Chapter 5 #2
"This is going to be embarrassing." She looked back to the sky.
"I was working on a systems architecture project.
Security protocols for distributed networks.
My professor assigned a case study on early military encryption frameworks, and one of the primary sources was a paper co-authored by a student at the Royal Military College.
" She turned her head and looked at him. "Three guesses."
"I think I only need one." He laughed. "Good lord."
"It wasn't just the technical work—though the work was brilliant, and I mean that. It was that the bio note said you were twenty when you wrote it. Twenty. And I thought, if this guy can do that at twenty with everything he's been through, then what's my excuse?"
"I think you’re being too hard on—"
"Don't." She held up her hand. "If you say something humble right now, I'll lose all respect for you."
He closed his mouth, but she could see the struggle. The man wanted to deflect. It was written all over him.
"So, I followed the path," she said. "Joined the military.
Found my way into electronic warfare. And every time someone mentioned Rhodes, I paid attention.
Not because I wanted to be you. Because you were proof that people like us—people who start with nothing, who lose the people that matter most—can still build something that matters. "
He palmed her cheek, holding her gaze. He leaned closer. His breath was hot on her skin.
She rested her hand on his shoulder and tried to recall the last time someone had kissed her.
A year ago? She couldn't remember his name. Chad? Todd? Not Todd? Did it even matter? She tilted her face the last quarter inch.
Gideon pulled back. "I think we can go now."
"Right," she managed.
He pushed to all fours, and a second later was on his knees three feet from her.
It was for the best. She rolled into a sitting position a little further from Gideon.
The wind moved through the trees above them. Somewhere to the west, a branch cracked.
Zadie's pulse ticked. Gideon shifted into a crouch. His body angled toward the sound.
Another crack. This one louder and definitely closer.
"That's not human," Gideon whispered.
She scanned the brush line to their left. The terrain sloped down into a shallow ravine choked with deadfall and scrub. Visibility was maybe thirty feet before the timber swallowed everything. "It's not."
A shape moved low through the brush. Tawny. Fluid. The kind of movement that didn't waste a single calorie because every calorie had a purpose.
Cougar.
Zadie's breath caught in her chest. She'd grown up in country like this. She knew the rules. Don't run. Make yourself big. Make noise. Never ever turn your back.
But knowing the rules and applying them when a hundred-and-fifty-pound cat was thirty feet away and closing were two very different things.
"Don't move," she said, though she wasn't sure if she was talking to Gideon or herself.
The cougar stepped out of the brush and into the gap between the trees. It was a male—broad head, thick neck, shoulders rolling with muscle that made the enhanced soldiers she'd fought look like amateurs. Its eyes locked on her with the flat focus of a predator that had a made a decision.
The animal took another step. Then another. Each one unhurried. It wasn't charging. It was closing distance, eliminating Zadie’s options one step at a time.
And it was working. The slope of the ravine was to her left. The deadfall behind her. The cluster of fir to her right was too tight to move through quickly. The cougar had put her in a corner without her realizing it until she was already there.
She was a cyber analyst. The one who sat behind screens and found patterns in data and broke encryptions that other people built.
She wasn't the one who dealt with apex predators in the backcountry.
That was Scout. Scout would've read this terrain five minutes ago and never let herself get boxed in.
But Scout wasn't here.
"Zadie." Gideon's voice came from her right.
He'd moved—slowly, deliberately—and was now standing with about ten feet between them.
He had a rock in one hand. A big one. And he looked like a man who'd never thrown a rock at a living thing in his life but was fully committed to the concept.
"When I throw this, you move toward me. Fast."
"If you miss—"
"I won't miss. It's a cat, not a firewall."
"Firewalls don’t move as fast as a cat does," she whispered.
The cougar's ears flattened. Its weight shifted to its haunches.
"Now would be good," she said.
Gideon threw the rock. It hit the ground just in front of the cougar's feet and exploded against a flat stone with a crack that echoed off the ravine walls.
The cat flinched. Just barely—a twitch of the head, a shift in weight. But it was enough.
Zadie moved. She pushed off the deadfall and covered the distance to Gideon in three strides. He grabbed her arm and pulled her behind him, putting his body between her and the animal.
"Get big," she said, stepping beside him. She wasn't hiding behind anyone. She raised her arms above her head. "Hey! Get out of here!"
Gideon did the same, spreading wide, and together they filled the gap between the trees like a wall. He grabbed a branch from the ground and cracked it against a trunk.
"Go!" he shouted. His voice was louder than she had expected. Raw. The volume came from somewhere deeper than his throat.
The cougar held for one more second. Its tail twitched, its eyes moving between them, recalculating.
Then it turned and disappeared into the ravine as if it had never been there.
Zadie's legs gave out. She didn't collapse, she just sat down, hard, on the forest floor, her hands shaking in a way they hadn't during the firefight, or the chase, or any of the last twelve hours.
