Chapter 6 #2
Voices ahead—muffled, casual, two people talking about nothing. A television playing somewhere. Lincoln counted heartbeats until the sound faded, until Bear’s hand dropped and they moved again.
Left at the first junction. The corridor stretched ahead of them, pools of shadow broken by intermittent emergency lighting. Lincoln’s pulse thudded against his ribs, steady but insistent, his body running calculations his conscious mind couldn’t access.
He spent most of his life behind a computer.
Preferred it that way. Screens were predictable, code was logical, and data didn’t require small talk.
But his father and uncles had never let that be an excuse.
Bollingers learned to defend themselves and the people who needed defending—it was nonnegotiable, woven into every family gathering and backyard sparring session.
And the friends who’d become family over the years—Theo, the Linear Tactical crew—had made sure Lincoln’s skills never got rusty. Just because he chose to work at a desk didn’t mean he couldn’t handle himself when the desk wasn’t an option.
Right at the second junction. Past a door with light bleeding underneath—the server room he’d identified on thermal, equipment fans humming behind thin walls. Past a stack of pallets. Past a chair sitting inexplicably in the middle of the hallway, like someone had been interrupted mid-task.
Two minutes fifteen seconds.
The building felt wrong in ways Lincoln couldn’t quantify.
The makeshift construction suggested temporary occupation, but the equipment suggested permanence.
The sleeping guards suggested routine, but the box suggested something else entirely.
Variables that didn’t resolve. Patterns that didn’t complete.
He filed it away. Later. He’d analyze it later.
Bear raised a fist again. They’d reached the northeast section.
The box was exactly where the thermal imaging had placed it—a metal container bolted to the concrete floor in what might have once been a loading area. Industrial steel, matte gray, four feet on every side. A heavy latch on the outside.
No lock.
Lincoln stared at that latch and felt something cold move through his chest. No lock because the person inside couldn’t reach it anyway. No lock because whoever had put them there wasn’t worried about any sort of rescue.
Bear and Derek took positions covering the approaches. Theo watched the corridor behind them. Lincoln approached the box alone, his heart thudding so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
Ninety seconds until patrol.
He lifted the latch. Metal scraped against metal—too loud, impossibly loud—but he didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. His fingers found the edge of the lid and pulled.
The lid swung open.
The woman was curled at the bottom, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around herself. Making herself small. Making herself fit. Auburn hair, tangled and matted. A frame that seemed too fragile for the steel box containing it.
She looked up.
Green-hazel eyes found his face, and Lincoln’s brain did something it had never done before.
It stopped.
No calculations. No analysis. No pattern recognition or probability assessment or logical framework. Just…loss of signal. A gap in the code where processing should be. He was looking at her face, and his mind had simply…stalled.
Two years of wondering. Two years of imagining possibilities, constructing hypothetical models, preparing himself for whatever reality might reveal. He’d been ready for her to be older. Younger. Plain. Beautiful. Ready for any variable.
He hadn’t been ready for this—for the way her eyes held his, for the particular architecture of her face, for the simple devastating fact of her existence.
His brain couldn’t categorize it. Couldn’t reduce it to data.
She was just there, real and present and looking at him, and every equation he’d ever trusted had gone silent.
“Mercury?”
Recognition crashed across her features—confusion to disbelief to something that looked like it might shatter her entirely.
“Binary?”
Her voice was barely a whisper. Hoarse. Broken. But the rhythm underneath was hers, unmistakably hers, the same cadence he’d learned to read through two years of keystrokes.
“Can you walk?”
She tried to move, to get up, but her legs buckled.
“I’ve got you.” Lincoln reached down and lifted her, one arm under her knees, one behind her back. She weighed almost nothing. “I’ve got you.”
Her fingers closed on his tactical vest, digging into the fabric. “You came. You actually came.”
“You sent coordinates. I received them.”
