Chapter 5
One year ago:
Mercury: I trust you. You know that, right?
Binary: Trust is difficult to quantify.
Mercury: That’s not an answer.
Binary: Yes. I know. The data supports reciprocation.
Mercury: “The data supports reciprocation.” That might be the most romantic thing you’ve ever said.
Binary: Stay safe, stranger.
Mercury: Stay strange, safety.
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing there.” Lincoln pinched the bridge of his nose and stared at the data scrolling across his center monitor. Deputy Director Hawkins from Treasury had been on the line for twelve minutes—eleven minutes longer than this conversation warranted.
“The access logs show—”
“The access logs show someone looked. That’s it. No downloads, no data extraction, no malware signatures. Someone knocked on the door and didn’t come in.”
“But the access pattern—”
“Is unusual. I agree.” Lincoln minimized the Treasury data and pulled up the pattern analysis he’d been running.
Six agencies in the last twenty-four hours—FBI, Marshals, Treasury, Homeland, Federal Reserve, DEA. His contacts from all six groups had come to him independently at different times, each at their own distinct level of hysteria.
They all showed the same anomaly: access without action. None of them were talking to each other—typical—which meant Lincoln was the only one who saw the full picture.
“But unusual isn’t the same as compromised,” he continued. “You’re looking at reconnaissance at best. Someone mapping your systems without taking anything. Testing your firewalls and finding them solid.”
“But it doesn’t concern you?”
Under normal circumstances, Lincoln would find this fascinating, if not necessarily disturbing.
Six federal systems probed simultaneously, no trace of extraction, no obvious motive.
It was the kind of puzzle his brain usually devoured.
Hell, it was the kind of thing he would’ve tried just for kicks.
When he was about four years old. Now it would be way too simple.
His eyes drifted to the third monitor from the left. The dark web portal sat open, its interface primitive and familiar. Silent.
“Mr. Bollinger?”
“I’ll flag it if anything changes.” He was already reaching for the disconnect. “Your systems aren’t compromised. Someone’s just window-shopping. It happens. Probably some bored middle schoolers.”
He ended the call before Hawkins could respond.
The command center hummed around him—six monitors glowing, servers cycling through their quiet rhythms, everything functioning exactly as designed.
Lincoln had built this room to be the one place his brain could operate without friction.
No social variables. No unpredictable humans.
Just data and logic and problems that had solutions.
The third monitor had no solutions.
He’d checked the forum forty-three times in three days. Not that he was counting. Except he was always counting—his brain didn’t know how to stop.
She was just gone.
He could find her. Three nights ago, she’d mentioned Montana—the first real location she’d ever given him.
With that thread to pull, he could probably have a name within hours.
He’d thought about it. More than thought about it.
His fingers had hovered over the keyboard a dozen times, ready to begin the search.
But that would violate everything they’d built. Two years of trust, founded on the understanding that their connection existed outside the real world. Safe in shadows, she’d called it once. Their anonymity was the architecture that held the whole thing up.
So he’d respected the rules.
And she’d left anyway.
The perimeter alert chimed—Bear’s truck on the drive, signature already verified by the gate system. Lincoln glanced at the time. 3:47 p.m. Their sparring session. He’d forgotten.
He was still staring at the silent forum when Bear appeared in the doorway, gym bag over his shoulder.
“You know there’s a whole world outside these screens, right?”
“I’m aware of the world. I prefer my screens.”
Bear crossed the room and dropped into the chair beside him, uninvited but not unwelcome. That was the thing about his cousin—Bear never waited for invitations, but he also never pushed where he wasn’t wanted.
“You look like hell, cuz.”
“That’s not quantifiable.”
“It is when I’ve known you for thirty years.” Bear nodded toward the monitors. “Another government contract?”
“Nah. Just people reaching out. Treasury. They think they’ve been hacked.”
“Have they?”
“No.” Lincoln closed the Treasury data. Left the forum open. “Someone accessed their systems without taking anything. Same pattern across six agencies in the last day. It’s reconnaissance, not theft.”
“Sounds like something you’d usually find interesting.”
“It should be.”
Bear was quiet for a moment. His eyes moved across the monitors, cataloging, assessing. Lincoln could feel the questions forming. Bear had always been too observant for his own good.
