"He always did think ahead."
"Still does." She leaned against his desk. "Are you okay? You’ve been unusually quiet and a wee bit melancholy since we walked through the bunker door."
"My life flipped upside down when my parents died." He stood in the middle of the room, doing his best to take it all in. "Uni would’ve been a stretch for my family, but my parents had been saving for college. I had good grades. But after the accident, I didn’t think it would happen. I figured I’d end up a grease monkey."
"Nothing wrong with that."
"You’re right." He stuffed his hands into his pockets. "But one of my teachers in high school saw something in me. He pushed me, and next thing I knew, I was in RMC. It changed everything. Opened doors I never dared to dream about. And then Darwin came knocking. For seven years he was my mentor. My friend." Gideon shook his head and laughed. "To me, Darwin was a legend, and the day he didn't stand up for me, he fell from grace." He briefly met her gaze before glancing at the note on the desk. "I'm just not quite sure how I feel about seeing him again."
"I know he's been nervous, but at the same time, excited about you being here." She pushed off the desk, pulled out the chair behind hers, and sat down. She clicked her fingers against the keyboard, and Gideon stared at her with awe and fascination. This woman who’d saved his life, who seemed like she wasn’t afraid of anything and could battle against men supercharged with chemicals, was the same women he’d spent hours with laughing over stupid jokes, like how many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None, it’s a hardware problem.
She was intelligent, funny, resilient, independent, and a slew of other descriptors. She was everything that she’d said he was—at twenty.
"I want you to watch something."
One of the screens on the wall came to life. It was a news clip—or maybe a press conference. A police spokesperson with a grim expression stood behind a podium bristling with microphones.
Gideon dropped into the chair.
"…Darwin Oswald, former Director of Medical Operations at Hyperion is wanted in connection with the deaths of multiple Hyperion security personal."
An image of Darwin appeared on the screen. It was the one Hyperion used for his identification badge. The same blue button-down. The same slightly crooked glasses. The same man who used to leave Post-it notes on Gideon's monitor that said things like "eat lunch" and "go home."
Darwin's picture disappeared, and flashes of the murdered men replaced it.
Gideon recognized one of them. A security guard from the west entrance. The one who always had a podcast playing on his phone during the night shift and never once gave Gideon a hard time for leaving at two in the morning.
His name had been Brian. Or maybe it was Ryan. And now, he was a photograph on a screen being used to frame a man who would never have harmed anyone.
"…Oswald is also accused of stealing highly sensitive data from the company. Information that deals with government contracts and top-secret material."
That was a lie. Gideon knew the security architecture. He'd built half of it. You couldn't steal data from Hyperion without tripping at least three redundancy alerts. The only way to do that was to steal it manually or by hard copy, and to do that you had to use an internal printer that logged everything.
Same fucking redundancy.
This wasn't a manhunt. It was a narrative.
"…Oswald is considered armed and dangerous. Anyone with information?—"
"Turn it off." Gideon had heard enough. Seen enough.
"You believe me now?"
"I always believed you. What I’m struggling with is why he let them fire me." Gideon’s mind went back to the hallway. The elevator. Darwin's face when he'd said he’d been pacing the halls trying to understand what the hell happened. The way Darwin had looked at the floor.
"Because he didn’t know," Zadie said. "But you planted a seed that day, and he went poking around. What he found was my team being ambushed." She pointed toward the door. "Kane? He nearly died. I could’ve died."
"I get it. I do." Gideon ran a hand over his face. Maybe Darwin hadn’t been indifferent Maybe he hadn’t known anything. It was possible. Gideon hadn’t known shit about what they’d done to the system he’d built.
What did that say about him?
He'd spent two months blaming Darwin for not standing up. For not saying a single word while security walked Gideon to the elevator. But what had Gideon done? He'd signed the NDA. He'd picked up the pen and put his name on a piece of paper that sealed his own mouth shut, and he'd walked out of that building without looking back. He hadn't fought, either. He'd just aimed his anger at the one person who might have been the only ally he had.
He spread his hands on the desk then stood and paced.
Zadie crossed the small space and stopped in front of him.
She reached up and placed her hands on either side of his face. Her palms were warm. Her eyes were steady. "I know you want to hold on to your anger at Darwin. But he’s kicking himself as much as you are. And the only asshole here is Finch."
