Chapter 21
Four months ago:
Mercury: Do I exhaust you?
Binary: What?
Mercury: People exhaust you. I’ve noticed—your typing slows after you mention social events. You need recovery time. But we’ve been talking for three hours.
Binary: You don’t require translation.
Mercury: Translation?
Binary: With most people, I run a parallel process. Analyzing expressions, calculating appropriate responses, checking my words against social protocols. With you, I just talk.
Mercury: That sounds like safety.
Binary: It sounds like home.
Lincoln parked on a gravel pull-off half a mile from Morgan’s place, his SUV screened from the road by a stand of pines.
The converted barn she called home sat at the end of a long driveway, isolated enough that they’d have warning if anyone approached—but also isolated enough that escape routes were limited.
He was focused, ready for what needed to be done.
But part of him wanted their road trip to continue as it had been for the past few hours. Listening to her talk about her past. Talking about his own.
So different from normal for him. Usually, people exhausted him after just a few minutes of conversation and he was looking for excuses to get back to his screens.
With Morgan, he’d wanted the road to keep going. The conversation to keep going.
But that wasn’t an option. It was time to work.
He shifted into operational mode. Everything became variables and threat assessment. His eyes moved across the road leading to her place, cataloging details.
No other vehicles visible in any direction. No obvious surveillance positions—though that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Someone skilled could be watching from the tree line, from a car parked on one of the side roads, from a dozen places he couldn’t see from this angle.
He pulled out his equipment. Signal scanner first, then the RF detector. The devices hummed to life in his hands. He swept them across the visible area, watching the readouts with the focus he usually reserved for debugging critical code.
Low-level signals. Could be normal Wi-Fi bleeding over from a neighboring property. Could be something else entirely.
Morgan sat quiet beside him, watching him work. Not asking questions. Not rushing him. Just trusting him to do what needed to be done.
The weight of that trust settled on his shoulders like something physical. He’d spent years building systems designed to eliminate single points of failure, to ensure that no one person’s judgment, or lack thereof, could bring everything crashing down.
Now he was the single point of failure for her safety, and the responsibility pressed against his ribs in ways he couldn’t quantify.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes.”
They approached on foot, Lincoln leading, Morgan close behind. He could hear her breathing—controlled, deliberate, the way someone breathed when they were managing fear instead of surrendering to it. More data about who she was. More evidence that she was stronger than she knew.
The wood siding was weathered, probably beautiful once before years of harsh winters had stripped away the finish.
A small porch held a rocking chair that looked handmade.
Window boxes hung beneath the front windows, empty now but shaped for flowers in another season, another life.
Charming under other circumstances. Right now, it was just geometry—entry points, sight lines, places where threats might hide.
Lincoln scanned her front door from a distance first, then moved closer. His eyes tracked every detail: the gap between door and frame, the weathered brass of the doorknob, the small dark shape tucked into the upper corner of the frame where wood met wood.
There it was.
A small device, nearly invisible unless you knew to look. Motion sensor. Trip it, and someone would get an alert. Probably a notification on a phone somewhere, maybe an automated system that logged time stamp and location.
This wasn’t law enforcement. Randall’s people had been here. They’d touched her door. Waited for her to come home.
Not a surprise. He’d assumed as much when they planned this. But seeing it—proof that this was real, that the hunters were already in position—made it land differently.
The back of his neck prickled—not fear, but the alertness of something being hunted. Or hunting.
“Motion sensor,” Lincoln said quietly. “We expected this.”
Morgan nodded. Her jaw was set, but she didn’t falter. Didn’t panic. Didn’t suggest they abort.
Good.
He circled the building, Morgan close behind, staying low, keeping to the shadows thrown by the afternoon sun.
A window on the east side caught his attention—old wooden frame, single pane, the kind of window that had been installed before anyone worried about energy efficiency or security protocols. He scanned it carefully.
Another sensor. Battery-powered, tucked into the frame. Simpler than the one on the door. They’d been thorough covering the obvious entry points, but not thorough enough to account for someone who understood their methodology.
He disabled it in under a minute. The work was familiar, almost meditative—disconnecting the trigger mechanism, ensuring the bypass wouldn’t register as a fault in whatever monitoring system they’d set up.
His hands knew what to do even when his conscious mind was running parallel processes, tracking their time exposure, calculating how long they had before someone might notice the disruption.
Going in here was the best option now that he’d rerouted the system.
He pulled, the window sliding open with a soft scrape of wood against wood.
Without a word, he boosted Morgan through first, then followed, pulling himself over the sill with an economy of motion that came from years of training he’d never imagined using in this manner.
Her apartment was dark. Still. The air carried that particular staleness of a space that had been closed up too long—dust and absence, the ghost of a life interrupted.
Lincoln’s eyes adjusted slowly, shapes resolving from shadows into furniture, walls, the architecture of Morgan’s existence before everything changed.
He watched her move through the rooms. This had been her life, and everything about it fairly screamed Morgan.
Books were everywhere—shelves overflowing along every wall, stacked on surfaces, piled beside chairs.
A reading chair by the window with an afghan draped over the back, the fabric faded in patterns that suggested years of use.
A kitchen that looked barely functional, more decorative than practical, the kind of space someone passed through rather than inhabited.
Morgan touched things as she passed them. Running her fingers along book spines. Adjusting a picture frame that had shifted slightly on its hook. Orienting herself. Cataloging. Lincoln could see her mind working—comparing what was to what had been, identifying the discrepancies.
“Someone’s been here.” Her voice came out quiet. Certain. “The books on that shelf are out of order.”
Lincoln looked at the shelf she’d indicated. The spines were aligned neatly, nothing obviously disturbed to his eye. But Morgan would know. Morgan would see the difference between where things were and where they should be.
Her memory seemed to be working fine when she wasn’t drowning in Randall’s data.
Maybe the coordinates and codes and endless strings of numbers weren’t destroying her capacity—they were creating interference.
Crowding out the signals she needed with noise she couldn’t filter, making it seem like the signals weren’t there anymore.
Lincoln moved through the apartment systematically, checking for devices.
He found the first one in the smoke detector—a small camera, lens barely visible, positioned to capture anyone who entered through the main door.
The second was more clever: hidden in a bookshelf, tucked behind a row of paperbacks, aimed at the living area.
Both were recording, not transmitting live. Storage cards, not real-time feeds. They hadn’t wanted to alert anyone the moment Morgan returned—they’d wanted footage. Evidence, maybe. Or just confirmation that their asset had come back to collect her things.
He disabled both cameras. Took the memory cards and slipped them into his pocket. The footage might be useful later, depending on what angles they’d captured, what patterns their placement revealed about the people who’d installed them.
Morgan had moved toward the bedroom. Lincoln followed, staying close enough to respond if something went wrong, far enough to give her space for whatever came next.
She went to the closet. Reached up to the top shelf, her fingers finding a box pushed back into the corner. When she pulled it down, her hands were trembling.
She opened the lid.
Lincoln watched her whole body change.
The tension that had been holding her together—the rigid spine, the controlled breathing, the careful movements of someone expecting the worst—released all at once.
Her shoulders dropped. Her chin fell toward her chest. Her arms wrapped around the box like she was embracing something precious, something she’d been afraid she’d lost forever.
He stood in the doorway and felt something crack open in his own chest. He’d watched her suffer for days now—the nightmares, the panic attacks, the seeming slow erosion of her memory.
He’d held her through the worst of it and told himself he understood. But watching her now, watching the way she clung to that box like it was the last piece of solid ground in a world that kept dissolving beneath her feet—he understood that he’d only seen the surface.