“Come on.” Bear surprised him instead. He stood, slinging his gym bag back over his shoulder. “You need to hit something.”
The gym occupied the entire east wing of the basement—mats, heavy bags, a full weight setup, a sparring ring in the corner that Bear had helped him install three years ago.
Lincoln had designed the space for efficiency: climate-controlled, soundproofed, every piece of equipment positioned for optimal workflow.
Bear had called it “aggressively functional” and then proceeded to leave his gear scattered across three different benches.
They wrapped their hands in silence. Stretched. Bear moved through his warm-up routine with the easy grace of someone who’d been training since childhood. Uncle Finn had started teaching them both when they were barely old enough to make a fist.
Lincoln’s body knew the movements, but his mind kept drifting. The silent forum. The empty space where Mercury should be.
“You ready?”
He wasn’t. He stepped into the sparring ring anyway.
The first exchange was sloppy. Lincoln threw a jab that Bear slipped easily, then ate a counter he should have seen coming. The impact snapped his head back, more surprise than pain.
“You’re telegraphing.” Bear reset, bouncing on his toes. “Try again.”
Lincoln shook out his shoulders. Came in again. Jab, cross, hook—technically correct, but the timing was off. Bear caught his hook on a forearm block and answered with a leg kick that buckled Lincoln’s stance.
“What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s twice I’ve hit you with the same kick. You always check it.”
Bear was right. He reset. Threw a front kick that Bear sidestepped, then overcommitted on the follow-up and caught an elbow to the ribs for his trouble. His lungs seized. He stepped back, hands up, trying to find his rhythm.
It wasn’t there. His body was in the ring, but his brain was upstairs, staring at a silent screen, like it had been for nearly four days.
Bear pressed the advantage—a level change into a takedown attempt that Lincoln sprawled on instinct. But the scramble that followed was ugly, all reaction and no strategy. Bear ended up in side control, then mount, and Lincoln tapped before the arm isolation was even locked in.
“Okay.” Bear rolled off him, sat back on the mat. He didn’t stand up. Didn’t reset for another round. Just sat there, breathing, waiting.
Lincoln stayed on his back, staring at the ceiling. The silence stretched.
Bear had always been good at this—knowing when to push and when to just be present.
He’d done it when they were kids, when Lincoln’s brain would short-circuit from too much sensory input and he’d need to hide in a closet until the world made sense again.
Bear would just sit outside the door. Not talking. Not demanding. Just there.
“There’s someone.” The words came out before Lincoln decided to say them.
Bear didn’t move. “Okay.”
“Online. On a…forum.” Lincoln sat up slowly, wrapping his arms around his knees. “We’ve been talking for two years.”
“Talking about what?”
“Everything. Nothing. Security vulnerabilities. Poetry. The nature of memory.” He paused, trying to find words for something he’d never had to explain. “She quotes literature. I correct her meter. We write in code.”
“Code like…programming?”
“Code like secrets hidden in sonnets. Messages embedded in mathematical sequences.” Lincoln picked at the tape on his left hand.
“She appeared on a security forum two years ago. Took apart someone’s encryption like it was a Sunday crossword.
I was…impressed. I said something about her methodology. She responded.”
“And you’ve been talking ever since?”
“Every night. Nine p.m. She types a greeting, I type a greeting. We exchange…things.”
Bear was quiet for a moment. “What kinds of things?”
“Ideas. Observations. Pieces of ourselves, wrapped in ciphers.” Lincoln heard how it sounded—strange, obsessive, impossible to explain to someone who lived in the normal world. “I know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense.” Bear shifted, drawing one knee up. “Two years is a long time. You know her.”
“I don’t know her name. Her face. Anything real.”
“You know how she thinks. How she writes. What makes her laugh.” Bear shrugged. “Seems pretty real to me.”
Lincoln didn’t have a response to that.
“So what happened?”
The question sat between them. Lincoln stared at the mat, at the grid of lines marking the training space, at anything other than his cousin’s patient face.
“She’s gone.”
“Gone, how?”
“I don’t know. Three nights ago, just nothing.” His voice came out emotionless, despite the feelings roiling inside him. “She’s never missed our exchange. Not once in two years. Never even late. And then…gone.”
