“More coordinates,” she said instead. “I’ll start with the Homeland batch.”
“Morgan—”
“Thirty-eight point nine zero seven two, negative seventy-seven point zero three six nine. Forty point seven one two eight, negative seventy-four point zero zero six zero.”
Lincoln was quiet for a long moment. Then his keyboard resumed its clicking.
She kept going.
An hour later, Lincoln pushed back from his workstation.
“I need to check something on the secondary server,” he said. “The cross-reference algorithm is running slow. Give me five minutes.”
Morgan nodded without looking up. Her throat burned. The headache that had started as a dull throb behind her temples had sharpened into something more insistent, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
She heard his footsteps retreat across the command center. Heard the door open and close.
Silence.
She went still. Her fingers stopped their unconscious rhythm against her thigh. The data that had been pouring out of her all day paused at the edge of her consciousness, waiting.
She should use this moment to rest. To drink something, eat something, close her eyes for just a minute.
Instead, she tested herself.
My apartment.The converted barn outside Whitefish, with its sloped ceilings and the window that stuck in summer.The bookshelf by the door. Third shelf from the top, left to right.
The titles should have come instantly. They always had.
Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. The Complete Works of Jane Austen. A battered paperback of?—
She stopped.
There was a gap.
Between Austen and the next book—something with a green spine, she could almost see it—there was nothing. A blur where memory should be. Like a word on the tip of her tongue that refused to form.
Her breath stuttered.
She’d told herself it was stress before. Exhaustion. Trauma. But this was different. This was a hole where information should be.
She tried something else. Something that should have been untouchable.
Binary’s first message to me. The exact words.
She’d thought about it a thousand times since. Lincoln had quoted it back to her just days ago, in her bedroom, when she’d needed proof that she’d existed before the warehouse.
“Your code is inefficient. Line 347 could be compressed.”
Yes. That was right. She could see the words on her screen, white text on black background, the cursor blinking as she’d decided how to respond.
But what had come next? Her reply—she knew the gist of it, knew she’d said something about sonnets and beauty and function. But the exact phrasing, the precise arrangement of words that had started everything?—
It wouldn’t come.
She pressed harder.Not everything is about efficiency.Had she written that? Or was itEfficiency isn’t everything? Had she used a period or a dash?
Two weeks ago, she could have recited their entire first exchange verbatim, including her typos. Now she was guessing.
