“People could be dying while I sit here feeling sorry for myself.” The words came out sharper than she intended. “I can’t just take a break because I have a headache.”
Lincoln didn’t flinch. He rarely did.
“You’re not a server,” he said. “You can’t run twenty-four seven without maintenance. The data isn’t going anywhere. Your ability to function is.”
Morgan opened her mouth to argue. Closed it.
He was right. She hated that he was right.
“I know the work is destroying me.” The admission cost her something. “Every time I recite those codes, I hear Randall’s voice. But if I stop while someone on those lists gets killed—how do I live with that?”
Lincoln was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted—still blunt, but softer underneath.
“The data will still be there tomorrow. And the day after.” His voice was quiet but firm. “But if you burn out, you’re no good to anyone—including the people on those lists. Exhausted people miss patterns. Make mistakes. You’re already slower than you were three days ago.”
She wanted to argue. Couldn’t find the flaw in his logic.
“I’m not suggesting we abandon the work,” he continued. “Just step back from it. A few hours.” He stood, pushing his chair back. “There’s a place I want to show you. It’s not far.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to see people.” The thought of interacting with strangers, of performing normalcy, made her stomach clench.
“There won’t be people. Just us.” He hesitated, and something uncertain moved through his expression. “And a cliff.”
“A cliff?”
“Trust me?”
It wasn’t really a question. She’d trusted him with her life when she sent those coordinates. She’d trusted him with her worst memories when she told him about the box. What was a cliff compared to that?
“Okay,” she said. “Show me your cliff.”
The drive took them away from Lincoln’s compound and deeper into the Wyoming wilderness.
Morgan rolled down her window, letting the air rush over her face. She hadn’t been outside—truly outside, not just staring through glass—in over a week. The windsmelled like pine and grass and something wild she couldn’t name. Her eyes watered from the brightness of unfiltered sun.
The road climbed as the landscape shifted from grassland to foothills to the kind of vertical terrain that made her breath catch.
“I wouldn’t have thought you were outdoorsy,” she said.
Lincoln’s mouth curved—not quite a smile, but close. “I was raised in Oak Creek. It’s home to Linear Tactical.”
“Linear Tactical?”
“It’s a training facility. Survival, tactical skills, situational awareness, self-defense, weapons handling.” He navigated a curve in the road with the kind of easy competence that suggested he’d driven it a thousand times. “My uncle Finn was one of the founding members. He and the other original guys—Zac Mackay, Dorian Lindstrom, a few others—they built the place from nothing back before I was born.”
Morgan tried to reconcile this with her image of Lincoln—the man who lived inside screens, who processed the world as data, who’d built two fortunes before thirty by understanding systems better than the humans who used them.
“So, you grew up doing…wilderness survival training?”
“Among other things. My cousins and I were around Linear all the time as kids. Bear learned to track animals before he learned to read. Derek could field-strip a rifle by age ten. I was more interested in the technology side—security systems, communications protocols—but my family made sure I could handle myself in the field too.” He glanced at her. “Including rappelling, which is what we’re doing today.”
Morgan’s stomach tightened. “Rappelling. Down a cliff.”
“A very specific cliff. My dad almost died there once.”
Morgan stared at him. “What?”
“Equipment failure during a charity event. His rig gave out halfway down—he was falling, nothing to catch him but a few hundred feet of air and the canyon floor.” Lincoln’s voice stayed even, but his hands had tightened on the steering wheel. “A friend grabbed him. Held on while my dad climbed on to his harness. They made it down together, one step at a time.”