Gideon dropped beside her. He was breathing hard, his face flushed, and his hands weren't much steadier than hers.
"City boy just saved me from a cougar," she said. Her voice cracked, and what came out next was a laugh—sharp, involuntary, and completely unhinged. "My teammates are never going to let me live this down."
"I threw a rock. That's literally all I did."
"You threw a rock, and then you stepped in front of me."
"Instinct."
"Bullshit." She looked at him. His hair was a disaster. His face was dirty. There was a scratch across his cheekbone she hadn't noticed until now, and his blue eyes were soft and warm.
"You know what you remind me of right now?" she said, still catching her breath. "MacGyver. Solving problems with whatever's lying around."
Gideon cocked his head. "What did you just say?"
"MacGyver. You know—duct tape, paperclips, saves the day with a—"
"I know what MacGyver means." He stared at her now with an intensity that had nothing to do with the cougar. "Why that name?"
"Because you just threw a rock at a cougar and somehow it worked. It's very MacGyver." She frowned. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
He was quiet for a long moment. The forest filled the silence—wind, birds, the creak of timber settling.
"Hopper," he said.
One word. Barely above a whisper.
The ground shifted beneath her. Not literally, but it might as well have.
Her breath caught. For three full seconds, she couldn't do anything but stare at him while her brain tried to reconcile the man sitting in the dirt in front of her with the voice on the other end of a gaming headset who'd made her laugh harder than anyone had in years.
"You're MacGyver."
"And you're Hopper."
She palmed both hands over her face and let out a sound that was half laugh, half something she didn't have a name for. "Oh my God." Her gaming partner, the man she'd been terrified to meet was also the same man she'd had a crush on for years. Talk about a mindfuck.
"Grace Hopper," he said. "Co-developed COBOL. I always thought that said a lot about you."
She dropped her hands. "I should’ve known. I mean, I read somewhere that as a kid you rebuilt an engine from spare parts."
"I feel so violated."
"You do not."
"I wanted to meet you. I asked more than once. Then you disappeared. I looked for you. As Flatline, I looked for Hopper everywhere."
"You disappeared first, and I was running missions. Being deployed. Then my unit was ambushed, and now the world thinks I’m dead.
" She gestured vaguely at the forest, the dirt, the remnants of a day that had started with gunfire and was now apparently including the revelation that the man she'd been quietly falling for through a screen was the same one who'd just saved her from a mountain lion with a rock.
"I looked for you, too," she said quietly.
"When you disappeared, I thought something had happened. "
"Something did happen. I just couldn't tell you about it." He shook his head slowly. "Felicity. Hopper. Is there anyone else I should know about?"
"That's all of me." She held his gaze. "Every version. You've met them all now. How about you?"
"You’ve met all my personalities." He held her gaze the same way he had a moment ago.
"Don't do that again," she whispered.
"Throw a rock?"
"Step in front of me."
"I can't promise that."
He closed the space between them. She could smell whatever was left of the morning's coffee on his breath. His hand came up—the same way it had last night when he'd traced her jaw—and this time, his fingers slid into the hair.
She let him. She didn't just let him—she leaned into it, her hand finding the front of his jacket, fingers curling into the fabric.
His forehead touched hers. They stayed there. Breathing. Not moving. Not pulling away.
"This is a terrible idea," she whispered.
"Probably."
"We've known each other for less than a day."
"Technically, we've known each other for weeks. Months, if you count the gaming."
"That's not the same thing."
"It's not entirely different, either."
She tilted her head. His lips brushed hers—barely. Light enough that it might not have counted. Except it did, because she felt it in places that had nothing to do with her mouth.
She pulled back. Not far. Just enough to see his face. "We should go."
"Yeah." He didn't move.
"The chopper's gone. The cougar's gone. And we're sitting in the dirt like two idiots."
"Two alive idiots."
She flattened her palm against his chest. His heart was hammering. So was hers. "Take me to the bunker, MacGyver."
"Lead the way, Hopper."
She stood, brushing dirt and pine needles off her pants. Her legs were solid again. Whatever that moment had been, it had reset something—loosened a knot she hadn't realized she'd been carrying since they'd left the relay station.
They walked back to the SxS in silence, but it wasn't heavy. It was the kind that happened when two people had said enough for now and trusted that there'd be time for more.
She hoped there would be. She hoped for a lot of things right now, and that was new. At least, when it came to men.
But Gideon Rhodes—legend, city boy, rock thrower, MacGyver—had done something to that math, and she wasn't entirely sorry about it.
She fired up the SxS.
He slung the rifle across his lap and settled into the seat. "And Zadie?"
"Yeah?"
"Your dad would be so proud of you."
She put the vehicle in gear because if she opened her mouth, nothing useful was going to come out of it.