Chapter 26
Eighteen months ago
Binary: Instinct is just pattern recognition the conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
Mercury: That sounds like a compliment dressed as dismissal.
Binary: It’s an observation. I don’t trust instinct. I trust data.
Mercury: What if someday the data isn’t there?
Binary: Then I’ll be in trouble.
The world came back in fragments.
Smoke. Heat. A high-pitched whine that Lincoln realized, after several disoriented seconds, was coming from inside his own skull. His ears weren’t working right. Everything sounded like it was underwater, muffled and distant and wrong.
He was on his back. No—on his side, half-buried under something. Debris pressed against his ribs, his shoulder, his leg. When he tried to move, pain lanced through his entire left side and he had to bite down on a groan.
Think. Process. What happened?
The gunfire. The smoke grenades. He’d been moving toward Morgan’s position when the world turned white and loud and then nothing.
Lincoln forced his eyes to focus through the haze. The corridor had become something else entirely—a collapsed nightmare of twisted metal and shattered concrete, lit by the orange glow of spreading flames.
The industrial freezer unit he’d dove behind rose beside him like a steel monument, its surface blackened and dented but intact. Solid construction. Built in an era when equipment was meant to outlast the buildings that housed it.
That freezer had saved his life.
He pushed against the debris pinning him, ignoring the protest from his body. A chunk of drywall shifted. A section of ceiling tile crumbled. Inch by inch, he worked himself free until he could drag his legs clear and roll onto his hands and knees.
The movement made his head swim. Blood dripped from somewhere above his left eye, tracking warm down his cheek. His shoulder screamed when he tried to put weight on it—wrenched, maybe dislocated, definitely useless for anything requiring finesse. But his legs worked. His right arm worked.
Functional. Damaged but functional.
“Lincoln.”
The voice rose above the ringing in his ears.
Bear. Lincoln turned, squinting through smoke that burned his eyes, and found his cousin pulling himself from a pile of rubble near a concrete support column.
Bear’s face was a mask of dust and blood, one arm hanging at an angle that suggested something was very wrong with it, but he was moving. Alive.
“Status,” Lincoln managed. His throat felt scraped raw.
“Been better.” Bear staggered upright, favoring his left leg. “Then again, been worse. You?”
“Functional.”
Bear almost laughed—a rough, pained sound. “That’s one word for it.”
Lincoln forced himself to stand. The corridor stretched in both directions, but one end was completely impassable—ceiling caved in, support beams jutting through the wreckage like broken bones.
Fire licked along the edges of the collapse, feeding on decades of accumulated debris and old wooden framing. The heat pushed against them in waves.
Morgan.
The thought cut through everything else. She’d been ahead of him. Running for the exit corridor while he provided cover fire. He’d told her to go. He’d promised he’d be right behind her.
“Morgan was heading for the east exit.” Lincoln’s voice came out steadier than he felt. “We need to—”
He took two steps toward the corridor she’d taken and stopped.
It wasn’t there anymore.
Where the exit corridor had been, there was only rubble. Fire. A wall of destruction that radiated heat so intense he could feel it searing his skin from fifteen feet away. The blast had taken out the entire section—collapsed it into a burning tomb.
No.
Lincoln moved toward it anyway, some irrational part of his brain insisting he could find a way through, could dig past the wreckage, could reach her—
Bear’s hand closed on his uninjured shoulder. “Lincoln. Stop.”
“She was going that way. She was—”
“I know.” Bear’s grip tightened. “But that path is gone. We find another way.”
Lincoln’s mind raced, pulling up the building schematics he’d studied before the operation. Floor plans. Exit routes. Structural supports. He could see the layout in his memory, could trace the corridors and doorways, could calculate which paths might still be passable—
And then understanding hit him like a second explosion.
The intel about the client meeting. The “vulnerable moment” they thought they were exploiting. The perfect setup that had seemed too good to verify more thoroughly.
Manufactured. All of it. Manufactured.
“It was a trap.” The words came out hollow, disconnected from the chaos around them. “Randall planted the intel. He wanted us here. This whole thing was designed to—”
He stopped. Looked at the bodies visible in the rubble. Randall’s men. Randall had sacrificed his own people to spring this trap, had determined those losses to be acceptable because none of it mattered except one thing.
Getting Morgan.
