She pushed herself upright, drawing her knees to her chest. The shaking hadn’t stopped. If anything, it was getting worse—her body finally releasing the terror it had held frozen during the nightmare.
“I was in the box.” Her voice came out thin, fractured. “In the dream. I was back in the box.”
Lincoln didn’t say anything. Didn’t offer platitudes or reassurances or any of the empty phrases people usually deployed when faced with someone else’s pain. He just sat there, present and silent, his attention focused on her like she was a problem he was genuinely trying to understand.
“It was so small.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, trying to hold herself together. “I couldn’t move. Couldn’t see. I kept thinking—if I could just make myself smaller, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe I could disappear into the dark and the dark would stop pressing back.”
“You’re not in the box anymore.”
“I know.” The tears were building behind her eyes, hot and insistent. “I know I’m not. But every time I close my eyes—” She shook her head.
“Because I could not stop for Death,” she whispered, the words escaping before she could catch them. Dickinson. Always Dickinson when the panic hit. “He kindly stopped for me?—”
She cut herself off. Shook her head. “Sorry. I do that. Quote things.”
She couldn’t finish. The words dissolved into something shapeless, something that hurt too much to name.
Lincoln was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted—softer, almost tentative.
“Your code is inefficient,” he said. “Line 347 could be compressed.”
Morgan’s breath caught. Was that…?
“Not everything is about efficiency,” he continued, the words precise and deliberate. “Explain. It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines. Read the first letter of each line.”
Their first exchange. The very first words they’d ever shared, two years ago on the dark web forum when neither of them had known what they were starting.
“You remember that?” Her voice cracked on the question.
“I saved our conversations. All 743 of them.” He paused. “I’ve read them multiple times.”
Something broke open in Morgan’s chest.
He’d saved them all. Every poem, every joke, every late-night confession wrapped in code. She’d spent four days being Randall’s filing cabinet—a brain to fill, a tool to use—and she’d started to forget she’d ever been anything else. But Lincoln had proof. Lincoln had records. She’d been real to someone before the warehouse.
She’d been real to Binary.
The tears she’d been holding back spilled over, hot tracks running down her cheeks. She didn’t attempt to stop them. Didn’t have the strength left to try.
“You existed before the warehouse,” Lincoln said. His voice was still careful, still measured, but there was something underneath it now—something raw. “You were real before any of this happened. Our conversations were real. I have the records to prove it.”
She was crying in earnest now, days of terror and exhaustion and grief pouring out of her in ragged sobs. It was the first time she’d really cried since the rescue—the first time she’d felt safe enough to fall apart.
Lincoln sat very still beside her for a moment, hands folded in his lap, clearly unsure what to do with her tears. Then, slowly, like he was solving a problem he’d never encountered before, he reached out and took her hand.
His fingers were warm. Steady. He didn’t squeeze too hard or pull her toward him—just held on, an anchor in the storm of her grief. He wasn’t performing comfort. He wasn’t following a script. He was just there, present and uncertain and trying, his thumb tracing a single careful line across her knuckles.
When the sobs finally began to subside, Morgan took a shuddering breath and heard herself speak.
“Your code is inefficient. Line 347 could be compressed.” She kept going, the words flowing out of her with perfect clarity. “Not everything is about efficiency. Explain. It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines. Read the first letter of each line. Stay safe stranger. Sometimes beauty IS the function. Dot dot dot. Interesting.”
She recited the entire exchange—every line, every pause, every piece of punctuation—exactly as it had appeared on her screen two years ago.
Lincoln had gone very still.
“You—” He stopped. She could almost hear his brain recalibrating, reassessing. “Did you memorize all of our conversations?”
Oh no. He thought this was just about them. That she was some sort of desperate stalker. “No. It’s not—I’m not a stalker, I promise. I memorize everything.”
