Chapter 14
DAR
Icatch myself listening for his keyboard rhythm when I enter the workspace, and the recognition of the habit stops me inside the door.
During my time inside this mountain, I've mapped its corridors, memorized its security rotations, analyzed its communication infrastructure, had sex with its system administrator twice, and apparently trained my auditory processing to use the sound of Tommy's typing as an environmental baseline.
His rhythm reaches me before I reach my workstation: rapid, even, steady, present.
Something in my stomach settles into a resting frequency I didn't authorize.
This is a problem.
The sex I can file under controlled variables. A biological function complicated by proximity, adrenaline, and the reality that Tommy's mind operates at a frequency I've spent my entire life searching for without knowing I was listening.
That the rest of him operates at an equally compelling frequency is a bonus I wasn't expecting and am handling poorly.
The keyboard thing is different. The keyboard thing means I've started calibrating my nervous system to another person's presence, and the last time I did that, the person died in an extraction gone wrong because the system I trusted failed in exactly the way I said it would.
I sit down and open my laptop.
Tommy glances over. His glasses are slightly askew, and there's a chocolate smudge on his left thumb, and the combination of genius and mess that constitutes Tommy Hale in the morning is unfairly appealing.
"You're staring at my hands," he says.
"You have chocolate on your thumb."
He looks at his thumb, then at me. He sucks the chocolate off without breaking eye contact.
The deliberateness of it sends a signal straight through my professional composure and into territory that is entirely inappropriate for the morning shift in a shared workspace.
"Better?" he asks.
"Worse, actually."
He grins. The full, unguarded version that transforms him from the guy behind the screens into something my pulse has very specific opinions about. "Noted."
I turn to my laptop and start working because the alternative is climbing across two workstations and the operational benefits of that approach are questionable.
The rhythm beside me continues, steady and grounding and dangerously close to feeling like safety.
The morning becomes an exercise in peripheral awareness. I type, I analyze, I trace logic paths through the Committee weapon's outer layers, and the whole time my nervous system is running a parallel thread dedicated entirely to the man sitting beside me.
He reaches across my station for a spare cable, and his forearm passes through my field of vision, and the muscles shifting under his skin remind me of the server room and the way those arms held his weight above me.
I stare at my screen and type something I'll have to delete later because my fingers are producing gibberish while my brain processes forearm data.
At one point he leans back in his chair and stretches, arms above his head, and his shirt rides up just enough to expose a strip of skin above his waistband. The glimpse lasts maybe a second. My body's response to it lasts considerably longer.
"You're typing slower," he says without looking at me.
"Complex analysis."
"Your analysis was running at full speed until I stretched."
"Correlation isn't causation."
"Sure it isn't." His voice carries the grin I refuse to look over and confirm.
Willa finds me at lunchtime.
I'm eating at my workstation because the communal area is loud and full and the social dynamics of a found family forged through shared trauma are exhausting to navigate from the outside.
Every interaction requires translation. Their shorthand, their inside jokes, the way Stryker calls Dylan "sunshine" in a tone that communicates both mockery and genuine affection. It's a language I don't speak and haven't been invited to learn.
"You're eating at your desk again," Willa says, materializing beside me with the particular authority of a woman whose medical opinion you don't argue with.
"I'm eating."
"You're eating a protein bar that expired ages ago while staring at encryption analysis. That's fueling a machine, and the machine deserves better." She plucks the wrapper from my hand and reads the date. "March. It's May."
"Preservatives exist for a reason."
"Come eat real food. Rachel made something that involves actual vegetables."
The invitation comes without expectation, without the pressure of someone who will be offended if I decline. Persistence without pressure. The medical equivalent of a packet retry.
I look at my screen. The encryption analysis will be there when I get back. The control layer mapping is ahead of schedule. And the protein bar was, admittedly, terrible.
"Fine."
The communal area is everything my loft was not.
