither do I. But sometimes I still reach.
Two days.
Morgan stood at the window of the guest room and watched the Wyoming sky shift from gray to pale gold. Two days since Lincoln had carried her out of that warehouse. Two days of clean sheets and soft clothes and doors that opened from the inside.
Two days of not sleeping.
As promised, the clothes he’d ordered had arrived just a few hours later—soft fabrics in muted colors, nothing that irritated the bandages on her arms. She’d showered twice, scrubbing everywhere except her arms until her skin turnedpink, trying to wash away the smell of industrial concrete that she knew wasn’t really there anymore.
She’d eaten small amounts when Lincoln brought food. Mostly more crackers and soup. And drank electrolyte solution until she was sick of it.
Her body was healing. The cuts on her forearms had scabbed over properly now, the angry red fading to something duller. The bruising around her nose had shifted from purple to a sickly yellow-green. She could walk without her legs buckling. She could hold a cup of tea without her hands shaking. She’d taken to drinking it the way she always did—both hands wrapped around the cup, fingers perfectly symmetrical, like praying. Lincoln had noticed. He hadn’t commented. She appreciated that.
But she couldn’t sleep.
Every time she closed her eyes, she was back in the box. Metal walls pressing in. Darkness so complete it had weight. The latch clicking shut above her, sealing her into a space where she couldn’t stand, couldn’t stretch, couldn’t do anything but curl into herself and wait.
So she stayed awake.
She’d found ways to pass the hours. Walking the perimeter of the room, counting steps. Sitting by the window, watching the security lights cycle on and off as deer or rabbits triggered the motion sensors. Reciting poetry in her head—Angelou, Frost, Longfellow—letting the familiar rhythms anchor her to something besides the memories she couldn’t escape.
Lincoln checked on her. Brought food at regular intervals, knocked softly, didn’t push when she said she was fine. He’d installed the lock he’d promised—she could hear him in the hallway with his tools, precise and unhurried—and hadn’t commented when she immediately tested it three times.
At night, she heard him moving through the house at odd hours, footsteps in the hallway at two a.m., the soft click of his keyboard drifting up from the command center. He kept strange hours too. She found herself listening for him, tracking his presence the way she tracked the security lights. Proof that she wasn’t alone. Proof that something in this fortress was alive besides her own fear.
And underneath it all, heavy and waiting: everything Randall had put inside her head. She could feel it there, pressing at the edges of her thoughts, threatening to surface. She wasn’t ready to look at it yet. Wasn’t ready to explain it. So she kept her mind busy with poetry and step-counts and the rhythm of Lincoln’s footsteps, and tried not to think about what she was carrying.
But the exhaustion was building. She could feel it in her bones, in the way her thoughts had started to fragment and scatter. Her body screamed for rest. Her mind refused to allow it.
Sleep meant dreams. Dreams meant the box.
Morgan pressed her forehead against the cool glass and watched the sun finish its climb above the tree line.
Another night survived. Another day to get through before the darkness came back. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep this up.
