“Yes. Thank you.”
There was a long silence between them. Not uncomfortable, but like they both didn’t know quite what else to say.
“You need to sleep,” he finally said.
“I know.”
“Real sleep. You haven’t slept properly since you got here.”
It wasn’t a question. He’d noticed. Of course he’d noticed.
Morgan looked at the covers—the ones she hadn’t beenable to bring herself to climb under, because being surrounded felt too much like being enclosed.
“Would you—” She stopped. Started again. “Do you think you could stay? Just for—I mean, you don’t have to, but?—”
“Statistically,” he said slowly, “having someone present reduces nightmare recurrence.”
“Is that a yes?”
Lincoln stood, and for a moment, she thought he was still leaving. Instead, he moved around to the other side of the bed and lay down beside her.
He was stiff at first, uncertain, like he wasn’t sure where his limbs were supposed to go. But when she curled into him—her head on his chest, her hand fisted in his shirt—he adjusted. Slowly. Carefully. His arm came around her, and she felt him exhale.
“This is outside my area of expertise,” he said quietly.
“Mine too.”
Yet somehow, it worked.
Morgan closed her eyes and listened to the steady rhythm of Lincoln’s heartbeat. Binary had come for her. He’d decoded her message and driven through the night and pulled her out of hell.
But it was Lincoln’s arms around her now. Lincoln’s warmth seeping into her bones. Lincoln’s voice, rough and certain, sayingI saw it. I came.
For the first time in days, the darkness behind her lids didn’t feel like a threat.
It felt like rest.
Chapter 10
Fifteen months ago:
Mercury: Do you ever wonder if we’d recognize each other? In person?
Binary: Unlikely. We have no visual data.
Mercury: That’s not what I meant. I meant…would we still be US? Without the screens between us?
Binary: The screens are just a transmission medium. The signal remains constant.
Mercury: You’re very confident about that.
Binary: I know your syntax patterns better than I know most people’s faces. That doesn’t change with proximity.
Mercury: Sometimes I think you see me more clearly than anyone who’s actually looked at me.
Lincoln woke to the weight of Morgan against his chest and the soft murmur of words he couldn’t quite catch.
This had become their pattern over the past three nights around two a.m. The first night, he’d heard her screamthrough the walls and found her tangled in sweat-damp sheets, quoting Dickinson in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. The second night, he’d simply shown up before the screaming started, some part of him already attuned to her rhythms in a way he couldn’t quantify.
