Chapter 14
Eight months ago:
Mercury: What do you choose to remember?
Binary: I don’t choose. I retain what’s useful and discard what isn’t.
Mercury: But what about the things that slip away before you decide? The details you didn’t know mattered until they’re gone?
Binary: Data doesn’t slip. It’s either stored or it isn’t.
Mercury: For you, maybe. For the rest of us, memory is a tide. Things wash in. Things wash out. And sometimes you don’t notice what’s missing until you reach for it.
Binary: That sounds inefficient.
Mercury: It sounds human, Binary. Beautifully, terribly human.
Two days since the cliff. Two days since the kiss.
Morgan’s voice had gone hoarse hours ago, somewhere around the third string of names, numbers and coordinates. She reached for the glass of water Lincoln had brought her and found it empty. The tea beside it had long gone cold, a film forming on the surface she didn’t remember watching develop.
“Forty-one point eight seven eight one, negative eighty-seven point six two nine eight.” The numbers scraped out of her throat like sandpaper.
“Thirty-three point four four eight four, negative one twelve point zero seven four zero. Twenty-nine point seven six zero four, negative ninety-five point three six nine eight.”
Lincoln’s keyboard clicked in response. Cross-referencing. Always cross-referencing.
She’d been at this for six hours today. Fourteen yesterday. The data poured out of her in an endless stream, and she let it, because movement was easier than stillness. Because as long as she was working, she didn’t have to think about anything else.
The kiss should have been a clear, bright memory. Lincoln’s hand on her jaw at the bottom of that cliff, the roughness of his voice when he’d said I didn’t plan that. The way his lips had felt against hers—uncertain and real and nothing like code.
Instead, the memory kept fragmenting. She’d summon the warmth of it and find coordinates flooding in.
The exact pressure of his mouth would blur into account numbers.
The look in his eyes would dissolve into military designations—KILO-SEVEN-TANGO, ECHO-FOUR-NOVEMBER—until she couldn’t tell what was real and what was data.
That was the problem. The kiss was competing for space in her head, and it was losing.
“Chicago,” Lincoln said. “Phoenix. Houston. Still metropolitan areas. The pattern holds.”
Morgan nodded without really hearing him. Her hands had started to tremble again—a fine vibration she’d noticed yesterday and ignored. She pressed them flat against her thighs, hiding them under the desk where he couldn’t see.
“What about the next set?” she asked. Her voice came out sharper than she intended. “The ones from the DEA breach. We haven’t finished those.”
“We’ve been working for six hours.”
“So?”
“So, you need a break.”
“I’ll rest when we find something useful.” The words snapped out before she could stop them. “People could be dying while we sit here debating my hydration levels.”
Lincoln’s typing stopped.
She could feel him watching her—that focused attention he turned on problems he couldn’t immediately solve. The furrowed brow, the slight tilt of his head. Confusion, probably. Trying to reconcile this version of her with the woman who’d kissed him two days ago.
Part of her wanted to explain. To tell him about the kiss playing on a loop behind her eyes, about the way she kept summoning the memory and finding it crowded out by Randall’s data.
About how she wanted to talk about what was happening between them but couldn’t, because talking required stopping, and stopping meant everything she was outrunning would finally catch up.
She didn’t say any of it.
“More coordinates,” she said instead. “I’ll start with the Homeland batch.”
“Morgan—”
“Thirty-eight point nine zero seven two, negative seventy-seven point zero three six nine. Forty point seven one two eight, negative seventy-four point zero zero six zero.”
Lincoln was quiet for a long moment. Then his keyboard resumed its clicking.
She kept going.
An hour later, Lincoln pushed back from his workstation.
“I need to check something on the secondary server,” he said. “The cross-reference algorithm is running slow. Give me five minutes.”
Morgan nodded without looking up. Her throat burned. The headache that had started as a dull throb behind her temples had sharpened into something more insistent, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
She heard his footsteps retreat across the command center. Heard the door open and close.
Silence.
She went still. Her fingers stopped their unconscious rhythm against her thigh. The data that had been pouring out of her all day paused at the edge of her consciousness, waiting.
She should use this moment to rest. To drink something, eat something, close her eyes for just a minute.
Instead, she tested herself.
