I think about it the way I think about a device I can't disarm, because the wires are all connected and cutting any one of them changes the circuit, and the problem isn't the complexity. The problem is that I don't want to cut anything. I want to leave this the way it is, her feet in my lap and her terrible socks and the steady click of keys and the bay gone dark outside the windows,and that should scare me because it means there's something to lose.
It doesn't scare me. That's what scares me.
Bombs I understand. Loss I've studied. This, her skin warm under my hand and the sound of her typing filling the loft like it belongs here, is the one thing my training didn't cover.
Her typing stops. "You're staring at me."
"I'm reading."
"You haven't turned a page in twenty minutes."
"It's a dense manual."
She looks at me over the top of her laptop, and the expression on her face is knowing and unguarded and carries absolutely no sympathy, which is right because sympathy would be an insult and Nox Bradshaw doesn't do insults. She does precision. Her eyes drop to my hand on her ankle, then come back up, and the look she gives me is a dare she won't say out loud.
"Read your manual, Holland."
I look at the page. The words don't register. Her ankle is warm under my hand, and the loft smells like thyme and tea and something that's just her, and the joint training exercise is days away, and the cold anger from this morning is gone.
It broke the moment she turned her hand under mine and laced her fingers through.
8
NOX
Ileave the loft early with my boots in my hand. Griff's door is closed. His breathing is steady through the wall, slow and deep, and I am not going to stand in this hallway cataloging the rhythm of it like data I need to keep.
Last night on the balcony, his thumb traced my knuckle and I let him, and this morning the only strategy I have for that is distance.
Security escorts me to the comm building which smells like recycled air and stale coffee, which is an improvement over the loft, where everything smells like Griff Holland and the particular brand of chaos he inflicts on my concentration just by existing in the same postcode.
I arrived early because early means alone, and alone is where my brain works best. The monitors are running, the coffee is terrible, and the burst transmissions I've been capturing from the relay device are scrolling across my center screen in neat rows of encrypted gibberish that I've been chipping away at for days. The encryption is military-grade, which I expected. What I did not expect is how personal the handshake protocol would feel once I realized where I'd seen it before.
A knock on the doorframe pulls me out of the code.
Dr. Gwen Abernathy stands in the opening with a tablet in one hand and a look on her face that I recognize from the hospital investigation, the one that says she's here in a professional capacity and intends to stay in a professional capacity right up until she decides otherwise.
"Nox. Do you have a minute?"
"That depends on what you're here to ask."
"Rivera flagged your sleep patterns from the access logs. You've been badging in before 0500 and not leaving until well past midnight." She steps inside and sets the tablet on the edge of my desk, pulling up a screen that shows a simple chart. "As the medical liaison for this investigation, I'm required to check in when team members show signs of exhaustion-related impairment."
"I'm not impaired."
"You've averaged under four hours of sleep per night for the past week."
"I've averaged under four hours of sleep per night for most of my adult life. My brain doesn't shut off on command, and I'd rather be working than lying in the dark thinking about malware architectures."
Gwen doesn't argue. She pulls over the spare chair and sits down, crosses her legs, and waits with the steady patience of a woman who spends her professional life standing over open chest cavities until the bleeding stops. Surgeons and hackers have that in common: the ability to sit inside a problem longer than it's comfortable.
"I'm fine, Gwen."
"I believe you think that."
"I believe I know my own tolerances."
"I believe sleep deprivation causes a measurable decline in cognitive function that the sleep-deprived person is physiologically unable to detect in themselves." She tilts herhead. "It's one of the cruelest tricks fatigue plays, and it's how trauma surgeons kill patients. Four hours a night might be your baseline, but four hours a night while running a counterintelligence operation under active threat from a trained adversary who has escalated to threats and then an actual bomb is a different kind of calculation altogether."
