Chapter 7
Fourteen months ago:
Mercury: What does home feel like to you?
Binary: Reduced variables. Predictable patterns. Absence of chaos.
Mercury: That sounds lonely.
Binary: Does it? I find it peaceful.
Mercury: Maybe peace and loneliness feel the same when you’ve had too much of either.
Binary: That’s surprisingly profound for 9:47 p.m.
Mercury: I contain multitudes. Whitman said so.
Binary: Whitman said that about himself. You’re misattributing.
Mercury: Maybe I’m just borrowing.
The world came in fragments.
Voices first—low and steady, the particular cadence of men who were trying not to wake someone.
Morgan caught words without meaning: compound, secure, she’s been out for twenty minutes.
The hum of an engine beneath her. The smell of leather seats and something else, something clean and unfamiliar that her exhausted brain couldn’t categorize.
A hand adjusted a blanket around her shoulders, and she flinched.
“Easy.” Binary’s voice. Close. Real. “You’re safe.”
Safe. The word slid through her consciousness like water through fingers. They’d used it hundreds of times in their sign-offs. Stay safe, stranger. But her body didn’t understand the concept anymore. Her body only knew the box, the knife, the endless flood of data she couldn’t stop absorbing.
She tried to open her eyes. The darkness behind her lids was gentler than the darkness of the box—no metal walls pressing in, no latch she couldn’t reach—but her eyelids felt weighted. Heavy. Like someone had filled them with sand when she wasn’t paying attention.
“How much longer?” A different voice. Deeper. The one Binary had called Bear, she thought, though she couldn’t be certain of anything right now.
“Forty minutes to Linc’s place. Maybe less if we push it. Annie is waiting at the house.”
“We’re not being followed.” Binary again. “We’re clear.”
Morgan wanted to tell him that clear didn’t mean safe, but the darkness pulled her back under before she could respond.
The next fragment was colder.
Wind against her face. The sudden absence of the vehicle’s warmth. She was being lifted—arms under her knees, behind her back—and her body went rigid before her mind caught up.
“It’s me.” Binary’s voice in her ear. “Just me. We’re home.”
Home. Another word that didn’t compute.
She forced her eyes open.
Lights. Motion sensor lights, flooding the darkness with harsh white illumination as they triggered one after another.
A driveway that seemed to stretch forever, winding through trees she couldn’t identify.
Gates behind them—she’d heard them open, metal grinding against metal—and ahead, a structure that her tired brain could only process in pieces.
Stone. Glass. Multiple levels rising against a sky full of stars. Security cameras mounted at intervals she automatically cataloged: twelve degrees of coverage overlap, no blind spots visible from this angle. Reinforced doors. A garage that looked like it could hold six vehicles, maybe more.
“You live in a fortress,” she said. Her voice came out wrong—scratchy, thin, like it belonged to someone else.
“I live in a secure residential compound with adequate defensive infrastructure.”
“Same thing.”
The front door opened as they approached—automatic, keyed to something she couldn’t see.
More lights inside, warm this time instead of harsh.
Morgan’s brain kept cataloging even as she tried to make it stop: hardwood floors, high ceilings, minimal furniture arranged with geometric precision.
No clutter. No photographs on the walls.
Everything functional, everything in its place.
It looked exactly like she’d imagined Binary’s space would look. Except much bigger.
The other men filed in behind them. She heard their footsteps, their voices, but the words blurred together. Someone called out a name—Bear again, she thought—and another voice responded. How many of them were there? Four? Five? She couldn’t make herself care enough to try to actually count.
Her brain had spent four days absorbing everything, whether she wanted to or not.
Names, numbers, coordinates, the exact pattern of cuts on her arms. Now it was doing something different.
Now it was keeping information out, like a door slammed shut against a flood.
The men’s faces wouldn’t stay in her memory.
Their names slipped away as soon as she heard them.
Everyone except Bear. That name stuck because it didn’t sound like a name at all. It sounded like what he probably was—big and solid and dangerous in a way that should have frightened her but didn’t.
“Aunt Annie’s waiting in the study.” One of the others. She couldn’t see his face.
“Good.” Binary’s arms tightened around her, just slightly. “Tell her we’re coming.”
Footsteps retreated. A door opened and closed somewhere else in the house. Morgan let her head fall against Binary’s shoulder because holding it up required energy she didn’t have.
“Who’s Aunt Annie?”
