Chapter 4
Two months ago:
Mercury: Have you ever really needed someone?
Binary: Need is a variable I try to eliminate.
Mercury: That’s not an answer.
Binary: I needed my cousins when I was young. They translated the world for me.
Mercury: And now?
Binary: Now I have better systems.
Mercury: Systems can’t hold your hand in the dark, Binary.
Morning arrived as the clang of metal on metal.
Light stabbed into the box. Morgan uncurled slowly, every muscle screaming from another night spent contorted against unforgiving walls.
Three nights now. Three nights of her spine pressed into corners, her knees jammed against her chest, her body folded into shapes it was never meant to hold.
Her back spasmed. Her neck had locked at an angle sometime around what she guessed was midnight and hadn’t released since.
The cuts on her forearms—she’d stopped counting them—had crusted over in layers, the oldest pulling painfully against the newest whenever she moved.
“Up,” Novak said. “Time to work.”
Morgan rose on legs that didn’t want to hold her. The cuts on her forearms tugged as she moved—a latticework of healing wounds in various stages. The oldest had scabbed over, tight and itching. The newest ones from yesterday still wept if she bent her wrists wrong.
Randall’s knife had come out six times yesterday. The first few had his logic behind them—she’d paused too long, let her attention drift. But the others came while she was working steadily, doing nothing wrong.
“Keeps you sharp,” he’d snickered at his own pun, wiping the blade clean. The rest of the time, he didn’t bother explaining.
She flinched now at every shadow. Every time Randall shifted in his chair. Every time his hand moved toward his pocket. Her body had learned what her mind refused to accept: there was no pattern, no way to predict, no behavior that guaranteed safety.
She could be perfect and still bleed.
She blinked as she walked into her main working area. The warehouse had transformed overnight. Yesterday had been smaller—two workstations, just her and someone at a computer who never spoke. Randall had fed her data for hours: strings of numbers, names without context, codes she didn’t recognize.
Practice, he’d called it. Preparation.
But today, there were six computer stations—a row of laptops glowing in the dim space, each one manned by someone Morgan had never seen before. They didn’t look at her. Didn’t speak. Just typed with the focused intensity of people who knew exactly what they were doing.
A fire sale. She’d heard that term whispered between guards yesterday, and the scope of it became clear now.
Multiple hackers, coordinated attack, hitting systems from every angle at once.
These people knew what they were doing—their fingers moved with the kind of fluid certainty that came from years of experience.
Morgan didn’t belong here, at least not as any sort of computer expert.
She could navigate a database, sure. Build a digital catalog.
Find her way around a firewall if she had enough time and the right tools.
But this? This was elite-level work. The kind of operation Binary could probably coordinate in his sleep.
Binary.
Three nights. She’d missed three nights of their nine p.m. exchange. Three nights of silence where there should have been poetry and code and the quiet comfort of someone who understood how her mind worked.
He’d probably given up on her by now. Decided she’d ghosted him. No explanation. No goodbye. Just silence.
The binary stars have aligned.
Was he still typing it? Still waiting for her response? He’d probably already written her off.
She shoved the thought down. Grief was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
She knew why Randall had taken her. The article.
Her memory. A human hard drive that left no digital trail—that part, she understood.
But she didn’t understand why she was here for this.
A room full of elite hackers who didn’t need a librarian stumbling through firewalls beside them.
They were doing the real work. She was just…
sitting here. Absorbing whatever they put in front of her.
Randall guided her to her usual station with a hand on her shoulder—light pressure, almost paternal, far more unsettling than if he’d shoved her. “Big day, Miss Reece. Let’s make it count. My computer experts are ready to do their part.”
Morgan sat. Around her, the hackers waited in perfect stillness—coiled, ready, watching Randall.
“I don’t know how to hack,” she said. “Not at this level.”
Randall didn’t look at her. “You won’t need to. They open the doors. You walk through and remember what you see.”
He stood at the center of the room, phone pressed to his ear. Listening. Then: “We’re green.”
Six keyboards erupted at once.
Randall appeared at Morgan’s shoulder. “At most, we have a twelve-hour window before the systems lock us out. You’re going to absorb more data today than most people see in a lifetime.
