But he didn’t step aside, and his eyes didn’t leave her face, and Morgan knew that whatever he saw there was going to require an explanation she didn’t know how to give.
She stood before he could ask.
“I need some time,” she said. “I’m going to lie down.”
She was out of the command center before he could respond.
Chapter 15
Seven months ago:
Mercury: Do you ever wish you could turn your brain off?
Binary: Frequently. It doesn’t have that function.
Mercury: What do you do instead?
Binary: I solve problems until exhaustion forces a shutdown.
Mercury: That sounds lonely.
Binary: It’s efficient. Loneliness is just an unoptimized variable.
Mercury: Sometimes I think you believe that. And sometimes I think you’re lying to both of us.
Morgan sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, staring at nothing. The bedside lamp cast a warm circle of light that didn’t reach the corners of the room. Outside, the Wyoming darkness had settled over the area like a held breath.
She was trying to remember the color of Ms. Delacroix’s eyes.
They were brown. She knew they were brown. She’dlooked into those eyes a thousand times—across library tables, over cups of tea, through the blur of tears when she’d needed someone and Ms. Delacroix had been there. Brown eyes. Warm eyes. The first person—besides Lincoln—who’d ever looked at her like she was more than her memory.
But whatshadeof brown?
Morgan summoned the image the way she’d always summoned images—expecting it to be there, waiting, preserved in the amber of perfect recall. Instead, she found only the word.Brown.Generic. A label instead of a memory. Like someone had taken a photograph and replaced it with a description.
The particular warmth of those eyes. The way they’d crinkled at the corners when Ms. Delacroix smiled. The exact depth of color, somewhere between coffee and honey, that had made Morgan feel seen for the first time in her life.
Gone.
She pressed her hands against her face and felt herself start to shake.
She was losing Ms. Delacroix. Piece by piece, detail by detail, she was losing the only person who had ever loved her. And she couldn’t tell anyone, because how did you explain that your own mind was betraying you? How did you put into words the particular horror of summoning a memory and finding it hollow?
For twenty-eight years, her memory had been the one constant. Foster homes changed. People left. But her mind stayed—perfect, reliable,hers. It was the foundation everything else was built on. The thing that made her valuable, made her useful, made herher.
And now it was being crowded out by coordinates and military codes and the endless flood of data Randall had poured into her skull.
She was disappearing inside her own head.
Morgan stood up. Sat down. Stood up again. Her legs carried her to the window without her permission, then back to the bed, then to the door—not to leave, just to touch it, to feel the wood grain under her fingertips, something real and solid andexternal.
What else had she lost?
She grabbed for other memories, frantic now. Her first foster home—the wallpaper in her bedroom, the pattern of faded roses. It came, but slowly. Too slowly. Was it roses or peonies? Had there been a border at the top, or was she inventing that?
The library in Whitefish. The exact position of her desk. The way the afternoon light fell across the returns cart at three p.m. in October. She could see it, but the edges had softened. Like looking at something through a window that needed cleaning.
How much had she already lost without noticing?
