Chapter 19
Six weeks ago:
Binary: What do you do when someone needs something you can’t give them?
Mercury: You try anyway.
Binary: Even if you fail?
Mercury: Especially then. The trying is the point.
He woke to the first pale light of dawn and cold sheets.
Lincoln’s hand found the empty space beside him before his eyes fully opened. The pillow still held the impression of Morgan’s head. The sheets smelled like her. But she was gone.
“Morgan?”
No answer. He waited for a while, but she didn’t return. She wasn’t using the bathroom or grabbing a quick drink of water. He pulled on his discarded pants, not bothering with a shirt, and went to find her.
The kitchen was empty. Coffeemaker untouched. The guest room door stood open, the bed inside still made from yesterday. He made his way to the library, then his command center.
Nothing.
His pulse was climbing. He knew that was irrational—she was in the house; the security system would have logged any exit—but his body didn’t care about logic. His body remembered the warehouse. The four-foot box. The way she’d looked when they’d found her.
He circled back through the living room, and this time, he saw her. She was curled in the leather chair in the corner, knees drawn up, so still he’d walked right past her the first time.
He stopped and stared.
She was holding something. A notebook—one of the blank journals from his office, the kind he used for sketching system architecture. He hadn’t noticed one was missing.
He approached slowly, making sure his footsteps were audible on the hardwood. She didn’t look up.
From this angle, he could see fragments of what she’d written. Dense handwriting covering page after page.
Ms. D’s eyes—brown, warm, crinkled at the corners when she smiled. Voice: low, measured, slight Southern accent when she was tired.
Apartment: blue couch, left side of room. Third shelf had the Dickinson collection with the cracked spine.
And then, in shakier letters:
First foster home: yellow wallpaper. Roses? Peonies? Border at top?
Lincoln stopped breathing.
Question marks. If she was writing down memories, why was she using question marks?
Morgan Reece—who had recited their entire first exchange from perfect memory, who could quote every book she’d ever read, who had been kidnapped specifically because she never forgot anything—was using question marks.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m losing them.” Her voice was barely audible. She still wasn’t looking at him.
“I’m losing my good memories.” She finally raised her eyes.
Red-rimmed. Swollen. She’d been crying for a while—alone, in the dark, while he slept three rooms away.
“I keep trying to remember Ms. Delacroix’s face.
The exact color of her eyes, the way her smile looked when she was proud of me.
And it’s…” She swallowed. “Fuzzy. Like looking through water.”
Lincoln lowered himself onto the ottoman across from her. The distance between them felt wrong now. A few hours ago, there had been no distance at all. She’d been wrapped around him, and he’d thought—
He’d thought they’d reached something. Together.
But she’d been carrying this. Even then. Even while they held each other. She’d known her mind was failing and hadn’t told him, and he understood why—some fears were too big to say out loud—but the thought of her suffering in silence made his chest ache.
“So you’re writing your memories down?”
Morgan flipped to a fresh page. Her pen trembled over the paper.
“I’m going to write the first letter Ms. Delacroix ever sent me. I was fourteen. I’ve recited it to myself hundreds of times.”
She started writing.
My dearest Morgan—
The pen stopped.
“My dearest Morgan,” she whispered. “I wanted to write because…because I…”
Her face contorted. Her eyes squeezed shut. She was reaching for something—he could see the effort of it, the strain of trying to grasp something that kept slipping away.
“I know there’s more. I can feel it, the rhythm of her words, but the actual—” Her voice cracked. “She wrote about believing in myself. Something about potential. She drew a little star in the margin. The paper smelled like her perfume. I know all of this, but I can’t—”
The pen clattered to the floor.
Morgan pressed both hands against her face, and the sound she made was the worst thing Lincoln had ever heard. Not quite a sob. Something rawer. The sound of someone watching themselves disappear.
“It’s the data.” Muffled. Broken. “Everything Randall put in my head. It’s taking up space. Crowding everything else out. My brain has limits I never knew about, and his information is pushing my real memories out to make room.”
Lincoln stared at the notebook. At My dearest Morgan in shaky handwriting. At the blank space where a lifetime of love should have been.
He thought about his servers. His redundant backups. The elaborate architecture he’d built to ensure nothing was ever lost.
He thought about what it would feel like to reach for a file and find it corrupted. To watch your own data degrade, byte by byte, replaced by garbage you never wanted.
“I’ve never forgotten anything.” Morgan dropped her hands. Her face was devastated—wet, blotchy, stripped of every defense. “Not once in twenty-eight years. I don’t know who I am without my memory.”
You’re still you, he wanted to say. You’re still Morgan. Still brave. Still kind. Still the woman who sent coordinates in a poem when she had nothing else.
But that wasn’t what she needed to hear.
“What would help?” The words came out rough. “What do you need?”
She was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had gone small. Young.
“Ms. Delacroix wrote me letters. When I was in foster care. When I was lonely. When I needed someone to remind me I wasn’t broken.
” She picked up the notebook, stared at those three inadequate words.
“I kept every one. Filed them away in my apartment. Never opened them again because I didn’t need to—I had them memorized perfectly. ”
“And now you don’t.”
“Now I don’t.” Her fingers traced the edge of the paper. “But the physical letters are still there. In Montana. Proof. Something to anchor the memories to, before they slip away completely.”
Lincoln understood. He also understood what she wasn’t letting herself ask.
“You want to go to your apartment in Montana.”
“Yes.” Her hands curled into fists. “I know it’s dangerous. Randall’s people are probably watching. Maybe the feds too.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. There’s no way—”
“Morgan.”
She stopped. Looked at him.
He’d already pulled satellite imagery of her property. Already mapped the layout of the converted barn, the sight lines from the tree line, the nearest neighbor half a mile down the road. He’d done it days ago, looking for threads that might lead back to Randall. He knew the terrain.
The risks were significant. Probability of detection wasn’t trivial. The smart move was to wait, to find another way, to solve this problem without walking into hostile territory.
But he looked at her face. At the grief carved into every line. He thought about her laugh on the stairs, breathless against his mouth. The way she’d arched into him like she couldn’t get close enough. How his brain had finally gone quiet because she was the variable that made silence possible.
The math stopped mattering.
“We’ll get them.”
Morgan stared at him. “You’d do that? Go to Montana?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t calculate. Didn’t run the probability models or weigh the costs against the benefits. He just knew—with a certainty he’d never felt about anything that wasn’t code—that he would walk into whatever waited in Montana if it meant bringing her back those letters.
“We’ll plan carefully,” he continued. “Map their surveillance patterns. Identify the gaps. Create a diversion if we need one.” He reached for her hand.
She let him take it, her fingers wrapping around his immediately—cold, trembling, holding on like he was the last solid thing in her world. “We won’t go in blind.”
“Lincoln…” His name broke in her mouth.
“You’re not going to lose yourself.” He tightened his grip. “I won’t let that happen. We’ll get the letters. We’ll figure out how to fix this.” He didn’t know how. Didn’t have a solution, a plan, a guaranteed outcome. But he had certainty, and he offered it to her like a gift. “Whatever it takes.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she unfolded from the chair, crossed the space between them, and climbed into his lap.
Her arms wrapped around his neck. Her face buried in his shoulder. Her whole body shook with the tears she’d been holding back.
Lincoln held her.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t try to fix it with words or logic or plans. Just held her while the dawn light strengthened around them, while her grief poured out against his skin, while the house stayed silent and the world stayed distant and the only thing that mattered was the woman in his arms.
He would get her those letters.
He would burn down anyone who tried to stop him.