Chapter 13 #2
“You’re not a server,” he said. “You can’t run twenty-four seven without maintenance. The data isn’t going anywhere. Your ability to function is.”
Morgan opened her mouth to argue. Closed it.
He was right. She hated that he was right.
“I know the work is destroying me.” The admission cost her something. “Every time I recite those codes, I hear Randall’s voice. But if I stop while someone on those lists gets killed—how do I live with that?”
Lincoln was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted—still blunt, but softer underneath.
“The data will still be there tomorrow. And the day after.” His voice was quiet but firm. “But if you burn out, you’re no good to anyone—including the people on those lists. Exhausted people miss patterns. Make mistakes. You’re already slower than you were three days ago.”
She wanted to argue. Couldn’t find the flaw in his logic.
“I’m not suggesting we abandon the work,” he continued. “Just step back from it. A few hours.” He stood, pushing his chair back. “There’s a place I want to show you. It’s not far.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to see people.” The thought of interacting with strangers, of performing normalcy, made her stomach clench.
“There won’t be people. Just us.” He hesitated, and something uncertain moved through his expression. “And a cliff.”
“A cliff?”
“Trust me?”
It wasn’t really a question. She’d trusted him with her life when she sent those coordinates. She’d trusted him with her worst memories when she told him about the box. What was a cliff compared to that?
“Okay,” she said. “Show me your cliff.”
The drive took them away from Lincoln’s compound and deeper into the Wyoming wilderness.
Morgan rolled down her window, letting the air rush over her face. She hadn’t been outside—truly outside, not just staring through glass—in over a week. The wind smelled like pine and grass and something wild she couldn’t name. Her eyes watered from the brightness of unfiltered sun.
The road climbed as the landscape shifted from grassland to foothills to the kind of vertical terrain that made her breath catch.
“I wouldn’t have thought you were outdoorsy,” she said.
Lincoln’s mouth curved—not quite a smile, but close. “I was raised in Oak Creek. It’s home to Linear Tactical.”
“Linear Tactical?”
“It’s a training facility. Survival, tactical skills, situational awareness, self-defense, weapons handling.
” He navigated a curve in the road with the kind of easy competence that suggested he’d driven it a thousand times.
“My uncle Finn was one of the founding members. He and the other original guys—Zac Mackay, Dorian Lindstrom, a few others—they built the place from nothing back before I was born.”
Morgan tried to reconcile this with her image of Lincoln—the man who lived inside screens, who processed the world as data, who’d built two fortunes before thirty by understanding systems better than the humans who used them.
“So, you grew up doing…wilderness survival training?”
“Among other things. My cousins and I were around Linear all the time as kids. Bear learned to track animals before he learned to read. Derek could field-strip a rifle by age ten. I was more interested in the technology side—security systems, communications protocols—but my family made sure I could handle myself in the field too.” He glanced at her.
“Including rappelling, which is what we’re doing today. ”
Morgan’s stomach tightened. “Rappelling. Down a cliff.”
“A very specific cliff. My dad almost died there once.”
Morgan stared at him. “What?”
“Equipment failure during a charity event. His rig gave out halfway down—he was falling, nothing to catch him but a few hundred feet of air and the canyon floor.” Lincoln’s voice stayed even, but his hands had tightened on the steering wheel.
“A friend grabbed him. Held on while my dad climbed on to his harness. They made it down together, one step at a time.”
Morgan stared at him. “Lincoln. That’s—your father almost died. And you’re taking me to the same cliff?”
“It was sabotage. Someone deliberately compromised the gear.” He glanced at her. “The person responsible was caught years ago. It’s not a concern now.”
“Who would sabotage rappelling gear?”
“Someone with a grudge against Linear Tactical. My dad wasn’t the target—just the one who happened to grab that rig.” Lincoln’s hands loosened on the wheel. “He doesn’t talk about it much. But I think it changed how he sees things. Made him think about how fast everything can end.”
Morgan understood that. Two weeks ago, she’d been preparing for a conference. Now, she was a fugitive with federal charges and a head full of data that could get people killed. Everything could change in a breath.
The vehicle pulled into a small clearing, and Morgan understood why he’d brought her here.
The cliff fell away before them in a sweep of ancient stone, dropping hundreds of feet to a valley floor that looked like a painting—green and gold and rust, threaded with the silver ribbon of a distant stream.
The air was different up here, thinner and sharper, carrying the clean bite of elevation.
She walked to the edge and felt vertigo pull at her stomach. Not fear exactly. Just awareness. The world was very large and she was very small and her problems—the data, the panic, the fuzzy edges of memories that should be crystal clear—seemed to shrink in proportion.
“We’re going down there?” she asked.
“Yes.” Lincoln was already unloading gear from the back of the SUV—ropes, harnesses, carabiners, equipment she didn’t recognize. “This is one of Linear Tactical’s training routes. The rigging stays up year-round—they maintain it regularly, and I checked it myself last week.”
“But your father almost died here.”
“From sabotage. Not from the cliff itself.” He looked up, met her eyes. “I won’t let you fall. I promise.”
He helped her into the harness with hands that were steady and sure, adjusting straps, checking buckles, explaining each piece of equipment and its function.
His competence here was different from his competence with computers—less cerebral, more physical.
He moved like someone who knew exactly what his body could do.
“The key,” he said, positioning her at the cliff edge, “is to trust the system. Your instincts will tell you to grip tighter, to fight the descent. Don’t. Let the rope do the work.”
Morgan looked down. The drop yawned beneath her, vast and hungry. Her heart hammered against her ribs.
