Chapter 10
Travis
Sera had been working at my kitchen table for two days, and I’d been pretending I wasn’t aware of her one floor above me.
We’d settled into a pattern without discussing it. I cooked. We ate together, talked in the careful way people talk when they’re circling something neither of them is ready to name, and then she went back to her laptop and I went back downstairs.
She worked. I worked. The compound had always been built for one person, and now there were two, and I was more aware of that than I wanted to be.
“Your heart rate elevates by an average of four beats per minute when she’s directly above you,” Maude observed on the second evening.
“That’s the coffee.”
“You haven’t had coffee in three hours.”
“Then it’s a delayed reaction.”
“To coffee. From three hours ago. That selectively activates when she walks into the kitchen.”
“Toaster, Maude. I’m telling you.”
“Noted. Filing underthings Travis refuses to acknowledge. The folder is getting quite large.”
Or maybe a vacuum.
“I’m bringing her down here in a few minutes.” I couldn’t avoid it forever. “Remember, you’re to mention absolutely nothing about my extracurricular activities. Nothing shows up on any screen she has access to. Not the mission logs, not the intercept timestamps, not the route data. None of it.”
“Got it. You’ve only told me that a dozen times since she’s arrived.”
“I’ll stop telling you when I stop worrying about it.”
“So never, then.”
Definitely a fucking vacuum.
When I went upstairs Sera was at the kitchen table with her laptop and a legal pad covered in handwriting so small and precise it looked like machine print. She had her hair pulled back and a pen between her teeth and she didn’t look up when I came in, which meant she was deep enough in the work that the rest of the world had gone optional.
I recognized it because I did the same thing. The difference was that when I did it, nobody was around to see it.
I poured coffee and stood at the counter and watched her for about ten seconds longer than was professionally necessary. Then I set a second mug in front of her.
She took the pen out of her mouth. “Thank you.”
“How far along are you?”
“The core framework is rebuilt, about eighty, maybe eighty-five percent. Some of the peripheral data I can’t reconstruct from memory, but the structural model is solid.” She turned the legal pad toward me. Rows of variables, weighted and cross-referenced, mapped against a timeline that spanned eighteen months.
She’d done this from her head. No backup files, no reference materials, no thumb drive. Just two years of work rebuilt from the architecture of her own memory.
“I need better processing power than this laptop can give me,” she said. “And I need your intercept data to validate the model. I can keep working up here, but at some point I’m going to need access to your systems.”
I’d known this was coming. I’d known it since the first morning, when she’d sat at this table and laid out her methodology and I’d understood that the work she’d built and the work I’d been doing were two halves of the same whole. I just had to figure out how to keep her from knowing all the details of my half.
“Come downstairs into my control room.”
She looked at me. Waiting for conditions, probably. Rules, restrictions, the list of things she couldn’t touch.
“Bring your legal pad,” I said. “And your coffee.”