“Dr. Anne Mackay. She’s not actually my aunt—she’s Derek’s mother-in-law. Wife of Zac Mackay, one of the men who founded Linear Tactical.” He paused, seeming to realize this information meant nothing to her. “She’s a doctor. She’ll help.”
Doctor.
Morgan’s whole body went cold.
“No.”
“You need medical attention. The cuts on your arms are showing signs of infection, and based on your physical presentation, you’re severely dehydrated—”
“Please.” She was shaking now. She could feel it starting in her hands and spreading outward, a tremor she couldn’t control. “I don’t want anyone else touching me.”
Binary stopped walking. She felt him adjust his hold, felt him looking down at her even though she couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. No one touches you without your permission. I’ll make sure of it. But just let Annie take a look at you, okay? She’s very gentle.”
The study was smaller than she’d expected.
Warmer. A woman stood near a leather sofa, medical bag open on the coffee table, hands clasped in front of her.
Late fifties, maybe early sixties. Gray-streaked hair pulled back from a face that had the particular patience of someone who’d spent decades dealing with people in crisis.
Binary set Morgan down on the sofa. Her legs wouldn’t hold her—she knew that without trying—so she didn’t attempt to stand. Just sat there, hands fisted in her lap, unable to stop cataloging exits and distances.
“Hi, I’m Annie.” Her voice was calm. Unhurried. She took a step forward, hand extended.
Morgan flinched back before she could stop herself.
Annie’s hand dropped immediately. She retreated to where she’d been standing, expression shifting into something careful. “Okay. No touching until you’re ready.”
Morgan nodded.
“I know this is hard,” Annie said. She hadn’t moved closer.
Hadn’t reached for her instruments. Just stood there, giving Morgan space.
“You’ve been through something terrible, and the last thing you need is more strangers putting their hands on you.
But I do need to assess your injuries—make sure nothing is critical. Can we work out a way to do that?”
Morgan’s gaze darted to Binary. He was standing near the door, arms crossed, watching the interaction with an expression she couldn’t read.
“Is it okay if we have Lincoln wait outside? I think you might feel more comfortable if it’s just us girls for a few minutes. Then he can come back.”
“Lincoln,” Morgan whispered. Binary’s name was Lincoln.
Annie looked confused. “Yes, Lincoln. Is that okay?”
He moved from the door and came to crouch in front of her. He gave her space, didn’t crowd her, but made it so they were eye to eye.
“My real name is Lincoln.”
“My name is Morgan.”
“Morgan.” He said it like he was trying it out, tasting the syllables on his tongue. “It’s nice to meet you.”
She nodded. The words should’ve felt silly, given the number of hours they’d spent talking to each other, but they didn’t.
“I’ll be right outside the door, okay? Annie is the best doctor I’ve ever known, and I would trust—have trusted her—with my life.”
“Okay. Please stay right there, though.”
“I will not move from that door. I promise.”
It was enough. She nodded, and he was gone.
Annie waited until Morgan looked at her again. “I’m going to tell you everything before I do it. Every touch, every instrument, every step. You say stop, we stop. Deal?”
Morgan’s hands were still shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs, trying to make them behave.
“Deal.”
The examination was slow.
Annie narrated every movement like she was reading a manual out loud. I’m going to take your pulse now. I’m going to shine this light in your eyes. I’m going to look at your arms—can you roll up your sleeves for me?
Morgan rolled up her sleeves.
Annie’s face didn’t change when she saw the cuts. Fourteen parallel lines on her left forearm, eleven on her right. Some scabbed over, others still raw, the skin around them red and angry with early infection.
“Can you tell me how you got these?”
The question was gentle. Clinical. Like Annie was asking about a scraped knee instead of systematic torture.
“The man who kidnapped me, the leader, his name was Randall. He had a knife. He cut me.” Morgan heard her own voice from somewhere far away.
“Every time I slowed down. Every time I asked a question. Sometimes for no reason at all.” She stared at the latticework of wounds, at the story they told on her skin.
Silence. Annie’s hands had stilled over her medical bag.
“These need to be cleaned and properly dressed,” Annie said finally. “I think we can get away with butterfly closures. No need for stitches.”
“No needles.” Morgan’s voice cracked on the word. “Please. No needles. They would feel like—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t explain that the press of metal into her skin would feel too much like being held down, restrained, waiting for the next cut.