Chapter 9
Eleven months ago:
Mercury: What’s the first thing you reach for when you wake up?
Binary: My phone. I check system alerts.
Mercury: Not coffee? Not a person?
Binary: I don’t have a person to reach for.
Mercury: Neither do I. But sometimes I still reach.
Two days.
Morgan stood at the window of the guest room and watched the Wyoming sky shift from gray to pale gold. Two days since Lincoln had carried her out of that warehouse. Two days of clean sheets and soft clothes and doors that opened from the inside.
Two days of not sleeping.
As promised, the clothes he’d ordered had arrived just a few hours later—soft fabrics in muted colors, nothing that irritated the bandages on her arms. She’d showered twice, scrubbing everywhere except her arms until her skin turned pink, trying to wash away the smell of industrial concrete that she knew wasn’t really there anymore.
She’d eaten small amounts when Lincoln brought food. Mostly more crackers and soup. And drank electrolyte solution until she was sick of it.
Her body was healing. The cuts on her forearms had scabbed over properly now, the angry red fading to something duller.
The bruising around her nose had shifted from purple to a sickly yellow-green.
She could walk without her legs buckling.
She could hold a cup of tea without her hands shaking.
She’d taken to drinking it the way she always did—both hands wrapped around the cup, fingers perfectly symmetrical, like praying.
Lincoln had noticed. He hadn’t commented. She appreciated that.
But she couldn’t sleep.
Every time she closed her eyes, she was back in the box. Metal walls pressing in. Darkness so complete it had weight. The latch clicking shut above her, sealing her into a space where she couldn’t stand, couldn’t stretch, couldn’t do anything but curl into herself and wait.
So she stayed awake.
She’d found ways to pass the hours. Walking the perimeter of the room, counting steps.
Sitting by the window, watching the security lights cycle on and off as deer or rabbits triggered the motion sensors.
Reciting poetry in her head—Angelou, Frost, Longfellow—letting the familiar rhythms anchor her to something besides the memories she couldn’t escape.
Lincoln checked on her. Brought food at regular intervals, knocked softly, didn’t push when she said she was fine. He’d installed the lock he’d promised—she could hear him in the hallway with his tools, precise and unhurried—and hadn’t commented when she immediately tested it three times.
At night, she heard him moving through the house at odd hours, footsteps in the hallway at two a.m., the soft click of his keyboard drifting up from the command center.
He kept strange hours too. She found herself listening for him, tracking his presence the way she tracked the security lights.
Proof that she wasn’t alone. Proof that something in this fortress was alive besides her own fear.
And underneath it all, heavy and waiting: everything Randall had put inside her head.
She could feel it there, pressing at the edges of her thoughts, threatening to surface.
She wasn’t ready to look at it yet. Wasn’t ready to explain it.
So she kept her mind busy with poetry and step-counts and the rhythm of Lincoln’s footsteps, and tried not to think about what she was carrying.
But the exhaustion was building. She could feel it in her bones, in the way her thoughts had started to fragment and scatter. Her body screamed for rest. Her mind refused to allow it.
Sleep meant dreams. Dreams meant the box.
Morgan pressed her forehead against the cool glass and watched the sun finish its climb above the tree line.
Another night survived. Another day to get through before the darkness came back. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep this up.
The answer, as it turned out, was midafternoon.
One moment, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing, her fingers tapping out iambic pentameter against her thigh. The next, the world tilted sideways, and her body simply gave out.
The dream came fast.
The box. Always the box. Metal walls so close she could touch them without extending her arms. Darkness pressing against her eyes like something solid, something alive. The smell of rust and concrete and her own fear, sharp and animal.
She tried to move. Her limbs wouldn’t respond.
She tried to scream. Her throat locked shut.
Randall’s voice slithered through the dark, reading data at her in that flat, professional tone. Coordinates. Names. Numbers. An endless flood of information she didn’t understand, couldn’t process, couldn’t stop absorbing.
47.6062, -122.3321. David Thornton. Rebecca Vance. KILO-SEVEN-TANGO.
