She walks away. Victoria never lingers for reactions.
It's my infrastructure he's targeting. Webb looked at everything Echo Ridge has done across every operation thatdismantled his people, his networks, his revenue streams, and decided the way to win was to destroy the thing I built. The weapon isn't aimed at Kane or Stryker or the operators who put bullets in Committee assets. It's aimed at the systems I built. It's aimed at me.
The corridor is empty. Dinner noise filters through the stone behind me, muffled laughter and the clink of silverware, and I'm standing here with Victoria's intel settling into my bones like cold water. I head for the ops center because it's the only place that makes sense right now, the one room where the thing Webb wants to destroy is something I can see, touch, defend.
I spend two hours at my workstation running diagnostics I don't need to run, checking perimeters I already checked. Burning through busywork because the alternative is sitting still with Victoria's intel and Dylan's question occupying the same skull. By midnight, the corridors are empty and the restless energy hasn't gone anywhere useful. The diagnostics come back clean for the fourth time, and I shut my monitors down because staring at green status lights isn't going to fix what's actually wrong.
The gym is mine after midnight. It has been since the early days, when the equipment was secondhand and the mats were surplus and I trained alone because the alternative was lying in my bunk with nothing between me and the quiet.
The weights are a language I don't speak publicly. The team knows me as the man behind the screen, the one with the quick mouth and the quicker fingers and the glasses that reflect their faces back at them.
They don't know about the hours after midnight. They don't know about the pull-up bar or the dead lifts or the systematic, methodical process of turning a body that started as an afterthought into something functional.
Kane knows. He knows everything because that's what commanders do. The one time he mentioned it, obliquely, I deflected with a joke. He let it go because Kane understands that some things exist in the spaces between what we show and what we are, and those spaces are private.
I train hard tonight. Dylan's words are the spark, and Victoria's intel is the accelerant. The burn in my shoulders, the ache in my grip, the controlled violence of each rep, all of it is a conversation I'm having with myself about judgment and compromise, about Dar's collarbone catching the light in that doorway, the cold of her fingers overlapping mine on the diagnostic cable in the server room, her voice telling me'you're not special'so flat it dared me to argue.
The barbell comes down. It goes up. It comes down.
She's in my system, the one I don't have admin access to, the one that runs on instinct and pattern recognition and the quiet, treacherous process of wanting someone before you've decided to.
I keep seeing her hands on my keyboard, keep catching her scent in my workspace, something clean and sharp underneath the Mountain Dew. The almost-lift at the corner of her mouth when I say something that registers rewires something in my chest every time I cause it.
I'm building her into my routines. I position the Mountain Dew within reach. I adjust the lighting to her preference. The twelve-point-three-millisecond argument was really about proving I listen when she speaks.
I'm engineering an environment around her, a set of conditions optimized for her productivity and comfort, and the process is so automatic, so integrated into my operational thinking, that I didn't recognize it as personal until Dylan pointed a spotlight at it and asked me to look.
Underneath the infrastructure, underneath the operational justification, there's something else.
I keep circling back to the memory of her forearm brushing mine when she reached for my keyboard, the cold of her fingers when I handed her the diagnostic cable and held on a beat too long. Her face when she looked at me in the server room stays with me, chin tilted up in the cold light, and the stretch of silence before she turned away felt longer than any mission I've monitored through a screen.
I push the weight up. I hold it. I let gravity and muscle negotiate.
Compromised.The word cycles back through my head the way it has every day since she sent it through my system.Compromised.Yeah, more than maybe.
The bar racks. I sit up, breathing hard. My skin's flushed and my muscles are burning, and none of it has done a damn thing to discharge the tension that lives in my body now whenever I think about rainbow hair and cold hands and the driest delivery of'you're not special'that has ever made a grown man want to pin someone against a server rack and find out what she sounds like when the precision breaks.
I train for another hour. I push past the point where the muscles protest. It doesn't help.
8
DAR
Ican't sleep. The mountain hums differently at night, or maybe the difference is that nothing else competes with it after dark. During the day, the hum is background, buried under keyboard noise and boot steps and the ambient friction of too many people in a space carved from stone. Well past midnight, it's the only sound, and my internal clock, calibrated to the glow of screens rather than the presence or absence of sunlight, has decided that this is prime operating hours and sleep is a resource allocation I can't justify.
My quarters are small but not spartan. A double bed with a quilt that someone folded across the foot, a desk, a bathroom through a narrow door, and a lock I checked the first night with the professional detachment of someone who evaluates security mechanisms the way other people evaluate curtain fabric.
The bed's comfortable enough that the insomnia isn't the mattress's fault, and the pillow smells like laundry detergent, which means someone washed it before I arrived. The small touches of domesticity, the quilt, the clean linens, feel like the work of people who've learned that making a space livable is its own form of welcome.
The walls are close. I can lie on the bed and almost touch both walls simultaneously if I stretch my arms, and the exercise is strangely comforting because it means I can map the dimensions of my cage without instruments.
I get up, throw on clothes and pull on boots. The corridors at this hour are empty in a way that makes the facility feel like a skeleton, something that only becomes alive when the people inside it are awake. The overhead LEDs are dimmed to the nighttime setting, casting a low amber glow that turns the carved rock walls into something almost organic. My footsteps echo ahead of me, announcing my approach to intersections and corners, an acoustic signature I can't suppress.
I walk without direction. Past the communal area, dark and still. Past the medical bay, where Willa's equipment sits ready for the injuries that this life guarantees. Past the armory, locked and humming with its own electronic security, and I note the lock type and the access protocol without conscious intent because that is what I do. I evaluate systems. Every system.
The truth, the one I'm not examining too closely, is that I'm walking because the alternative is lying in the dark thinking about Tommy's hands on the relay housings in the server room, precise and confident and warm when they wrapped around mine. Lying in the dark thinking about the Mountain Dew that appeared at my workstation at exactly the right moment, placed by a man who's been studying my patterns with a focus that should alarm me and instead makes something in my chest go tight. Lying alone on a double bed while my brain replays the twitch at the corner of his mouth when I said twelve point three milliseconds, and the way the twitch felt like a door opening, and the way I wanted to walk through it.
Moving feels like outrunning the thoughts. It isn't working, but the illusion of forward progress is better than lying still with the knowledge that I'm losing a fight I didn't agree to.
