“You’re not the person on that bulletin. You’re Mercury. You’re Morgan. You’re both.” His grip on her hand tightened. “And I’ve already chosen my side.”
The tears came then—silent, streaming down her cheeks. But she was almost smiling through them, something loosening in her expression that had been locked tight since the moment he’d shown her the bulletin.
She’d trusted him with coordinates when she had nothing else. Now she’d trusted him with everything—the horror, the data, the weight she’d been carrying alone.
He wasn’t just harboring a fugitive. He was all in.
Lincoln had built his entire life around logic and distance and systems he could control. He’d kept the world at arm’s length, trusted his screens more than his instincts, avoided anything that couldn’t be reduced to data.
But Morgan couldn’t be reduced to data. She was real and breathing and broken in ways his algorithms couldn’t fix. And somewhere in the last few days, she’d become the variable he was no longer willing to eliminate.
“We start tomorrow.” His voice came out rough. “Tonight, you rest. You’ve been carrying this alone long enough.”
Morgan nodded. Her hand was still in his.
His was still in hers.
Outside, the Wyoming sky had gone dark, and somewhere in the distance, the people who’d tried to turn her into a filing cabinet were still looking for their lost investment.
Let them look.
They had no idea what they’d created when they’d locked her in that box and underestimated what she’d built with a stranger on the dark web.
Two years of coded poetry. Two years of trust. And now, finally, the chance to turn all those puzzle pieces into something that could bring the whole operation down.
Together.
Chapter 13
Ten months ago:
Mercury: Do patterns comfort you or trap you?
Binary: Both. Patterns are the architecture of predictability. I find safety in knowing what comes next.
Mercury: But what about when life refuses to follow the pattern?
Binary: Then I build a new one. Chaos is just order we haven’t decoded yet.
Mercury: I think that might be the most optimistic thing you’ve ever said.
Binary: Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain.
They’d been trying to unravel the data in her mind for three days.
Morgan sat at the workstation Lincoln had set up for her in his command center, her fingers wrapped around a cup of tea that was no longer warm. The blue glow of the monitors cast strange shadows across the room, turning everything into geometry—angles and planes and theparticular architecture of a space designed for one person’s brain.
Now it held two.
“Ready when you are,” Lincoln said from his main station a few feet away. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, waiting.
This was their system now. She recited; he cross-referenced. Her memory fed his databases, and somewhere in the intersection of flesh and silicon, they hoped to find meaning in the chaos Randall had poured into her head.
Morgan closed her eyes.
“Forty-seven point six zero six two, negative one twenty-two point three three two one.” The coordinates came out flat, mechanical. She’d learned to strip the emotion from the recitation—it was the only way to get through it. “Thirty-nine point seven three nine two, negative one zero four point nine nine zero three. Thirty-eight point nine zero seven two, negative seventy-seven point zero three six nine.”
Lincoln’s keyboard clicked in rapid bursts. “Seattle. Denver. Washington DC. Same pattern as yesterday—major metropolitan areas. What about the names from that session?”