“Randall has her.” Lincoln’s chest constricted. “Bear—the exit. I sent her toward the exit. He would have had people waiting to grab her. Randall has Morgan.”
He reached for his phone without thinking. Dead. The screen was shattered, the casing cracked, the device nothing but expensive debris. His tablet—he patted his tactical vest, found the pocket empty, spotted the remains of it half-buried in rubble three feet away. Destroyed.
The jamming was still active, or maybe his comms were simply broken, but it didn’t matter. He had nothing. No data feeds. No building monitors. No way to see beyond the smoke in front of his face or track movement through the structure or find where they’d taken her.
He was blind.
Okay. Work the problem.
Lincoln closed his eyes, trying to visualize the building schematics again. Randall would need an extraction route. Based on the blast pattern and structural damage, the south corridor was compromised, which meant he’d move north or west. If Lincoln could calculate the probable—
But he couldn’t see the real-time damage without his tablet. Couldn’t overlay thermal imaging to track the fire’s spread. Couldn’t access the building’s security feeds to confirm which corridors were still passable.
Query the building’s security feeds. Shit. Also no access.
He shifted approaches. Morgan’s phone. If he could ping her GPS signature, triangulate her position relative to cell towers—
Track her phone’s GPS signature. Fuck. No equipment.
His tablet was destroyed. His phone was dead. He had no way to run the trace, no way to—
Model Randall’s probable routes based on structural damage patterns.
Lincoln could do that manually. He had the schematics memorized. If he assumed the blast originated from the east corridor and propagated through the older wooden supports, then the load-bearing walls in sections C and D would be compromised, which meant Randall’s viable exits were—
The ceiling groaned overhead. A crack spider-webbed across the concrete above him, and Lincoln realized he had no idea if his assumptions were correct.
He was guessing. Extrapolating from incomplete data. Any conclusion he drew could be wrong, and if he was wrong, he’d go the wrong direction and Morgan would—
The panic didn’t come all at once. It came in pieces. Each failed solution. Each closed door. His mind kept reaching for resources that weren’t there, kept trying to run calculations on hardware that had been destroyed, and every time it came up empty, the pressure in his chest ratcheted tighter.
Morgan was gone. Randall had her. And Lincoln couldn’t solve this problem the way he’d always solved every problem because he didn’t have his tech, didn’t have his systems, didn’t have anything except a body that had always been secondary to the mind it carried around.
He couldn’t think.
Couldn’t calculate.
He was fucking useless. Couldn’t—
Bear grabbed him. His good hand on Lincoln’s shoulder, grip like iron, getting directly in his face despite his own injuries.
“Hey.” Bear’s voice was rough but steady. “Look at me, cuz. Linc. Look at me.”
“I can’t—” Lincoln’s voice cracked. “I’m useless. I don’t have anything. No data, no systems, no way to find her. I can’t do this without—”
“Shut up and listen.” Bear shook him once, hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“You are a lot fucking more than just a genius behind a screen. I know that for a damned fact. You grew up with us. You trained with us. Every combat drill, every weapons session—you were there. All your training as an adult has been for a reason. Your brain isn’t your only weapon. ”
“I can’t—”
“You fucking can.” Bear’s eyes held his, refusing to let him spiral. “You learned everything we learned. Hand-to-hand. Tactical movement. Combat shooting. You just never believed you’d need it because you always figured your mind would solve any problem before your body had to.”
The fire crackled. Somewhere deeper in the building, metal shrieked against metal—a sound like the structure was squealing.
“She needs you right now,” Bear said. “Lincoln Bollinger, the man. Not your computers. Not your data. You. So stop thinking and start moving.”
Lincoln breathed.
In. Out. Forcing oxygen past the panic, past the smoke, past the voice screaming that this wasn’t how he operated.
Bear was right.
He’d trained for this. The muscle memory was there, buried under layers of intellectual superiority and stubborn conviction that his body was merely transportation for his brain.
Time to find out if any of it had stuck.
“Okay.” Lincoln’s voice was steadier now. “Okay. Based on the schematics, there’s a service corridor on the north side. If it’s still passable, it connects to the rear section of the building. They’d have to take her through there to get her out.”
Bear nodded. Then his jaw tightened, and Lincoln saw the question he was holding back.
“Derek was near the east wall,” Lincoln said. “Theo and Callum were at the north exit. I don’t know if—”