And this is why I worry about you, Binary.
Back and forth. The intellectual dance they’d perfectedover 743 messages—testing each other, challenging each other, sharing pieces of themselves encoded in poetry and mathematics.
Mercury was his. His secret. Hissomething.
She went quiet for a moment—long enough that Lincoln checked his connection status twice—and then:
Packed my blue dress. The one that matches Montana sky.
Lincoln’s hands stilled on the keyboard.
His chest did something strange. A tightening, like code compiling too fast for the system to handle. In two years, she had never shared anything this concrete. No locations. No physical descriptions. No details that could identify her beyond the persona she’d constructed. Their mutual anonymity was the foundation of whatever this was. Safety in shadows.
Montana.
A blue dress.
She’d given him somethingreal.
His brain did what it always did—started solving for the unknown variable. Conference schedules, library databases, population cross-references. Montana wasn’t that big. He could have a real name by midnight.
But his hands stayed still. She’d shared something real, and that wasn’t the same as an invitation to find her. After two years of careful distance, she’d chosen to step closer.
But what did that mean?
Nothing matches the Wyoming sky. It cheats—uses colors that don’t exist elsewhere.He sent it before he could stop himself.
Three seconds of silence. Four. He’d given her a piece of real information too. His state, his location, a thread she could pull if she chose. Lincoln waited, pulse thudding against his ribs, for her response.
The Rocky Mountain states do have exceptional skies. I’ve always wanted to see Wyoming’s.
Lincoln leaned back in his chair. A reciprocation.
The tightness in his chest had shifted into something warmer. He didn’t have a name for it, didn’t know how to categorize it.
Perhaps someday.
It was the closest they’d ever come to acknowledging that this—whatever this was—might exist beyond encrypted forums and coded poetry. That they might be real to each other. That someday could mean something.
Her response came soft:
“Miles to go before I sleep.”
Robert Frost. She never quoted directly without purpose. Lincoln understood—she was pulling back to safer ground, signaling the end of tonight’s exchange before they wandered too far into territory neither of them had mapped.
He matched her retreat.Sleep is just system maintenance. Necessary if regrettable.
Tomorrow’s administrative tedium awaits. Save me, Binary.
Libraries are the original cloud storage. You’ll survive.
Conference continues at 7 a.m. with breakfast.A pause.Should encode some rest.
This was the part Lincoln dreaded—the sign-off that meant hours of silence, of not knowing if she was safe, if she was real, if she’d return tomorrow. Irrational. He knew it was irrational. She always came back.
But tonight, for the first time, he knew where she’d be when she woke up.
Montana. A librarian conference. A blue dress the color of sky.
