His fingers laced through hers, warm and certain. He didn’t look at her. Didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to.
Chapter 14
Eight months ago:
Mercury: What do you choose to remember?
Binary: I don’t choose. I retain what’s useful and discard what isn’t.
Mercury: But what about the things that slip away before you decide? The details you didn’t know mattered until they’re gone?
Binary: Data doesn’t slip. It’s either stored or it isn’t.
Mercury: For you, maybe. For the rest of us, memory is a tide. Things wash in. Things wash out. And sometimes you don’t notice what’s missing until you reach for it.
Binary: That sounds inefficient.
Mercury: It sounds human, Binary. Beautifully, terribly human.
Two days since the cliff. Two days since the kiss.
Morgan’s voice had gone hoarse hours ago, somewhere around the third string of names, numbers and coordinates. She reached for the glass of water Lincoln had brought her and found it empty. The tea beside it had long gone cold, afilm forming on the surface she didn’t remember watching develop.
“Forty-one point eight seven eight one, negative eighty-seven point six two nine eight.” The numbers scraped out of her throat like sandpaper. “Thirty-three point four four eight four, negative one twelve point zero seven four zero. Twenty-nine point seven six zero four, negative ninety-five point three six nine eight.”
Lincoln’s keyboard clicked in response. Cross-referencing. Always cross-referencing.
She’d been at this for six hours today. Fourteen yesterday. The data poured out of her in an endless stream, and she let it, because movement was easier than stillness. Because as long as she was working, she didn’t have to think about anything else.
The kiss should have been a clear, bright memory. Lincoln’s hand on her jaw at the bottom of that cliff, the roughness of his voice when he’d saidI didn’t plan that. The way his lips had felt against hers—uncertain and real and nothing like code.
Instead, the memory kept fragmenting. She’d summon the warmth of it and find coordinates flooding in. The exact pressure of his mouth would blur into account numbers. The look in his eyes would dissolve into military designations—KILO-SEVEN-TANGO, ECHO-FOUR-NOVEMBER—until she couldn’t tell what was real and what was data.
That was the problem. The kiss was competing for space in her head, and it was losing.
“Chicago,” Lincoln said. “Phoenix. Houston. Still metropolitan areas. The pattern holds.”
Morgan nodded without really hearing him. Her hands had started to tremble again—a fine vibration she’d noticed yesterday and ignored. She pressed them flatagainst her thighs, hiding them under the desk where he couldn’t see.
“What about the next set?” she asked. Her voice came out sharper than she intended. “The ones from the DEA breach. We haven’t finished those.”
“We’ve been working for six hours.”
“So?”
“So, you need a break.”
“I’ll rest when we find something useful.” The words snapped out before she could stop them. “People could be dying while we sit here debating my hydration levels.”
Lincoln’s typing stopped.
She could feel him watching her—that focused attention he turned on problems he couldn’t immediately solve. The furrowed brow, the slight tilt of his head. Confusion, probably. Trying to reconcile this version of her with the woman who’d kissed him two days ago.
Part of her wanted to explain. To tell him about the kiss playing on a loop behind her eyes, about the way she kept summoning the memory and finding it crowded out by Randall’s data. About how she wanted to talk about what was happening between them but couldn’t, because talking required stopping, and stopping meant everything she was outrunning would finally catch up.
She didn’t say any of it.