Don’t waste my time.” His fingers tapped once against his pocket.
“The punishment for that would be much more than just a few cuts on the arms.”
The screen in front of Morgan flooded with information.
And didn’t stop.
The data kept coming. Each hacker fed information to her screen—a constant stream from six different breaches, six different systems. She caught glimpses of headers as the files flashed past. FBI. DEA. US Marshals. Treasury Department. Federal Reserve. Homeland Security.
The security protocols weren’t triggering. No lockouts, no alarms, no frantic system responses. It took her longer than it should to figure out why.
Because nothing was being downloaded. Nothing was being copied or transferred or saved to external drives—all things that would cause the systems to crack down.
She was the download. Her eyes on the screen, her mind absorbing the data—that left no digital footprint. The systems had no idea they were being robbed.
Her memory took it all, whether she wanted it or not. Every name. Every number. Every file.
Some of what they gave her had structure. Case files with names and dates. Financial records with account numbers. Server architectures with access protocols. She could see the shape of it, even if she didn’t understand the purpose.
But other times, Randall simply read to her.
“47.6062, -122.3321. 39.7392, -104.9903. 38.9072, -77.0369.”
Coordinates. She recognized the format. But coordinates to what?
“November 3rd. November 8th. November 15th.”
“What happens on those dates?”
The knife came out. She didn’t ask again.
“KILO-SEVEN-TANGO. ECHO-FOUR-NOVEMBER. brAVO-NINE-ALPHA.”
Codes. Military-style designations that meant nothing to her. She filed them away in her memory palace—a room full of locked boxes she couldn’t open.
Names came next. Dozens of them, no context attached.
“David Thornton. Rebecca Vance. Miguel Santos. Karen Whitmore.”
Witnesses? Criminals? Government agents? She had no way of knowing. Just names floating in the dark, waiting for meaning.
Sometimes he gave her numbers that looked like bank accounts. Sometimes strings of letters that might be passwords or might be code phrases. Once, a sequence of what sounded like call signs—“Raven,” “Blackwood,” “Compass”—followed by phone numbers.
“You don’t need to understand,” Randall said, watching her absorb it all. “Filing cabinets don’t ask questions.”
So, she didn’t. She memorized coordinates without knowing what she’d find there. Dates without knowing what would happen. Names without knowing if she was helping to save them or condemn them.
Hour after hour after hour, the data continued. Endlessly. The Federal Reserve caught on first that something was a little off. Soon, they were locked out of that. The DEA next. But the other systems hadn’t figured it out, so there was still plenty of information.
She wasn’t sure exactly when she realized something was going wrong in her head.
Between memorizing number and name, she tried to recall her apartment. The converted barn outside Whitefish. The bookshelves she’d built herself. The reading chair by the window.
The image came back blurred. Indistinct. Like looking through frosted glass.
She tried harder. Ms. Delacroix—the woman who’d taught her everything, who’d given her the only real guidance she’d ever known.
Morgan summoned her face and found it fuzzy.
The shape was there, but the details had softened.
The precise color of her eyes. The exact pattern of wrinkles at the corners of her smile.
Even Binary’s messages seemed distant. She could recall the words, but the feeling that had accompanied them—that warmth in her chest when his responses appeared—felt like something that had happened to someone else.
For the first time in her life, the things she wanted to remember were slipping. None of the data was, but would it start? Had she met her capacity?
One by one, the systems locked them out. But not before Morgan had absorbed way more data than they’d ever dreamed could be taken without being noticed.
As that data came slightly slower, she had more time to study the screens. Her blood froze as she saw some of the hackers’ keystrokes.
The access logs they were deliberately leaving showed her IP address. Her keystrokes.
They were leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs leading directly to her.
“You’re framing me.”
“Insurance.” Randall adjusted his cuffs, unconcerned. “Every hack has your fingerprints on it. If federal investigators find reason to look, which they won’t, they’ll have evidence of a rogue librarian who orchestrated the largest cyberattack in US history.”
Her hands went cold. “No one will believe that.”
“Won’t they?” That small, terrible smile. “A woman with perfect memory, working alone, no family to vouch for her character. You’re already a ghost. We’re just giving that ghost a criminal record. Right at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list, if we’ve done our job right.”