Chapter 6
Seven months ago:
Binary: Why do you drink tea instead of coffee?
Mercury: Tea requires patience. Coffee is just impatience in a cup.
Binary: That’s not chemically accurate.
Mercury: Yes. But not everything needs to be.
The warehouse sat at the end of a dead-end street in Denver’s industrial district, surrounded by chain link fencing and the kind of darkness that swallowed sound.
Lincoln adjusted the thermal imaging scope and swept it across the building’s east face for the fourteenth time in the last hour. Same heat signatures. Same patrol patterns. Same single figure curled impossibly small in what his brain kept insisting couldn’t actually be a box.
Two hours. They’d been watching for two hours, and that figure hadn’t moved more than a few inches. Shifting position, his tactical mind supplied. Trying to find comfort where none existed.
“Anything new?” Bear’s voice came through the comms unit, low and steady. His cousin was positioned thirty yards to Lincoln’s left, behind a rusted shipping container.
“Negative. Two guards still on an eight-minute rotation. Four signatures stationary on the second floor. One isolated target, northeast corner.”
“Still in the box?”
Lincoln’s jaw tightened. “Still in the box.”
Two hours of watching that heat signature. Two hours of calculating patrol patterns and entry points, while somewhere inside that building, someone was curled in a space too small to stretch, too dark to see, too isolated to hope for rescue.
Unless they were hoping. Unless they’d sent coordinates in a poem and were counting seconds, waiting for someone to come.
If it was even her.
Lincoln forced himself to lower the scope. Staring wouldn’t change the math. They had to wait for the right window or they’d get themselves killed and leave Mercury worse off than before.
But the next patrol rotation should be in six minutes. Six minutes, and then a four-minute window. They could be inside in ten minutes if they moved now.
“We should go now.” Lincoln’s voice came out flatter than he intended. “We can make it. We can—”
“Not yet.” Derek shifted in the passenger seat beside him, his breath fogging in the cold. “We need to confirm the guard pattern is consistent. Give them one more rotation.”
“But…”
“Take a breath, Linc.”
“I’ve taken enough breaths. She’s been in that building for four days.”
“And she’ll be in there for another twenty minutes while we make sure we don’t get killed trying to get her out.”
Lincoln knew he was being managed, but he couldn’t deny his cousin was right.
“So let’s slow down. Run it again. Everything we know, everything we don’t. Because right now, you’re about to charge into an unknown building based on a reflection in a puddle.”
“It wasn’t just a puddle,” Lincoln muttered.
“I know. Go through it again.”
Lincoln had already explained twice during the drive. He didn’t mind explaining again—Derek wasn’t trying to back out. Neither were Bear or Theo. Derek was trying to give him something else to focus on. Besides that goddamned box.
It worked.
“I couldn’t access satellite imagery without triggering federal attention, and they’re already freaking out since this morning’s non-breach breach in their systems. So I pulled footage from every accessible camera in a six-block radius.
” Lincoln forced his eyes away from the warehouse, making sure all the data was perfect in his mind.
“A security system on the building across the street caught a reflection in standing water. Four nights ago, at approximately midnight, a van arrived. Someone exited carrying what appeared to be a body bag.”
“Appeared to be.”
“Weight distribution and dimensions consistent with an unconscious adult. They carried the body inside. The van left forty minutes later. Empty.”
“And you think that’s Mercury?”
“The timing correlates. She missed our first exchange four nights ago.”
Derek was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was careful. “Could be a trap. Someone intercepts her messages, figures out your codes, sends a fake SOS.”
“Possible.”
“Could be she’s part of whatever operation is running out of that building. Could be you’re the mark.”
“Also possible.”
“Could be that body bag was a rolled carpet and we’re about to commit felony breaking and entering for nothing.”
“Unlikely. But possible.”
“Okay.” Derek exhaled. “You know I’m just saying the stuff that needs to be said out loud.”
“I know. While also keeping me distracted.”
Derek smiled. “You know, for most of your life, you wouldn’t have even been able to recognize that.”
Theo’s voice cut in on the comms from his position near the fence line. “What’s the interior layout?”
Lincoln raised the scope again, grateful for the pivot to tactics.
