Chapter 3
Eighteen months ago:
Mercury: Do you feel safe? In general, I mean. In your life.
Binary: Define safe.
Mercury: Protected. Certain that tomorrow will come.
Binary: Tomorrow is a mathematical inevitability. The Earth rotates. Time progresses.
Mercury: That’s not what I meant.
Binary: I know. But your question has no logical answer. Safety is an illusion we construct to function.
Mercury: That’s bleak, Binary.
Binary: Is it? I find it freeing. If safety doesn’t exist, we can stop searching for it. We can just…be.
Mercury: Sometimes I think you’re the sanest person I know.
Binary: That’s statistically unlikely, given our sample size of two.
Mercury: See? Sanest person I know.
Consciousness came back in fragments.
Concrete. Cold and rough against her cheek. A single bulb swinging somewhere above her, casting shadows that moved like living things across gray walls. The smell hit her next—industrial, chemical, the particular staleness of a space that had never known fresh air.
Morgan tried to move and discovered her hands were bound behind her back. Zip ties. The plastic bit into her wrists when she tested them, sharp enough to draw blood if she pulled too hard.
Her blue dress was torn at the shoulder. She could feel the cool air against exposed skin, could see the ragged edge of fabric—one that didn’t actually match the Montana sky—in her peripheral vision.
A door opened somewhere behind her.
Footsteps. Measured. Unhurried. The click of expensive shoes on concrete.
“Miss Reece. You’re awake.”
It was the man from the garage. She forced herself to sit up, to turn, to face whatever came next with her eyes open.
He stood in the doorway like he was surveying a new office. Expensive suit, perfectly tailored. Calm demeanor. But it was his posture that unsettled her most: shoulders relaxed, hands loose at his sides, weight balanced. The posture of a man who had never once doubted a decision he’d made.
“Where am I?”
“Somewhere quiet.” He stepped closer, and she fought the urge to scramble backward. “Somewhere we can work without interruption.”
“Work?”
“You have a very particular skill set, Miss Reece. We’ve been looking for someone like you for quite some time.
” He crouched down to her level, and his eyes were the worst part—not cruel, not angry.
Curious. The way a researcher might examine a new specimen.
“The article about you was quite illuminating. A memory that never forgets. Every number, every face, every detail—stored forever.”
Her stomach dropped.
The article. All those details she’d let them print—her abilities, her job, her face. She might as well have painted a target on her own back.
“We’re going to need you to prove it.” The man’s voice was as flat as his eyes. “Prove your memory is what the article claims.”
Another man stepped into the room—heavier, rougher, with a tattoo of a snake coiling up his neck. “Ready when you are, Mr. Randall.”
Randall. She filed the name away automatically—first useful data since waking up.
“Fifty numbers,” Randall took a clipboard from the guard. “I’ll read them once. You’ll recite them back.”
Morgan’s mind raced. She didn’t know what they wanted.
Didn’t know why her memory mattered to men who kidnapped women from parking garages.
But every instinct she had—honed through a lifetime of making people uncomfortable—screamed at her to hide.
To be less. To not let them see what she could really do.
She looked at the second man’s eyes. Just as flat and empty as Randall’s.
Randall began reading. “7. 23. 891. 4. 562. 19. 3847…”
The numbers flowed into her mind automatically, each one finding its place in the architecture of her memory. She couldn’t stop it any more than she could stop breathing. By the time he finished, all fifty were arranged in perfect sequence, ready to be recalled.
She deliberately scrambled them.
“7. 23. 562. 891… No, wait. 4. 19. 847… 3847?” She let her voice shake, let confusion creep across her face. “I’m sorry, I—the reporter, she exaggerated. I’m good with numbers but not like…It’s not like a recording—”
Snake tattoo man snorted. “See? I told you that article was exaggerating. Nobody can do what that article said she could do.”
Randall’s demeanor shifted. The assessment in his eyes went cold, clicking over to a different calculation entirely.
“Then she’s useless. Kill her and get rid of the body.” He nodded to the guard.
The gun came out so fast Morgan barely registered the motion. Black metal. Barrel pointed at her forehead. The guard’s finger already on the trigger.
“Wait!” The word tore out of her. “Let me try again. I was nervous. Please. Let me try again.”
Silence stretched. The gun didn’t waver.
“One more chance,” Randall said quietly. “Fail, and you’re dead.”
He read a new sequence. Different numbers, same length, same flat delivery.
This time, Morgan recited them back perfectly. She didn’t have any other choice if she wanted to stay alive. Every digit in order, no hesitation, no mistakes. Her voice came out steady even though her hands were shaking behind her back.
When she finished, Randall smiled. It was a small expression, barely a curve of lips, but something about it made her skin crawl. The smile of a man who’d just confirmed an investment would pay off.
“Good.” He stood, brushing invisible dust from his trousers. “Don’t lie to me again. I find dishonesty tedious. Novak. Get her ready.”
