Chapter 10
Travis
Sera had been working at my kitchen table for two days, and I’d been pretending I wasn’t aware of her one floor above me.
We’d settled into a pattern without discussing it. I cooked. We ate together, talked in the careful way people talk when they’re circling something neither of them is ready to name, and then she went back to her laptop and I went back downstairs.
She worked. I worked. The compound had always been built for one person, and now there were two, and I was more aware of that than I wanted to be.
“Your heart rate elevates by an average of four beats per minute when she’s directly above you,” Maude observed on the second evening.
“That’s the coffee.”
“You haven’t had coffee in three hours.”
“Then it’s a delayed reaction.”
“To coffee. From three hours ago. That selectively activates when she walks into the kitchen.”
“Toaster, Maude. I’m telling you.”
“Noted. Filing under things Travis refuses to acknowledge. The folder is getting quite large.”
Or maybe a vacuum.
“I’m bringing her down here in a few minutes.” I couldn’t avoid it forever. “Remember, you’re to mention absolutely nothing about my extracurricular activities. Nothing shows up on any screen she has access to. Not the mission logs, not the intercept timestamps, not the route data. None of it.”
“Got it. You’ve only told me that a dozen times since she’s arrived.”
“I’ll stop telling you when I stop worrying about it.”
“So never, then.”
Definitely a fucking vacuum.
When I went upstairs Sera was at the kitchen table with her laptop and a legal pad covered in handwriting so small and precise it looked like machine print.
She had her hair pulled back and a pen between her teeth and she didn’t look up when I came in, which meant she was deep enough in the work that the rest of the world had gone optional.
I recognized it because I did the same thing. The difference was that when I did it, nobody was around to see it.
I poured coffee and stood at the counter and watched her for about ten seconds longer than was professionally necessary. Then I set a second mug in front of her.
She took the pen out of her mouth. “Thank you.”
“How far along are you?”
“The core framework is rebuilt, about eighty, maybe eighty-five percent. Some of the peripheral data I can’t reconstruct from memory, but the structural model is solid.
” She turned the legal pad toward me. Rows of variables, weighted and cross-referenced, mapped against a timeline that spanned eighteen months.
She’d done this from her head. No backup files, no reference materials, no thumb drive. Just two years of work rebuilt from the architecture of her own memory.
“I need better processing power than this laptop can give me,” she said. “And I need your intercept data to validate the model. I can keep working up here, but at some point I’m going to need access to your systems.”
I’d known this was coming. I’d known it since the first morning, when she’d sat at this table and laid out her methodology and I’d understood that the work she’d built and the work I’d been doing were two halves of the same whole.
I just had to figure out how to keep her from knowing all the details of my half.
“Come downstairs into my control room.”
She looked at me. Waiting for conditions, probably. Rules, restrictions, the list of things she couldn’t touch.
“Bring your legal pad,” I said. “And your coffee.”
The control room door opened on my biometric, and I stepped aside to let her in.
She stopped just past the threshold. I waited for the reaction.
The wide eyes, the slow scan, the questions about what everything did and how much it had cost and why a man who supposedly consulted on tech infrastructure needed a setup that rivaled a government facility.
Instead, she walked to the secondary desk where I’d set up her workstation and ran her hand along the edge of the monitor. “Dual screen?”
“I figured you’d want the model on one and reference data on the other.”
“That’s exactly how I work.” She sat down. Adjusted the chair height. Moved the keyboard half an inch to the left. Precise, automatic, the way I positioned my own equipment every morning. “This is how you spend your days.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. “Most of them.”
“I built something like this at the Bureau. Three monitors, networked storage, a workspace nobody else used because the cubicle was too far from the break room.” She looked around once more, and what I saw in her face wasn’t admiration.
It was recognition. The expression of a person who understood what it meant to construct a world that fit your brain. “Yours is better.”
“Mine cost more.”
She almost smiled. I almost let myself enjoy it.
We started with her framework. She loaded the rebuilt model onto the system, and I pulled my intercept data into a parallel feed.
“This cluster here.” She pointed at a concentration of courier movements south of Kalispell. “My model predicted activity in this window, but the frequency is higher than I projected. Why?”
