Chapter 13
Ten months ago:
Mercury: Do patterns comfort you or trap you?
Binary: Both. Patterns are the architecture of predictability. I find safety in knowing what comes next.
Mercury: But what about when life refuses to follow the pattern?
Binary: Then I build a new one. Chaos is just order we haven’t decoded yet.
Mercury: I think that might be the most optimistic thing you’ve ever said.
Binary: Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain.
They’d been trying to unravel the data in her mind for three days.
Morgan sat at the workstation Lincoln had set up for her in his command center, her fingers wrapped around a cup of tea that was no longer warm.
The blue glow of the monitors cast strange shadows across the room, turning everything into geometry—angles and planes and the particular architecture of a space designed for one person’s brain.
Now it held two.
“Ready when you are,” Lincoln said from his main station a few feet away. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, waiting.
This was their system now. She recited; he cross-referenced. Her memory fed his databases, and somewhere in the intersection of flesh and silicon, they hoped to find meaning in the chaos Randall had poured into her head.
Morgan closed her eyes.
“Forty-seven point six zero six two, negative one twenty-two point three three two one.” The coordinates came out flat, mechanical.
She’d learned to strip the emotion from the recitation—it was the only way to get through it.
“Thirty-nine point seven three nine two, negative one zero four point nine nine zero three. Thirty-eight point nine zero seven two, negative seventy-seven point zero three six nine.”
Lincoln’s keyboard clicked in rapid bursts. “Seattle. Denver. Washington DC. Same pattern as yesterday—major metropolitan areas. What about the names from that session?”
“David Thornton. Rebecca Vance. Miguel Santos. Karen Whitmore.”
“Cross-referencing against witness protection databases.” A pause. “No matches in the accessible records. Either these are aliases, or they’re in systems I can’t reach without flagging federal attention.”
Morgan opened her eyes. Her head throbbed. It had been throbbing for three days now, a dull pulse behind her temples that never fully faded.
She didn’t mention it. She could suck it up.
“What about the account numbers?” she asked instead. “The ones from the Treasury breach.”
“I’ve traced three to shell corporations in the Caymans. Two more to a holding company in Delaware that leads nowhere.” Lincoln’s jaw tightened. “Whoever set this up knew what they were doing. The money moves through so many layers that by the time it lands somewhere real, the trail is cold.”
More dead ends. More puzzle pieces that refused to connect.
Morgan took a breath and kept going. “KILO-SEVEN-TANGO. ECHO-FOUR-NOVEMBER. brAVO-NINE-ALPHA.”
The military codes. Randall had read these to her while the hackers worked, his voice flat and professional, the knife already in his hand. She’d memorized them perfectly because she hadn’t had a choice. Because the alternative was another line carved into her skin.
She could still hear his voice when she said them. Could still feel the cold press of metal against her forearm, the particular anticipation of pain that had become its own kind of torture.
Her head throbbed more now.
“Military designations,” Lincoln said. “But they don’t match any standard protocol I can identify. Could be internal codes—something specific to an organization rather than a branch.”
“Or something made up entirely.” Morgan rubbed her temples. “That’s the problem. I have thousands of pieces, but I don’t know which ones are real intelligence and which ones are noise.”
“The coordinates are real. The agency breaches were real.” Lincoln turned to look at her. “The pattern will emerge. We just need more data points.”
More data points. More recitation. More hours of dragging Randall’s voice out of her memory and listening to it echo in this room full of screens and servers.
Morgan stood up too fast. The headache spiked, and she pressed her palm against the edge of the desk to steady herself.
“I need a minute.”
Lincoln didn’t argue. He just nodded and returned his attention to his screens, giving her space without making a production of it.
She’d noticed he did that—withdrew when she needed room, advanced when she needed presence.
It was like he’d studied her the way he studied code, mapping her patterns until he understood the architecture underneath.
She walked to the window. The Wyoming sky stretched endlessly beyond the glass, pale blue fading toward the mountains in the distance. She wondered if she’d ever see her home in Montana again.
Ms. Delacroix would have loved this view.
The thought rose unbidden, and Morgan reached for the memory automatically. The way she always did. Her mentor’s face, the particular warmth of her smile, the sound of her voice reading poetry in the library after hours—
The image came.