My apartment. The converted barn outside Whitefish, with its sloped ceilings and the window that stuck in summer. The bookshelf by the door. Third shelf from the top, left to right.
The titles should have come instantly. They always had.
Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. The Complete Works of Jane Austen. A battered paperback of—
She stopped.
There was a gap.
Between Austen and the next book—something with a green spine, she could almost see it—there was nothing. A blur where memory should be. Like a word on the tip of her tongue that refused to form.
Her breath stuttered.
She’d told herself it was stress before. Exhaustion. Trauma. But this was different. This was a hole where information should be.
She tried something else. Something that should have been untouchable.
Binary’s first message to me. The exact words.
She’d thought about it a thousand times since. Lincoln had quoted it back to her just days ago, in her bedroom, when she’d needed proof that she’d existed before the warehouse.
“Your code is inefficient. Line 347 could be compressed.”
Yes. That was right. She could see the words on her screen, white text on black background, the cursor blinking as she’d decided how to respond.
But what had come next? Her reply—she knew the gist of it, knew she’d said something about sonnets and beauty and function. But the exact phrasing, the precise arrangement of words that had started everything—
It wouldn’t come.
She pressed harder. Not everything is about efficiency. Had she written that? Or was it Efficiency isn’t everything? Had she used a period or a dash?
Two weeks ago, she could have recited their entire first exchange verbatim, including her typos. Now she was guessing.
Morgan’s hands had gone cold against her thighs.
The door opened behind her.
“The algorithm’s running faster now.” Lincoln’s voice, steady and practical. “I cleared some cache that was—” He stopped. “Morgan?”
She forced her expression into something neutral. Turned back to her workstation with hands she willed not to shake.
“Ready to continue,” she said.
If he noticed her stillness, the careful way she was holding herself together, he didn’t comment. He just settled back into his chair and pulled up the next database.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
Morgan closed her eyes. Drew in a breath that caught somewhere behind her ribs.
“ROMEO-TWO-VICTOR,” she began. “DELTA-EIGHT-PAPA. OSCAR-FIVE-WHISKEY.”
The data flowed. The gaps stayed hidden. But the fear she’d been outrunning crept a little closer.
The hours blurred together after that.
More coordinates. More names without faces.
More military codes that meant nothing to her and everything to someone.
The headache had become a constant now, a pressure behind her eyes that throbbed with every recitation.
Her hand kept drifting to her temple. She’d force it back to her lap, glance at Lincoln, then find it there again thirty seconds later.
“Morgan.”
She didn’t hear him. She was deep in a string of account numbers from the Treasury breach, the digits spilling out of her in automatic sequence.
“Morgan.”
His voice finally cut through. She blinked, looked up, and found him watching her with an expression she hadn’t seen before. Not just concerned. Worried. A tension around his eyes that looked almost like fear.
Two days ago, he kissed me at the bottom of a cliff. Now he’s watching me fall apart, and I can’t even tell him why.
“What?”
“You said the same number twice. You’ve never done that before.”
She had no memory of it. The realization landed like a physical blow.
“I’m fine. I just need—” She reached for her water glass and remembered it was empty. “More data. Let’s keep going with the next batch.”
“You’ve been at this for ten hours. We should stop for tonight.”
“I can keep going.”
“You repeated a number. You’ve never done that.” He turned his chair to face her fully. “Your hands have been shaking for the last hour. You keep touching your temple when you think I’m not looking. And your voice is so hoarse, I can barely understand the information. You’re exhausted.”
“The data doesn’t care if I’m tired.”
“No. But I do.”
The words landed harder than she expected. She opened her mouth to argue, to insist she was fine, to push through the way she’d been pushing through all day today and yesterday—but Lincoln was already standing, already positioning himself between her and the workstation.
“Tomorrow,” he said. Not a suggestion. “The data will still be there. You won’t be if you keep this up.”
She didn’t have the energy left to fight him. That was the truth of it. The resistance drained out of her all at once, leaving her hollow and shaking in its absence.
“Okay,” she heard herself say. “Okay. Tomorrow, then.”
But he didn’t step aside, and his eyes didn’t leave her face, and Morgan knew that whatever he saw there was going to require an explanation she didn’t know how to give.
She stood before he could ask.
“I need some time,” she said. “I’m going to lie down.”
She was out of the command center before he could respond.