Chapter 6 #2
"Across the hall." If he wasn’t mistaken, her cheeks flushed.
"I’ll take it." He crossed the threshold and found the accommodations more than he expected. Certainly more than what he’d been used to. It was simple. A single bed with a metal frame, a desk, a chair, a small closet, and a private bathroom.
He set his backpack on the bed and stared at the three letters on the back side. MGR—Malachi Gideon Rhodes.
Gideon ran his fingers across the letters. At one point, the stitching had been white. Now it was more the color of mud. His father had used this pack every day since Gideon and his mom had gotten it for him for Father’s Day when Gideon was six years old.
"You okay?" Zadie leaned against the doorframe.
"Yeah." He unzipped the pack and started pulling things out. The laptop went on the desk. The tablet beside it. "I take it there’s laundry in this place." He pulled out what little clothing he had. "This stuff stinks."
Zadie waved a hand in front of her nose. "Yeah, it does."
"Maybe it’s you you’re smelling." He lowered his chin.
"Aren’t you funny." She pointed to the closet. "There should be a laundry basket in there and when I radioed ahead, I told Neve if anyone was going on a supply run, to get you some clothes."
"How do you know my size?"
"I looked inside the label," she said.
"You did what? When?"
"I'm kidding." She laughed. "Come on. Let me show you around the rest of the place, and then I want to show you where you'll actually be spending most of your time."
"I’m all yours." He ran a hand through his hair, catching a couple of knots as he followed her out of one wing and through two mazes of corridors. "I’m going to need a map."
"I know, right?" She stopped at the entrance of a short hallway. "This is the medical bay. We’ve got an exam room, a small OR, but it's really more of a sterile treatment room. We can’t handle more than stitches and maybe a few minor procedures if absolutely necessary, but it’s functional.
And we also have two recovery suites." She gestured toward a door with a tilt of her head.
"Kane's in there. Wynn and Darwin are probably still with him since we haven't run into them yet. We'll steer clear for now."
He was fine with that. He wasn't ready for Darwin yet.
They passed a small gym—basic equipment, a heavy bag, some mats.
Then a storage room with enough supplies to sustain a small unit for months.
Then a utility corridor that led to the mechanical guts of the place—generators, water filtration, HVAC systems. That part fascinated him.
But the things that kept other things running had always fascinated him.
Whoever had designed this bunker had built it to survive the kind of scenarios most people only read about.
"And this is all owned by a General?"
"Gus bought it years ago," Zadie said. "It had been decommissioned and according to the world, it no longer exists. Kind of like me."
"I really don’t like it when you talk like that."
She jerked her head as if the comment shocked her. "Okay," she said softly.
It wasn't okay, but that was the best he was going to get from her right now.
"Now, on to the war and comms rooms. My two favorite places," she said.
"Any chance there’s a gaming room?"
She burst out laughing. "God, I wish. No, but I have an old system. Offline only. It’s in my room. We can play it tonight."
"I’d like that." That was true. But he also liked the idea of being alone with her in her room, and that thought should’ve caught him so off guard. But it hadn’t. Not after that kiss.
"This is the war room."
There was a long, rectangular table dominating the center, surrounded by chairs.
A couple of monitors lined one wall—maps, satellite feeds, data streams that were currently running.
A whiteboard on the far wall had notes written in at least three different handwriting styles, some circled, some crossed out, and one that just said DON'T ERASE in block letters.
"This is where the magic happens," Zadie said. "Or the arguments. Depending on the day."
"There's a difference?"
"Not in this group." She curled her fingers around his biceps. "Room next door is my domain."
He stepped inside. "Wow."
There were multiple screens mounted on the wall—some active, some dark.
Two desks positioned at angles that allowed clear sightlines to every monitor.
Cables routed cleanly along the walls. Although some of the equipment looked salvaged and repurposed, its precise configuration showed him that whoever set this up knew exactly what they were doing.
"Huh. That wasn’t here when I left." She strolled over to one of the desks. "Aww. Look." She held up a piece of paper.
Gideon took it, and his heart dropped to his knees. He recognized Darwin’s handwriting immediately—the precise, slightly left-leaning script of a man who'd spent decades writing medical notes.
Welcome, Gideon.
He stared at the paper. His thumb moved across the ink.
"That's a nice touch," Zadie said quietly.
"Yeah." He set the note on the desk, next to the keyboard. He didn't know what to do with the feeling in his chest, so he ignored it.
He ran his hand along the edge of the monitor. The system was modest but solid. Enough to work with. Enough to start. "Darwin set this up?"
"I’m sure he asked Shepherd who knew what I needed."
"He always did think ahead."
"Still does." She leaned against his desk. "Are you okay? You’ve been unusually quiet and a wee bit melancholy since we walked through the bunker door."
"My life flipped upside down when my parents died." He stood in the middle of the room, doing his best to take it all in. "Uni would’ve been a stretch for my family, but my parents had been saving for college. I had good grades. But after the accident, I didn’t think it would happen. I figured I’d end up a grease monkey. "
"Nothing wrong with that."
"You’re right." He stuffed his hands into his pockets.
"But one of my teachers in high school saw something in me.