Snake tattoo Novak cut the zip ties. Blood rushed back into her fingers, the pain sharp and prickling—she bit down hard on her lip to keep from crying out.
They sat her at a metal table with a laptop open in front of her—shipping manifests, routes, schedules scrolling across the screen. Digital files they could delete once she’d absorbed them.
They were using her as a human hard drive. A backup that no one could hack or trace.
Randall stood behind her, close enough that she could smell his cologne. Something expensive. Something that didn’t belong in this concrete hell.
“Memorize everything,” he said. “Every number, every location, every date.”
“What is this?”
“Shipment of twenty-three units arriving Tuesday.” He tapped a column of numbers. “Transfer points in three states. You’ll learn the entire network.”
Units. She assumed drugs. Weapons, maybe. Something illegal enough to require a human database instead of digital records.
She started reading. The information flowed in—dates, coordinates, names that were probably aliases, quantities measured in numbers she didn’t yet understand.
“Faster,” Randall said.
“I’m going as fast as—”
“Do it faster.”
She picked up as much speed as she could. But then she paused too long on the next manifest, trying to make sense of the routing codes.
Randall pulled a folding knife from his pocket. The blade was short—two inches, maybe—and very clean. He pushed up her sleeve, exposing the soft skin of her inner forearm.
“No, please—”
The cut was shallow. Precise. A thin line of red welling up, no longer than her thumbnail. It burned like fire, and she heard herself making a sound—high and animal and nothing like her own voice.
“Every time you slow down,” Randall said, wiping the blade on his pocket square, “we add another. Every time you ask a question I haven’t invited, another.
These will scar, Miss Reece. By the end of the week, your arms will tell the story of every mistake you’ve made.
” He folded the knife and slipped it back into his pocket.
“Or you can work efficiently, and we won’t need to have this conversation again. ”
Twenty minutes later, her hand hesitated over the keyboard.
She didn’t ask the question. But he’d seen the pause.
The second cut was parallel to the first.
“Your mind is the only thing keeping you alive,” Randall said, not looking up from her arm. “I trust that’s sufficient motivation.”
Hours passed. The manifests blurred together, but every detail lodged itself in her memory anyway.
At some point, Randall had left—she didn’t remember when, only that he’d added four more cuts to her arm before he went.
Six thin lines now, parallel as railroad tracks.
They weren’t bleeding much anymore, but the pain was constant, a low burn that flared every time she moved her wrist.
What would they do when they ran out of places on her arm? Where would they cut next?
When the work finally stopped, Novak led her down a corridor lined with rusted equipment and stacked crates. Industrial. Abandoned. The kind of place where things were stored and forgotten.
He stopped at a metal box bolted to the floor. Four feet by four feet, she estimated. A cube barely large enough to hold a person if they curled up tight.
Novak’s expression didn’t change. “Get in.”
“I can’t—there’s no room to—”
He grabbed her arm and shoved. Morgan stumbled inside, her body folding awkwardly against metal walls that pressed in from every direction. She couldn’t stand. Couldn’t stretch out. Could barely breathe.
The door clanged shut.
Darkness. Complete and absolute. Not a sliver of light, not a hint of the world outside. Just black and cold and the sound of her own ragged breathing echoing off metal walls.
Morgan wasn’t claustrophobic. She’d never minded small spaces, tight corners, crowded rooms. But this was different. This darkness had weight. It pressed against her skin, filled her lungs, seeped into the spaces behind her eyes.
She had no sense of time. No window, no clock, no way to mark the hours except the rhythm of her own heartbeat. She started counting. Seconds to minutes, her internal clock ticking away in the void.
Nine p.m. It had to be close to nine p.m.
She’d missed last night. Unconscious either in that van or this warehouse while Binary waited for a message that never came. Had he worried? Had he assumed she was done, that their two years of coded poetry had ended without explanation?
And now she was going to miss tonight too.
She imagined him at his keyboard, typing their greeting into the void. “The binary stars have aligned.” Waiting. Refreshing. Waiting longer.
Mercury?
Two years. Not once had she missed their nine p.m. exchange. Now she’d missed two nights in a row, and he had no way of knowing what happened.
Would he keep waiting? Or would he decide she’d abandoned him and move on?
He was the only person in the world who knew her.
Not her face, not her name, not the sound of her voice—but her.
The way her mind worked. The patterns she fell into.
The person she was underneath the memory that made everyone else uncomfortable.
Two years of messages, and he’d never once called her strange or unsettling or too much.
She couldn’t lose that. She couldn’t lose him—the only person who’d ever made her feel like her mind was a gift instead of a burden.
She pressed her fists against her mouth to muffle the sound, but the tears came anyway. She started reciting poetry to keep herself anchored—Dickinson first, then Frost, then whatever her mind reached for in the dark. The rhythm and the words were the only things that felt real.
“I dwell in Possibility,” she whispered, “a fairer House than Prose.”
The darkness didn’t answer.