But it took a beat longer than it should have.
Morgan’s hand tightened on the window frame. She tried again, deliberately this time. Ms. Delacroix at her desk, afternoon light falling across her silver hair, reading glasses perched on her nose. The details should have been instant, crystalline, as sharp as the day Morgan had first seen them.
Instead, they arrived slightly soft. Like a photograph left in sunlight too long.
Her pulse stuttered. She reached for something else. A poem. Ms. Delacroix used to quote Edna St. Vincent Millay when Morgan was overwhelmed, the words wrapping around her like a blanket.
“My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night…”
The next line. What was the next line?
“But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—”
Morgan stopped breathing.
The words were there, but the edges were fuzzy. Not wrong exactly. Just…indistinct. Like trying to read through water.
“—it gives a lovely light.”
That was right. That had to be right. She’d recited that poem a hundred times, heard Ms. Delacroix recite it dozens more. She could see the page in her memory, black text on cream paper, the particular way the line breaks fell—
But had Ms. Delacroix said lovely or brilliant? Had the candle burned at both ends or either end?
The floor tilted beneath her feet.
This wasn’t possible. This wasn’t possible.
Her memory was absolute—had been the absolute of her life for twenty-eight years.
It was the foundation everything else was built on.
The one constant in a life full of impermanence.
Foster homes changed, people left, but her memory stayed. Her memory was her.
And now it was blurring.
She gripped the window frame hard enough to hurt, using the pain to anchor herself. Her vision had narrowed, darkness creeping in at the edges. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t—
It’s just the stress. She forced the thought through the panic. I’m exhausted. I’m reliving trauma every time I open my mouth. Anyone would be struggling.
But she wasn’t anyone. She was Morgan Reece, the girl who never forgot. The woman whose brain had been valuable enough to kidnap. If her memory was failing—if Randall’s data had somehow broken her—
She couldn’t finish that thought. Couldn’t look at it directly.
Later, she told herself. Deal with this later.
She turned away from the window before Lincoln could notice her stillness, her silence, the way her hands were shaking.
“Ready to continue,” she said.
Her voice came out steady. Twenty-eight years of hiding her strangeness had taught her that much.
Lincoln looked up. His eyes moved across her face in that assessing way of his, cataloging data points she couldn’t control—the pallor of her skin, the tension in her jaw, the shadows under her eyes that had darkened over the past three days.
“More military codes,” she said before he could comment. “ROMEO-TWO-VICTOR. DELTA-EIGHT-PAPA. OSCAR-FIVE-WHISKEY.”
Lincoln typed. Morgan recited. The data flowed between them, flesh to machine, chaos seeking order.
But the fuzzy edges stayed with her. A crack in the foundation she’d built her entire identity on. A terror she couldn’t name and couldn’t escape.
By hour four, Lincoln had stopped typing.
Morgan didn’t notice at first. She was deep in the coordinates from the Federal Reserve breach, her eyes closed, her voice mechanical.
The numbers came out in strings that meant nothing to her—latitude and longitude, degrees and minutes, maybe points on a map, maybe something completely different. It didn’t matter.
“Morgan.”
She opened her eyes. Lincoln had turned his chair to face her fully, his expression unreadable in that way that usually meant he was processing something he didn’t know how to articulate.
“You haven’t eaten today.”
It wasn’t a question. She glanced at the untouched sandwich on the corner of her desk—the one he’d brought her hours ago that she’d barely registered.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You weren’t hungry yesterday either.” He paused. “You’re also not sleeping. Your response times have slowed by approximately fifteen percent since we started, and you keep pressing your hand against your temple every few minutes, which suggests persistent headaches you’re not mentioning.”
She should’ve known he would see it. “I’m fine.”
“That’s not accurate. You need a break.”
She looked away. The monitors glowed with data, patterns that still refused to coalesce into anything meaningful, despite Lincoln cross-referencing everything.
How could she stop when the answers were still out of reach?
How could she rest when every hour she spent recovering was an hour that someone on those lists might be found by the wrong people?
“People could be dying while I sit here feeling sorry for myself.” The words came out sharper than she intended. “I can’t just take a break because I have a headache.”
Lincoln didn’t flinch. He rarely did.