He pushed me, and next thing I knew, I was in RMC.
It changed everything. Opened doors I never dared to dream about.
And then Darwin came knocking. For seven years he was my mentor.
My friend." Gideon shook his head and laughed.
"To me, Darwin was a legend, and the day he didn't stand up for me, he fell from grace.
" He briefly met her gaze before glancing at the note on the desk.
"I'm just not quite sure how I feel about seeing him again. "
"I know he's been nervous, but at the same time, excited about you being here." She pushed off the desk, pulled out the chair behind hers, and sat down. She clicked her fingers against the keyboard, and Gideon stared at her with awe and fascination. This woman who’d saved his life, who seemed like she wasn’t afraid of anything and could battle against men supercharged with chemicals, was the same women he’d spent hours with laughing over stupid jokes, like how many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None, it’s a hardware problem.
She was intelligent, funny, resilient, independent, and a slew of other descriptors. She was everything that she’d said he was—at twenty.
"I want you to watch something."
One of the screens on the wall came to life. It was a news clip—or maybe a press conference. A police spokesperson with a grim expression stood behind a podium bristling with microphones.
Gideon dropped into the chair.
"…Darwin Oswald, former Director of Medical Operations at Hyperion is wanted in connection with the deaths of multiple Hyperion security personal."
An image of Darwin appeared on the screen. It was the one Hyperion used for his identification badge. The same blue button-down. The same slightly crooked glasses. The same man who used to leave Post-it notes on Gideon's monitor that said things like "eat lunch" and "go home."
Darwin's picture disappeared, and flashes of the murdered men replaced it.
Gideon recognized one of them. A security guard from the west entrance. The one who always had a podcast playing on his phone during the night shift and never once gave Gideon a hard time for leaving at two in the morning.
His name had been Brian. Or maybe it was Ryan. And now, he was a photograph on a screen being used to frame a man who would never have harmed anyone.
"…Oswald is also accused of stealing highly sensitive data from the company. Information that deals with government contracts and top-secret material."
That was a lie. Gideon knew the security architecture.
He'd built half of it. You couldn't steal data from Hyperion without tripping at least three redundancy alerts.
The only way to do that was to steal it manually or by hard copy, and to do that you had to use an internal printer that logged everything.
Same fucking redundancy.
This wasn't a manhunt. It was a narrative.
"…Oswald is considered armed and dangerous. Anyone with information—"
"Turn it off." Gideon had heard enough. Seen enough.
"You believe me now?"
"I always believed you. What I’m struggling with is why he let them fire me." Gideon’s mind went back to the hallway. The elevator. Darwin's face when he'd said he’d been pacing the halls trying to understand what the hell happened. The way Darwin had looked at the floor.
"Because he didn’t know," Zadie said. "But you planted a seed that day, and he went poking around. What he found was my team being ambushed." She pointed toward the door. "Kane? He nearly died. I could’ve died."
"I get it. I do." Gideon ran a hand over his face. Maybe Darwin hadn’t been indifferent Maybe he hadn’t known anything. It was possible. Gideon hadn’t known shit about what they’d done to the system he’d built.
What did that say about him?
He'd spent two months blaming Darwin for not standing up.
For not saying a single word while security walked Gideon to the elevator.
But what had Gideon done? He'd signed the NDA.
He'd picked up the pen and put his name on a piece of paper that sealed his own mouth shut, and he'd walked out of that building without looking back.
He hadn't fought, either. He'd just aimed his anger at the one person who might have been the only ally he had.
He spread his hands on the desk then stood and paced.
Zadie crossed the small space and stopped in front of him.
She reached up and placed her hands on either side of his face. Her palms were warm. Her eyes were steady. "I know you want to hold on to your anger at Darwin. But he’s kicking himself as much as you are. And the only asshole here is Finch."
"You’re right." He gripped her waist, pulling her closer, and stared into her eyes.
She tilted her chin up, and this time, when her lips met his, it wasn't the barely there brush from the forest. It was urgent and hard. Her fingers slid into his hair, and everything that had been building since he’d met her landed right here, in this room, in this kiss.
She tasted like sunshine and rain.
His hand came up to cradle the back of her neck, and she made a sound against his mouth, soft, barely there. It decimated whatever was left of the wall he'd been maintaining.
"Am I interrupting?" a deep voice asked.
Zadie jerked back and gasped.
Gideon straightened and turned toward the door.
Darwin stood in the frame. One hand in his jeans pocket, the other holding a small box. He wore a white button-down, sleeves rolled to the elbows, glasses crooked—because some things never changed. There was a hint of playfulness mixed with an air of seriousness in his expression.
"Jesus," Zadie mumbled as she smoothed back the hair from her braid that had fallen around her face. "You scared the crap out of me."
"I cleared my throat three times. You didn’t hear me." Darwin arched a brow. "It's good to see you, Gideon." Darwin stretched out his hand.
Gideon looked at it.
Not long. A second, maybe two, before he took Darwin’s hand.
The grip was firm. Neither of them let go right away.
"Two months," Gideon said.
"I know."
That was enough for now. Just two men standing in a room full of screens and secrets, holding onto a handshake that meant they were both willing to try.