“I didn’t think—” She was trembling against him, shaking so hard he could feel it in his own bones. “I haven’t been in our chats. I was afraid you would think I ghosted you. That you wouldn’t see it.”
“I saw it.”
“Linc.” Bear’s voice in his ear, sharp and low. “Movement. Patrol’s early. Thirty seconds.”
Shit. Lincoln turned toward the exit route, Mercury pressed against his chest. He could feel wetness seeping through his shirt—tears or blood, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the twenty yards between them and the door.
“I’ve got her,” he said into comms. “Go. Now.”
He ran.
Fifteen yards. Ten. A shout echoed behind them—someone had found the empty box. The sound multiplied, more voices joining, footsteps heavy and fast on concrete.
“Flash out,” Theo called.
“Cover your ears and keep your eyes closed.” He pulled her closer, turning his face into her hair as the corridor exploded into white.
Screams. Cursing. Bodies hitting walls.
Lincoln ran again, keeping her pressed tight against his chest. They burst through the northeast door into cold night air, but he didn’t slow down. The fence was thirty yards away. Bear was already there, holding the cut section open, waving them through.
Derek first. Then Lincoln with Mercury clutched against him. Theo. Bear.
Behind them, warehouse doors banged open. Shouting. But no pursuit—they’d been caught flat-footed, still reeling from the flash grenades, still trying to understand what had just happened.
The vehicle was fifty yards out. It felt like fifty miles. Lincoln’s lungs burned. His arms burned. Mercury had gone quiet against his chest, her breath shallow, her grip on his vest loosening.
“Stay with me,” he said to her. “We’re almost there.”
Bear yanked the vehicle door open. Lincoln climbed into the back seat without letting go of Mercury. Derek was already behind the wheel, engine running. Theo piled in on Lincoln’s other side, pulling the door shut as the tires screamed against pavement.
They were moving. They were clear.
Lincoln looked through the rear window. Figures spilling from the warehouse, but no vehicles. No chase. They’d gotten out clean.
The adrenaline was still coursing through him—fight-or-flight chemicals that had nowhere to go now that the fighting and fleeing were done.
His hands were steady on Mercury’s back, but something underneath was shaking.
Something that had been wound tight for four days was finally, terrifyingly, starting to uncoil.
In his arms, Mercury had gone still. Eyes closed. Breathing shallow. Her body finally surrendering to the exhaustion it had been fighting for days. But her fingers were still tangled in his vest, still holding on like she was afraid he’d disappear if she let go.
“Is she okay?” Bear twisted in his seat.
“I don’t know.” Lincoln looked down at her face—the sharp line of her jaw, the flutter of her pulse in her throat, the way her brow creased even in unconsciousness. “I don’t know what they did to her.”
“Hospital’s twenty minutes.”
“No.” The word came from Mercury, barely audible. Her eyes didn’t open, but her grip tightened. “No hospital. They have—people. Everywhere. Please.”
Bear and Lincoln exchanged a look.
“Okay,” Lincoln said. “No hospital. We’ll figure something else out.”
Derek accelerated onto the highway. Denver’s lights faded behind them, swallowed by darkness and distance. The cab was quiet except for the hum of the engine and Mercury’s shallow breathing.
Lincoln looked down at the woman in his lap. Two years of coded poetry. Seven hundred and forty-three messages. He knew the rhythm of her typing. Knew when she was laughing by the speed of her responses. Knew she hummed when she was thinking because her keystrokes shifted into waltz time.
But he’d never known her face. Never heard her voice. Never touched her.
Now she was here—real and breathing and broken in ways he couldn’t yet calculate—and his brain still hadn’t come back online.
The equations were still silent. The frameworks were still dark.
All he had was the weight of her in his arms and the terrifying, unfamiliar sensation of not knowing what came next.
He didn’t know what they’d walked into. Didn’t know who those people were or what they wanted with her or why she’d been kept in a box like something to be stored and forgotten.
But she wasn’t in the box anymore.
For now, that was enough.