The words were there, but the edges were fuzzy. Not wrong exactly. Just…indistinct. Like trying to read through water.
“—it gives a lovely light.”
That was right. That had to be right. She’d recited that poem a hundred times, heard Ms. Delacroix recite it dozens more. She could see the page in her memory, black text on cream paper, the particular way the line breaks fell?—
But had Ms. Delacroix saidlovelyorbrilliant? Had the candle burned atboth endsoreither end?
The floor tilted beneath her feet.
This wasn’t possible. This wasn’tpossible. Her memory was absolute—had been the absolute of her life for twenty-eight years. It was the foundation everything else was built on. The one constant in a life full of impermanence. Foster homes changed, people left, but her memory stayed. Her memory washer.
And now it was blurring.
She gripped the window frame hard enough to hurt, using the pain to anchor herself. Her vision had narrowed, darkness creeping in at the edges. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t?—
It’s just the stress.She forced the thought through the panic.I’m exhausted. I’m reliving trauma every time I open my mouth. Anyone would be struggling.
But she wasn’t anyone. She was Morgan Reece, the girl who never forgot. The woman whose brain had beenvaluable enough to kidnap. If her memory was failing—if Randall’s data had somehowbrokenher?—
She couldn’t finish that thought. Couldn’t look at it directly.
Later, she told herself.Deal with this later.
She turned away from the window before Lincoln could notice her stillness, her silence, the way her hands were shaking.
“Ready to continue,” she said.
Her voice came out steady. Twenty-eight years of hiding her strangeness had taught her that much.
Lincoln looked up. His eyes moved across her face in that assessing way of his, cataloging data points she couldn’t control—the pallor of her skin, the tension in her jaw, the shadows under her eyes that had darkened over the past three days.
“More military codes,” she said before he could comment. “ROMEO-TWO-VICTOR. DELTA-EIGHT-PAPA. OSCAR-FIVE-WHISKEY.”
Lincoln typed. Morgan recited. The data flowed between them, flesh to machine, chaos seeking order.
But the fuzzy edges stayed with her. A crack in the foundation she’d built her entire identity on. A terror she couldn’t name and couldn’t escape.
By hour four, Lincoln had stopped typing.
Morgan didn’t notice at first. She was deep in the coordinates from the Federal Reserve breach, her eyes closed, her voice mechanical. The numbers came out in strings that meant nothing to her—latitude and longitude, degrees and minutes, maybe points on a map, maybe something completely different. It didn’t matter.
“Morgan.”
She opened her eyes. Lincoln had turned his chair to face her fully, his expression unreadable in that way that usually meant he was processing something he didn’t know how to articulate.
“You haven’t eaten today.”
It wasn’t a question. She glanced at the untouched sandwich on the corner of her desk—the one he’d brought her hours ago that she’d barely registered.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You weren’t hungry yesterday either.” He paused. “You’re also not sleeping. Your response times have slowed by approximately fifteen percent since we started, and you keep pressing your hand against your temple every few minutes, which suggests persistent headaches you’re not mentioning.”
She should’ve known he would see it. “I’m fine.”
“That’s not accurate. You need a break.”
She looked away. The monitors glowed with data, patterns that still refused to coalesce into anything meaningful, despite Lincoln cross-referencing everything. How could she stop when the answers were still out of reach? How could she rest when every hour she spent recovering was an hour that someone on those lists might be found by the wrong people?