The knife appeared. She couldn’t see it—couldn’t see anything—but she felt it. The cold press of metal against the soft skin of her inner forearm. The bright, burning line of pain as it opened her up.
Every time you slow down, we add another.
She couldn’t slow down. Couldn’t speed up. Couldn’t do anything but lie there in the dark while the data poured in and the blade kept finding new places to cut.
Filing cabinets don’t ask questions.
The walls pressed closer. The darkness thickened.
She was shrinking, compressing, becoming something small enough to fit in the space they’d made for her.
Soon, there would be nothing left. Soon, she would just be data, stored and silent, a human hard drive with no room left for the person she used to be.
Morgan woke with a scream tearing out of her throat.
The sound was raw, animal—a noise she didn’t recognize as her own. She sat up gasping, heart slamming against her ribs, her hands fisting in the sheets like she could anchor herself to something real.
The room was dark—hours must have passed, the afternoon light long gone. She couldn’t remember where she was. For one terrible moment, the walls pressed in and she was back in the box, back in the dark, back in—
Not the box. A bed. A window. Shapes that proved the world still existed beyond her own terror.
A soft knock at the door. Then Lincoln’s voice, careful and low. “Morgan?”
She tried to answer. The word caught in her throat, trapped behind whatever had locked her voice away.
The door opened a few inches. Light from the hallway spilled across the floor, and Lincoln’s silhouette appeared in the gap. He didn’t enter. Didn’t approach. Just stood there, one hand on the doorframe, waiting.
“I heard you scream,” he said. “I wanted to check—” He stopped. Started again. “Are you okay?”
The question was absurd. She was the opposite of okay. But his voice—that careful, uncertain voice—cracked something loose in her chest.
“No,” she managed. The word came out uneven, wounded. “I’m not.”
Lincoln stayed in the doorway. She could see him processing, calculating, trying to figure out the correct protocol for a situation that had no protocol.
“May I come in?”
She nodded, then realized he might not be able to see the gesture in the dark. “Yes.”
He crossed the threshold slowly, like he was approaching something fragile. Which, she supposed, she was. He stopped a few feet from the bed, hands at his sides, posture rigid with uncertainty.
“Should I turn on a light?”
“No.” The darkness felt safer right now. Less exposed. “Just—can you stay? For a minute?”
“Yes.” He lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, leaving space between them. His weight shifted the mattress, and Morgan felt herself tilt slightly toward him before she caught herself. “I’m here.”
She pushed herself upright, drawing her knees to her chest. The shaking hadn’t stopped. If anything, it was getting worse—her body finally releasing the terror it had held frozen during the nightmare.
“I was in the box.” Her voice came out thin, fractured. “In the dream. I was back in the box.”
Lincoln didn’t say anything. Didn’t offer platitudes or reassurances or any of the empty phrases people usually deployed when faced with someone else’s pain. He just sat there, present and silent, his attention focused on her like she was a problem he was genuinely trying to understand.
“It was so small.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, trying to hold herself together. “I couldn’t move. Couldn’t see. I kept thinking—if I could just make myself smaller, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe I could disappear into the dark and the dark would stop pressing back.”
“You’re not in the box anymore.”
“I know.” The tears were building behind her eyes, hot and insistent. “I know I’m not. But every time I close my eyes—” She shook her head.
“Because I could not stop for Death,” she whispered, the words escaping before she could catch them. Dickinson. Always Dickinson when the panic hit. “He kindly stopped for me—”
She cut herself off. Shook her head. “Sorry. I do that. Quote things.”
She couldn’t finish. The words dissolved into something shapeless, something that hurt too much to name.
Lincoln was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted—softer, almost tentative.
“Your code is inefficient,” he said. “Line 347 could be compressed.”
Morgan’s breath caught. Was that…?
“Not everything is about efficiency,” he continued, the words precise and deliberate. “Explain. It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines. Read the first letter of each line.”
Their first exchange. The very first words they’d ever shared, two years ago on the dark web forum when neither of them had known what they were starting.
“You remember that?” Her voice cracked on the question.
“I saved our conversations. All 743 of them.” He paused. “I’ve read them multiple times.”
Something broke open in Morgan’s chest.