Chapter 4 #2
She stared at the screen. She wasn’t just their filing cabinet; she was their patsy. Even if she escaped, even if she somehow got free—the evidence would be waiting. Her digital fingerprints on every corrupted file, every breached database, every stolen secret.
The understanding landed like a blade between her ribs.
She was drowning in data she didn’t understand. Thousands of names and numbers and codes locked in her memory with no key to decode them. And the only people who knew what any of it meant were the people who’d made her the fall guy for all of it.
She was complicit. Permanently, indelibly complicit. And she didn’t even know what she was complicit in.
“No. I’m not going to do this. I can’t—”
Her head slammed against the desk. Stars exploded behind her eyes. Blood began to drip from her nose, spattering the keyboard in red drops. Randall’s hand remained on the back of her skull for a moment—not pressing, just resting there. A reminder of how easily he could do it again.
“I find repetition tedious, Miss Reece. I can’t is not a phrase I want to hear twice. Get back to work.”
She worked. Blood dripping. Hands shaking. More data flooding in. More puzzle pieces without a picture. More names and numbers and coordinates that meant nothing to her and everything to Randall.
Later—hours, maybe, time had lost all meaning—Randall’s voice carried through the wall.
Morgan went still at her keyboard, straining to hear. He was on the phone, pacing the corridor outside, and he didn’t know how well sound traveled in this place.
“Yes, she’s everything we hoped. Better, actually. The retention rate is remarkable.”
A pause. His footsteps coming closer, then retreating.
“The permanent facility is ready. We’ll move her there in a couple of days.”
Permanent facility.
“This location isn’t as secure as I’d like. Send transport to—” He rattled off coordinates, Morgan’s mind capturing them automatically. “I want her out of here by Thursday.” He paused briefly.
“No, she won’t be leaving. Ever. She knows too much at this point. She’s valuable, but she’s also a liability. Once we’ve extracted everything useful and established the new protocols, she’ll be retired.”
A soft laugh, almost admiring. “It really is extraordinary—she’s essentially a self-deleting hard drive. Very elegant solution.”
The footsteps faded. A door opened and closed somewhere distant.
A couple days.
After that, she’d disappear into a “permanent facility” and never leave. She’d become one more missing person, one more face on a poster that nobody would recognize.
Who knew if she ever would have access to a computer again. Right now was her only chance.
The browser was already open on the laptop. She stared at the screen, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat. Around her, the other hackers were messing around, their work done. Randall had stepped out for his phone call. Novak sat by the door, scrolling through his phone.
No one was paying attention to her.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. If she did this and got caught, Randall wouldn’t kill her—she was too valuable for that. But he’d make her wish he had.
But if she didn’t do this, she’d be living under Randall’s cruelty for the rest of her life.
There were so many risks here, but she had to take them. She opened the forum—their forum, the one where Mercury met Binary every night at nine—and started to type.
Emily Dickinson. “Because I could not stop for Death.”
But wrong. Deliberately, carefully wrong.
Her fingers trembled so badly, she had to retype twice.
She broke the meter in precise places, embedding her message in the syllable pattern.
An SOS hidden in the rhythm of nineteenth-century poetry—three letters that meant everything, followed by the coordinates Randall had rattled off on his phone call.
A message that would look like nothing to anyone who didn’t know her—
Novak’s chair scraped against concrete.
Morgan’s hand jerked toward the minimize button, but it was too late—he was already standing, already walking toward her. Her pulse roared in her ears. The poem sat on the screen, exposed, damning.
Please. Please don’t look closely.
He stopped beside her desk. Leaned over her shoulder. She could smell cigarette smoke and something sour, could feel the heat of him too close behind her.
His eyes scanned the screen.
The silence stretched for an eternity. Two seconds. Three. Morgan stopped breathing.
“The hell is that?”
“A poem.” Her voice came out remarkably steady, though she had no idea how. “Poetry helps me focus. I’m a librarian. I like words.”
He squinted at the screen. Emily Dickinson’s careful lines, the broken meter invisible to anyone who didn’t know to look for it. Just poetry. Just words arranged in lines.
“Huh.” He straightened, scratched the snake tattoo on his neck. “Weird.”
“What’s weird?”
Randall. Morgan’s stomach dropped. He’d appeared behind Novak, his gaze already on her screen.
“She’s writing poetry.” Novak jerked his chin toward her monitor. “Says it helps her focus.”
Randall stepped closer. Read the lines. Morgan’s heart stopped—actually stopped—as his eyes moved across the words she’d so carefully broken.
“Emily Dickinson,” he said. “Because I could not stop for Death.” He looked at her with something like amusement. “Morbid choice, Miss Reece.”
“I like Emily Dickinson.”
He studied her carefully. Then he turned away. “Let her have her poems.”
Morgan minimized the forum with shaking hands. For a long moment, she couldn’t see the screen—her vision had narrowed to a tunnel, edges dark and pulsing. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
The message was sent. Either Binary would see it, or he wouldn’t.
And even if he saw it, what then? She didn’t know who he was.
Didn’t know his name, his face, his life.
He could be a teenager typing from his parents’ basement.
He could be eighty years old. He could be on the other side of the world or in a wheelchair or have nothing but a laptop and good intentions.
Two years of messages, and she’d never once asked him for anything real.
Never pushed past the safe boundaries of their coded exchanges.
He struck her as someone who kept the world at arm’s length—brilliant but removed, more comfortable with data than people.
The kind of person who solved problems from behind a screen, not someone who kicked down doors.
She’d just sent an SOS to a stranger who might not want to get involved. Who might not be able to get involved, even if he wanted to.
But he was all she had.
When Novak took her back, the box didn’t feel smaller—it felt emptier.
The first night, the darkness had been a weight. Something pressing in, trying to crush her. She’d fought it with poetry, with counting, with thoughts of Binary waiting at his keyboard.
Tonight, the darkness felt like an absence. Like pieces of herself were dissolving into it, edges blurring, boundaries fading. She couldn’t tell where the metal walls ended and her own skin began.
Morgan curled into the only position that fit and tried to remember.
Binary’s messages. Their first exchange.
“Your code is inefficient. Line 347 could be compressed.”
“Not everything is about efficiency.”
“Explain.”
The words were there. But when she reached for what came next—the part that mattered, the part that had started everything—
“Sometimes beauty IS the…”
What was it? The next word. She’d said it. She’d gone back and read this exchange a thousand times. Why couldn’t she remember it?
“Sometimes beauty IS the…”
Her breath came faster. This wasn’t possible. She remembered everything. She’d remembered every word of every book she’d ever read, every conversation she’d ever had, every face and date and moment of her entire life.
The word was there. It had to be there. She could feel the shape of it, the weight of it, but when she reached—
Function.
“Sometimes beauty IS the function.”
Relief flooded through her, so intense it was almost painful. She clutched the reconstructed sentence like a lifeline, repeating it in the darkness until the syllables lost meaning.
Sometimes beauty IS the function. Sometimes beauty IS the function.
But the terror remained. For twenty-eight years, her memory had been absolute. Perfect. The one thing she could count on when everything else failed.
Now the darkness was taking the things she wanted to remember, while Randall’s data stayed sharp—47.6062, -122.3321. David Thornton. KILO-SEVEN-TANGO. November 3rd. Thousands of puzzle pieces rattling around in her skull, and she couldn’t forget a single one.
But Ms. Delacroix’s face was fading. Binary’s warmth was fading. Her own life was fading.
But she’d sent the message.
Binary noticed everything. He would see the broken meter. The SOS.
The rest was out of her hands.
Morgan pressed her forehead to her knees and whispered into the void.
“Please.”