His SUV waited in the far corner of the lot, parked deliberately in the spot with the clearest exit path and lowest probability of door dings from neighboring vehicles.
He drove exactly the speed limit. Not because he feared tickets—his legal team could handle any traffic violation—but because the limit existed for calculated reasons involving reaction time, braking distance, and statistical accident rates. Deviation introduced unnecessary variables.
His phone buzzed in the cupholder. Then again. A third time.
Lincoln didn’t look. He knew it was Bear without checking. Some variation ofyou’re being weirder than usualandis there something going on.
Bear worried. Hell, they all did—his cousins, his parents, the whole sprawling Bollinger family. Nobody quite understood him, but they’d spent thirty years loving him anyway, making room for his quirks, pulling him back into the world when he drifted too far into his own head.
But Bear was just the most persistent about it. The same protective instinct that had driven him and Derek to develop theinside voicecode when they were children had him showing up at Lincoln’s house unannounced to makesure he’d eaten actual food. Lincoln appreciated it. He just didn’t know how to say so in ways that translated.
The gates to his property recognized his vehicle’s signature and swung open. Motion sensors tracked his progress up the winding drive, a half mile of maintained gravel that discouraged casual visitors and provided multiple surveillance points. Everyone called the compound “Bruce Wayne Manor” because they thought they were clever.
Lincoln called it home because it was the only place his brain ever approached anything like quiet.
He pulled into the garage, grabbed his laptop bag, and took the stairs two at a time.
It was 9:00 exactly.
His fingers were reaching for the keyboard before he’d fully settled into his chair.
The command center came alive around him. Six monitors arranged in an ergonomic arc, each dedicated to specific functions—security feeds, market algorithms, communication channels, development environments.
The dark web portal lived on the third screen from the left, its interface deliberately primitive to avoid drawing attention.
Lincoln navigated through three layers of encryption, past two security checkpoints of his own design, to their private forum.
Empty.
He typed,The binary stars have aligned.
Her response appeared almost instantly—9:00 and twelve seconds.
And the mercury rises to meet them.
Lincoln’s shoulders dropped. Right on time. She was always right on time. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her, two years ago when she’d first appeared on a security forum and dismantled a senior researcher’ssupposedly unbreakable encryption with the casual elegance of someone solving a crossword puzzle.
His mouth curved—not quite a smile, but close. “There you are,” he said to the screen.
Her next message appeared almost immediately—a Shakespearean sonnet, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter that would look like pretentious literary discussion to anyone who intercepted it. Lincoln’s fingers flew across the keyboard, extracting the embedded code: first letter of each line, shifted through their agreed-upon cipher.
Librarian conference tomorrow. Discussing digital archives. Thrilling.
Even through text, her tone came through—dry, self-deprecating. The particular cadence she used when facing obligatory professional tedium.
He crafted his response: a mathematical sequence that looked like a security algorithm but decoded into a haiku.
Conferences drone onDeath by PowerPoint awaitsMy sympathies flow
Her reply came fast—too fast for normal typing. She was laughing. He knew her rhythms now, after two years. The way her messages accelerated when she found something genuinely funny versus the measured pace she maintained during serious discussion. He’d learned to read her the way he read code: patterns within patterns, meaning beneath syntax.
You’ve clearly never experienced the joy of debating optimal cataloging systems.
I’ve argued relational versus non-relational until someone left the chat. Close enough.
Not remotely the same. Databases don’t have that new-book smell.
Smell is a poor indexing parameter.