“Six heat signatures total. Four clustered in what appear to be sleeping quarters, second floor, west side. Two on patrol—one covers the north corridor, one covers the south. They pass the northeast section every eight minutes. There’s a four-minute window where the target area is unobserved. ”
“Entry point?” Bear asked.
“Side door, northeast corner. Electronic lock. I can bypass it in under thirty seconds.”
“And if you can’t?”
“I brought cutters that’ll go through pretty much anything.” That was Theo—Linear Tactical’s gear room had everything.
Lincoln allowed himself a small exhale. Four hours ago, he’d been ready to make this drive alone. Bear had stopped him before he’d even made it out of his house.
“You’re not doing this by yourself.”
“I don’t have time to—”
“Make time. Twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes had turned into Bear calling Derek and Theo. Both had shown up at Lincoln’s compound within the hour, already pulling gear from their trucks. Nobody had asked for explanations. Nobody had demanded justification. Lincoln had needed them, and they’d come.
That was it. That was everything.
He’d spent the four-hour drive on his laptop, chasing every digital thread he could find.
The warehouse hadn’t been used in over two years, according to city records.
The lease was buried under a shell corporation registered in Delaware—layers of misdirection he’d unravel eventually, but not tonight.
Tonight, all that mattered was the thermal signature curled in that box.
“Tell me about the target,” Bear said.
Lincoln swept the scope to the northeast corner. The heat signature hadn’t moved—same impossible position, same four-foot container. “Single occupant in a confined space. Dimensions approximately four by four by four feet.”
“Fuck.” Theo’s voice had gone flat. “That’s a coffin. Can’t even stretch out.”
The comms went silent. Lincoln watched the heat signature shift slightly—knees drawing tighter, arms adjusting—and felt something twist in his chest.
“The occupant has been stationary for the entire observation period. Two hours, fourteen minutes. They shift occasionally but don’t leave the container.”
“Because they can’t.” Bear’s voice had changed. The tactical calm was still there, but something harder had crept underneath. “They’re locked in.”
“The latch is external. Yes.”
More silence. Lincoln could feel the calculation happening on the other end—three men recalibrating their understanding of what they were walking into.
“Well.” Derek’s voice was different now too. The skepticism hadn’t disappeared, but it had shifted into something colder. “That settles one question.”
“Which question?”
“Whether we’re the good guys tonight.” A pause. “Whatever else is going on in there, nobody who locks a person in a four-foot box is running a legitimate operation.”
Lincoln hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Good guys, bad guys—those were categories that required moral frameworks his brain didn’t naturally process. But Derek was right. Whatever variables remained unknown, this one had resolved.
“So that’s our target,” Derek continued. “We go in, we get to the box, we get them out. Even if it’s not Mercury, we’re not leaving them in there.”
Lincoln nodded. Mercury or not, someone needed rescue.
Bear made a sound that might have been approval. “Rules of engagement?”
“We don’t engage unless forced. We don’t clear rooms. We don’t investigate. We avoid contact with the sleeping signatures, and we work around the patrol rotation. In and out.”
The words came out clean and tactical. Lincoln had said them before on other operations, in other contexts.
But this wasn’t another operation. Somewhere inside that building, in a space too small to stand, was the person who’d kept him company for two years.
The person who typed in waltz time when she was thinking.
The person who’d sent him poetry with a cry for help buried in the broken meter.
He knew it was her.
“And if things go sideways?” Derek asked.
“Flash grenades to cover extraction. Theo has four.”
These men had driven through the night because Lincoln asked. He didn’t have words for what that meant—had never been good at finding words for things that mattered. He filed it away. Data to be processed later, when Mercury was safe. When he could think again.
He checked his watch. Patrol was passing the northeast section now. Four minutes starting…now. “We move in ninety seconds. Questions?”
Silence.
“Then let’s go.”
The lock took nineteen seconds.
Lincoln pocketed the bypass kit and eased the door open, Bear already flowing through the gap with his weapon raised. Derek followed, then Lincoln, then Theo pulling rear security. The door closed behind them with barely a whisper.
They moved in formation through the darkness. The interior matched Lincoln’s thermal projections: industrial space carved into makeshift rooms, extension cords snaking across concrete, the hum of electronic equipment somewhere deeper in the building.
Three minutes forty-two seconds until the next patrol pass.
Bear held up a fist. They stopped.