Warm and full, with evidence of a human presence accumulated in layers: a blanket draped over the back of a couch, a stack of paperbacks on the side table, a coffee mug with a cartoon dinosaur on it that I'm going to find out the owner of if it kills me.
The air smells like garlic and bread and the particular warmth of food cooked by a person rather than sealed in plastic.
Rachel sets a plate in front of me. Rice, grilled chicken, roasted vegetables.
The first bite of the chicken is seasoned with something I can't identify, and the flavor registers on taste buds that have been living on takeout pad thai and expired protein bars for longer than my body deserves.
The rice is warm and perfectly textured, and the roasted vegetables have the char marks of actual attention, someone standing over a pan and caring about the outcome.
I eat faster than I intend to, and the hunger that surfaces isn't just caloric.
It's the hunger of a person who forgot that meals could be an act of care rather than a maintenance task.
Lucas is working on homework beside me, his pencil scratching across paper with the determined rhythm of a kid who has accepted that math doesn't stop just because your house is inside a mountain. Willa's hand rests on the back of my chair. Rachel refills my water glass without being asked.
The normalcy of it presses against something inside me that I've kept locked for a long time.
"I like your hair," Rachel says, with genuine curiosity rather than the performative interest I've learned to identify and dismiss. "How do you maintain the color? The rainbow must be a process."
"Bleach, semi-permanent dye, and a willingness to destroy hotel towels," I say, and the response surprises me because it's honest and delivered without the flat affect I default to with strangers.
Something about Rachel's straightforward curiosity bypasses the translation layer I usually require for social interaction.
Rachel laughs. The sound is easy and real, and Willa smiles beside me.
The moment is small and unremarkable and sits in my ribs like a stone dropped into still water.
Across the communal area, Tommy is leaning against the counter with a coffee mug in one hand and his glasses slightly crooked. He's watching the room, the team, the whole picture.
When his gaze passes over me, it carries something specific and precise. The look of a man who has identified a new variable in his most critical system and is running every calculation required to integrate it properly.
The warmth of that gaze aimed at me from across a room full of his people makes my throat tight in a way I can't classify.
Then he raises his mug slightly. A private toast, an acknowledgment that I'm sitting with his family and eating real food.
The tenderness of the gesture is so quiet that only someone calibrated to his frequency would catch it.
I look away before my face does something I'll have to explain to Willa.
The food is good. I eat all of it. Rachel asks about my work in the vague, respectful way of someone who understands classified environments.
Willa tells a story about a medical emergency involving Stryker, superglue, and a refusal to submit to stitches that makes Lucas giggle and makes me exhale something that almost qualifies as a laugh.
By the time I return to the workspace, the protein bar and the loneliness of my workstation feel like artifacts from a previous version of myself.
I drop into my chair. Tommy is back at his station. "Rachel's a good cook," I say.
"I know. I've been eating her food since she got here. Welcome to the discovery." He spins his chair toward me. "You laughed in there. I heard it."
"I exhaled aggressively. It's different."
"It's really not."
"It is to me." I pull up my laptop. "And stop watching me from across rooms. It's conspicuous."
"Says the woman who monitored my encryption signatures for months before we met."
"That was professional surveillance. This is..." I gesture vaguely at the space between us.
"This is what?"
I don't answer. He knows what it is. The grin he's fighting tells me he knows exactly what it is, and the bastard is enjoying watching me refuse to name it.
Khalid shows up with his laptop and has the question all ready. Same thing I did before faculty office hours at university.
"I've been practicing the routing protocol," he says, pulling up a chair. "But see what happens here."
What he shows me is great progress. He understood the fundamentals well enough to attempt something ambitious, and the failure point is a conceptual gap rather than a technical error.
I pull my chair toward his screen. "Show me where it breaks."
He walks me through his logic. I listen without interrupting, tracking his reasoning, identifying the moment where his mental model diverges from the actual behavior of the system.
Tommy codes the fix and tests it. The third layer initializes clean, and Khalid’s expression shifts to something bright and unguarded and entirely too young for this mountain.