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You can.” No hesitation. No doubt. “You’ve survived worse than gravity, Morgan. This is just physics.”
Just physics. She almost laughed.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
The first few feet were the hardest. Her body screamed wrong, wrong, wrong! as she leaned back over nothing, trusting rope and hardware and Lincoln’s steady hands on the belay. The harness bit into her thighs. Her fingers ached through her gloves from gripping the rope too tight.
But he talked her through it, that steady voice somehow reassuring in its lack of false comfort—good, keep your feet flat, that’s it, let out more slack, you’re doing fine—and slowly, impossibly, she began to descend.
Her heel scraped against stone, dislodging pebbles that tumbled into the void below. Wind gusted up from the valley, cold and clean, carrying the smell of pine and distant water. She could feel her own heartbeat in her throat, her temples, the tips of her fingers.
And then something shifted.
Somewhere between the cliff edge and the valley floor, Morgan stopped thinking about coordinates and dead ends and the fuzzy edges of Ms. Delacroix’s face.
There was only the burn of rope sliding through her grip.
The solid press of stone beneath her boots.
The vast blue bowl of sky wheeling overhead as she descended, foot by foot, into the waiting earth.
Her body, doing what it was designed to do. Moving through space. Existing in the present moment instead of drowning in the past.
She made it down.
Her legs were shaking when she touched solid ground, her arms burning, her palms raw. But she was laughing—actually laughing—a sound she barely recognized.
Lincoln descended beside her a moment later, smooth and controlled where she’d been jerky and uncertain. He unclipped from his rope and turned to look at her, and the expression on his face made her forget how to breathe for a moment.
Not his usual analytical assessment. Something else. Something she didn’t have a name for.
“You did it,” he said.
“I did it.” She was still laughing, giddy with adrenaline. “I can’t believe I actually did it.”
They found a flat rock near the base of the cliff and sat down, both of them breathing hard from the descent. The valley spread out below them, endless and green, and the sky stretched overhead in that particular shade of blue that Wyoming seemed to have patented.
For the first time in days, the data receded. The coordinates and names and military codes went quiet in her head, overwhelmed by simple sensory input: cold stone beneath her, warm sun on her face, the sound of wind moving through distant trees.
She felt like herself again. Not a filing cabinet. Not a server. Just Morgan.
“Thank you,” she said. The words felt inadequate. “Not just for this. For everything. For coming when I sent those coordinates. For not turning me in. For—” She gestured at the valley, the cliff, all of it. “For this.”
Lincoln turned to look at her. His hair was windswept from the descent, and he had a smear of chalk dust across his cheek.
“I’ve never brought anyone here before,” he said.
“Never?”
“This was always my place. Where I came when my brain wouldn’t stop, when the social demands got too loud, when I needed to remember that some problems can be solved with physics instead of people.
” He paused, and she watched him search for words—something she’d noticed he did when the thing he wanted to say mattered.
“I didn’t realize I wanted to share it until I met you. ”
Morgan stared at him. He’d said it the way he said everything—direct, factual, like he was reporting data rather than handing her something precious.
“That might be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she said. “And you have no idea, do you?”
“I was stating a fact.” He tilted his head, genuinely puzzled. “Is that romantic?”
“Yes.” Her voice came out thick. “Yes, it really is.”
She became aware, suddenly, of how close they were sitting. The warmth of his shoulder almost touching hers. The way his hand rested on the stone between them, close enough that she could see the small scar on his left knuckle—the one he’d said was from a soldering iron when he was twelve.
The air felt different. Charged. Like the moment before lightning strikes.
Morgan turned toward him. Watched his eyes track the movement, watched him go very still. She could see his pulse jumping in his throat, could feel the tension radiating off him—not pulling away, but not moving closer either. Waiting. Letting her decide.
She leaned in.
His lips were warm. Slightly chapped from the wind. He didn’t move at first—just let her kiss him, frozen with surprise or uncertainty or something she couldn’t read. Then his hand came up, tentative, and cupped her jaw, and he kissed her back.
It was clumsy. Unpracticed. Neither of them quite sure of the angle, the pressure, the rhythm. But it was real in a way that made her chest ache—two people who’d found each other through screens and codes finally discovering what touch felt like.
They pulled back at the same time, both slightly breathless.
“I didn’t plan that,” Lincoln said. His voice had gone rough.
“I know.” Morgan was shaking, but not from cold. “That’s why it was so perfect.”
He was looking at her like she’d just rewritten his source code. Like everything he thought he understood about himself had shifted three inches to the left, and he was still trying to recalibrate.
“We should head back,” he said finally. “Before it gets dark.”
“Yeah.” She wasn’t ready to return to the compound, to the data, to the endless work of decoding her own captivity. But real life had a way of reasserting itself whether you wanted it to or not. “We should.”
The route back up was slower than the descent—they took a trail that wound around the cliff face since climbing back up was definitely beyond her capacity—and by the time they reached the vehicle, the sun was beginning to sink toward the mountains.
They drove home in silence.
Not uncomfortable. Not tense. Just full—heavy with everything that had happened at the base of that cliff, with the kiss neither of them seemed ready to discuss, with the strange new territory they’d wandered into together.
Morgan watched the landscape scroll past her window and let herself exist in the quiet. The headache had faded. The panic had retreated. The fuzzy edges of Ms. Delacroix’s face were still there, waiting to terrify her later, but for now—just for now—she was okay.
Somewhere along the darkening road, Lincoln’s hand found hers.
His fingers laced through hers, warm and certain. He didn’t look at her. Didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to.