“Kindt shifted three additional couriers into the western corridor about six weeks ago. Summer traffic on the highways gives them more cover.”
“Seasonal adjustment.” She was already typing, updating her variables. “That would also explain the deviation in the northern routes. I assumed it was a personnel change, but if it’s traffic-based cover, the whole model needs a seasonal weighting layer.”
“How long to integrate that?”
“Give me twenty minutes.”
It took her twelve. She rebuilt an entire variable layer in her framework while I verified against my intercepts, and the revised model snapped the corridor data into alignment like a lens coming into focus.
“That’s a ninety-one percent match now,” she said.
“What’s the nine percent?”
“Noise, probably. Or a route I haven’t mapped yet.” She was already scanning the gaps.
She pulled up a secondary layer on her screen.
“There’s also an external variable I’ve never been able to resolve.
Kindt’s pipeline has been disrupted multiple times over the past year by something that isn’t law enforcement and isn’t a competitor.
I’ve been working around it, but with your intercept data I might be able to finally identify the source. ”
My chest went tight. I knew exactly what that external variable was. Me.
“How much is it affecting your projections?”
“A few percentage points. It’s not critical. Just irritating.”
“Then park it. The route gaps are more important right now.”
She gave me a look—the one that said she’d heard me prioritize and was deciding whether to argue. Then she nodded and went back to scanning the gaps.
“Here. This southeast branch. My model predicts courier activity, but your intercepts show nothing. Either they’re using a communication channel you haven’t found, or my projection is wrong.”
“Or they’re running that route dark. No comms. That’s what Kindt does with the youngest kids. The ones worth the most to buyers. No digital footprint, no scheduling chatter, just a van on a back road that nobody’s tracking.”
She went very still. “How young are we talking?”
“The chatter I’ve intercepted references children as young as four.”
She turned back to the screen. Her jaw was tight, but her voice was steady when she replied. “Then we need to pinpoint that route.”
“Agreed.”
We kept working. The exchange got shorter, faster.
She’d call out a pattern, I’d confirm or counter; she’d adjust. I’d flag an anomaly in my intercepts, she’d test it against her framework, and either the framework absorbed it or she’d set it aside for deeper analysis. No wasted motion. No wasted words.
Sera’s mind didn’t just fill gaps in my analysis. It worked the way mine did, from a different angle. The two perspectives together produced something neither of us could build alone.
I hadn’t ever felt that kind of alignment with another person. These feelings didn’t have a precedent, even with Naomi.
I had no idea how to categorize that.
I was still working on that problem when Maude interrupted.
“Incoming call from Beckett Sinclair. He has Hunter Everett and Ryan Cooper on the line. They’d like you to join immediately. Something about the Moreno account.”
The Moreno account. Corporate client, mid-level security detail, the kind of routine work that kept Warrior Security’s books healthy.
Not an emergency, but real enough that they’d want data pulled.
And they were calling now because I was always at my desk, always available, always home. What else would I be doing?
I looked at Sera. She was three feet away, sitting at a workstation that hadn’t existed three hours ago, in a room that nobody outside this compound knew she had access to.
“Work call,” I said. “My team. They don’t know you’re here. So, if you don’t mind staying quiet, that will make my life a lot easier.”
She nodded once and went still.
“Put them through,” I told Maude. “Audio only.”
“Hey guys.”
“There he is.” Beckett’s voice filled the room. “The ghost of Garnet Bend. We were starting to think you’d finally dissolved into your screens.”
“What do you need?”
“Good morning to you, too, sunshine. Hunter, tell the man.”
“The Moreno account flagged a possible breach on their internal network.” Hunter’s voice was what it always was: level, economical, carrying the natural authority of a man who didn’t waste words.
“Client’s convinced it’s an inside job. I need you to run a forensic scan on their server logs.
I’m sending the access credentials now.”
“Timeline?”
“Before their board meeting Friday. So, four days.”
“I’ll have it by tomorrow.”
“I told you.” That was Coop. His voice was warmer than mine, which wasn’t difficult since most people’s voices were warmer than mine. “He says that every time, and he means it every time. The man doesn’t sleep anyway.”
“The man sleeps,” I said. “The man just doesn’t waste daylight.”