Chapter 8 #2
The thought felt inadequate. Beauty was a category he’d never paid much attention to—an aesthetic judgment that seemed irrelevant to most of his concerns. But looking at her had done something to him. Rearranged something fundamental.
He had enough information to find out everything about her now.
Her real name, her location, some history.
He could cross-reference the details she’d given him—Montana, librarian, conference—and have a complete dossier within minutes.
That was what he did. That was how he understood things. Knowledge was control.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Then he pulled them back.
She’d given him her name herself. She’d chosen to share it, in that quiet moment in the study when they’d exchanged identities like gifts. Digging into her history without permission would betray that trust. It would be taking something she hadn’t offered.
If he wanted to know more about her, he would ask. She deserved that respect.
A few hours later, he checked the security feed again. The guest room door remained closed.
He stood up, suddenly restless. It had been too long. Annie had said to keep her hydrated. To make sure she ate something. That was concrete. That was actionable.
He could do actionable.
The knock echoed louder than he’d intended. He waited, counted to ten, then knocked again, softer this time.
The door opened.
Morgan stood in the gap, and his chest did something uncomfortable at the sight of her.
She looked worse than a few hours ago—pale, hollow-eyed, the bruising around her nose darkening toward purple.
She clearly hadn’t slept. Her hair hung tangled around her face, and she was still wearing the torn blue dress.
“I brought food,” he said, holding up the tray. Soup—canned, nothing fancy, but warm. Crackers. A fresh bottle of the electrolyte solution Annie had left. “You need to eat.”
Morgan stared at the tray like she’d forgotten what food was for. Then she stepped back, a silent invitation.
The guest room looked undisturbed. The bed was still made. She hadn’t even pulled back the covers.
“You didn’t sleep,” Lincoln said.
“I couldn’t.” Her voice came out rough, scraped raw. “The bed felt too—” She stopped. Shook her head. “I couldn’t.”
He set the tray on the nightstand. Stood there, hands empty, unsure what to do with them. In two years of messages, he’d never been at a loss for words with her. But that was different.
That was text. This was real.
He stared at her, trying to figure out what to say. “The dress, that’s the one you mentioned in our last exchange?”
“It’s not the right color,” she whispered.
Lincoln blinked. “What?”
Morgan was staring down at the fabric, her fingers clutching the skirt.
“I told you it matched the Montana sky. But it doesn’t.
Look at it.” She held out a fold of the material.
“It’s navy. Not cerulean. Not sky blue. I got it wrong, and I was going to tell you, the next time we talked.
I was going to say—” Her voice cracked. “But there wasn’t a next time.
I put on this stupid dress and told you the wrong color, and then they took me and I never got to—”
She was crying. Tears sliding down her cheeks while she clutched the fabric of a dress that shouldn’t matter, that was such a small thing compared to everything else, but somehow it mattered anyway.
Lincoln didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to fix this. The dress color wasn’t the problem—he understood that much—but he didn’t know what the real problem was or how to make it better.
“I’ll get you new clothes,” he said, because that was concrete. That was solvable. “My cousin River—Bear and Derek’s sister—is about your size. I can have her bring—”
Morgan flinched. “No. No one else. Please. I don’t want to see anybody else.”
“Okay.” He pulled out his phone. “I’ll order clothes. Online. They’ll be delivered to the gate. No one has to come inside. No strangers.”
She nodded, wiping her face with the back of her hand. The motion pulled at the bandages on her forearm, and she winced.
“Sit,” Lincoln said. “Eat something. I’ll handle the clothes.”
Morgan lowered herself onto the edge of the bed and picked up a cracker. She didn’t eat it. Just held it, turning it over in her fingers.
Lincoln typed rapidly on his phone, falling into the familiar rhythm of problem-solving. Clothes. He didn’t know her size, but he could estimate. Soft fabrics—nothing that would irritate the cuts. Long sleeves to cover the bandages if she wanted. Practical shoes. Toiletries. Basic supplies.
He ordered everything he could think of, same-day delivery, premium shipping. Money wasn’t an obstacle. Speed was.
“You type fast,” Morgan said.
“One hundred forty-seven words per minute.”
“I remember. You told me once.” A ghost of something—not quite a smile—crossed her face. “You were bragging.”
“I don’t brag. I was stating a relevant fact.”
“You were bragging.”
This felt familiar. This felt like them, the rhythm they’d built over two years of late-night exchanges. Lincoln felt something loosen in his chest.
She sipped a spoonful of her soup. Good, that would provide both some nourishment and hydration.
“Do you remember what you told me once?” she asked between sips. “About silence?”
Lincoln searched his memory. They’d discussed so many things over two years. Philosophy. Security. The nature of consciousness. Whether machines could feel.
“You said that silence between most people is uncomfortable,” Morgan continued. “But silence between the right people is just…room to think.”
He remembered now. Roughly fourteen months ago. She’d asked him why he didn’t mind their pauses, the gaps between messages when one of them was processing something complex.
“I remember.”
“I think—” She took a breath. “I think I need some room to think. Is that okay?”
“Yes.” Lincoln pocketed his phone. “I’ll be downstairs. In my command center. If you need anything.”
He moved toward the door, then stopped. Turned back.
“The clothes will be here in a few hours. I’ll bring them up when they arrive.”
Morgan nodded. She still looked fragile. Fractured. But something in her expression had shifted—some small tension releasing.
“Binary?”
Binary. He liked hearing that on her lips just as much as his real name. “Yes?”
“Thank you. For not…” She gestured vaguely. “For not trying to fix the parts you can’t fix.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that. It felt like a compliment wrapped in something sadder.
“Get some rest,” he said. “The soup will help.”
He closed the door behind him and made his way back downstairs, the house quiet around him. In his command center, he pulled up the archived messages.
Every conversation they’d ever had, preserved in chronological order. He scrolled through them, reading fragments at random.
Sometimes beauty IS the function.
Your iambic pentameter has a trojaned hexameter in line six.
Systems can’t hold your hand in the dark, Binary.
He was looking for something, but he didn’t know what. A map, maybe. A user manual for the woman upstairs. Some pattern in their history that would tell him how to help her now.
But the messages were from before. Before the warehouse. Before the box. Before whatever had carved those lines into her skin.
The Morgan in these archives was Mercury—sharp and quick and unbroken. The woman upstairs was someone else. Someone he didn’t fully know yet.
He read until his eyes burned. Until the words blurred together and the time stamps ran backward and the two years of their friendship unspooled across his screens like code he couldn’t compile.
Code was easier than people. It always had been. Code followed rules. Code could be debugged, optimized, understood.
But Morgan wasn’t code. And Lincoln was beginning to realize that understanding her would take something he’d never been good at.
Time. Patience. The willingness to make mistakes.
He closed the archive and stared at the security feed. The guest room door stayed closed.
She was worth figuring out. Even if it took him years. Even if he failed.
Some things were worth the effort of learning.