Bear nodded slowly. “You try to find her?”
“I could. I have the skills.” Lincoln shook his head. “But that would violate everything we built. We stayed anonymous for a reason. It was the foundation.”
“So, you’re just…waiting?”
“I was waiting. Now I think she’s done. She made a choice, and the choice was to leave without explanation.”
Bear was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful. “Linc, that sounds like it hurts.”
“That’s irrational.” The response was automatic.
“She and I never met. I don’t even know her name.
There’s no logical reason for—” He stopped.
Started again. “I can’t focus on work that should interest me.
Six federal systems got probed simultaneously, and I don’t care.
I keep checking the forum, even though I know nothing will be there.
And there’s this…hollow sensation. In my chest. It serves no biological purpose. ”
“That’s grief, cousin.”
“Grief is for loss. I didn’t lose anything. I never had anything to lose.”
“Two years of connection isn’t nothing.” Bear’s voice was gentle in a way that made Lincoln’s throat tight. “Your brain works different from most people’s. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel things. Just means you don’t always recognize what you’re feeling.”
Lincoln turned that over. The hollow sensation. The inability to focus. The way his eyes kept drifting to the third monitor, hoping for something that wouldn’t come.
It hurt.
“It’s irrational,” he said again, but quieter this time.
“Feelings usually are.” Bear clapped him on the shoulder—brief, grounding. “Doesn’t make them less real.”
They sat in silence for another minute. Then Bear pushed himself to his feet and offered Lincoln a hand.
“Come on. Let’s get some water. You can show me this mysterious forum.”
Lincoln took the hand. Let his cousin pull him up.
Upstairs, the command center waited. Monitors glowing, servers humming, the dark web portal still open on the third screen from the left.
Lincoln settled into his chair. Bear grabbed a water bottle from the mini fridge in the corner and leaned against the wall, watching.
Seven hundred and forty-three messages. Two years of coded poetry and mathematical sequences and the closest thing to real connection Lincoln had ever found outside his family. He’d saved every exchange, archived them with more care than he’d ever given his company’s financial records.
It was time to let go.
His fingers moved to the keyboard. He’d delete the archive first. Then close the forum account. Clean break. Logical. Efficient. No point holding on to 743 messages from someone who’d left without a word.
He opened the forum.
The message was there.
Lincoln’s hand froze over the keyboard. Time stamp from hours ago—he’d missed it somehow, too distracted by Treasury calls and hollow chest sensations to check. The format was familiar: Emily Dickinson, one of Mercury’s favorites.
“Is that from today?” Bear straightened from the wall. “That’s good, right? She’s back? More poems?”
Lincoln didn’t answer. His eyes were moving across the lines, and everything in him had gone still.
Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me—
The words were right. The structure was right. But the meter was wrong.
Mercury never got Dickinson wrong. She could recite the entire collected works from memory. She’d proven it once, during a three-hour exchange that had left Lincoln genuinely awed. He didn’t know how she did it, but in two years, she had never made a single error.
Unless the mistakes were intentional.
His fingers were already moving, muscle memory taking over. Extracting the pattern. Counting syllables. Mapping the breaks against what should be there.
Three short. Three long. Three short.
SOS.
His chest went cold.
“Linc?” Bear had moved closer, reading the tension in Lincoln’s shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
Lincoln didn’t answer. He was already running the rest of it—the deliberate errors forming a secondary pattern, a sequence of numbers that resolved into coordinates.
His other hand pulled up a map. Cross-referenced the location. Industrial district. Denver.
A warehouse.
“Linc.” Bear’s voice had sharpened. “What’s going on, man?”
Lincoln stared at the screen. At the SOS buried in broken poetry. At the coordinates leading to a concrete building in Colorado.
She hadn’t left. She hadn’t ghosted him. She’d been taken, and she’d found a way to tell him—a message that would look like nothing to anyone who didn’t know her, didn’t know their codes, didn’t know that Mercury never made mistakes with Dickinson.
Three nights of silence. Three nights of thinking she’d abandoned him while she’d been—
He couldn’t finish that thought.
Lincoln looked at his cousin. “I think we’re going to need to stage a rescue.”