Chapter 10 #2
“It’s ten in the morning, Trav. Daylight is literally happening right now. Are you telling me you’re going to go outside and enjoy it?”
“I’m telling you I’ll have your forensic scan by tomorrow.”
Beckett cut back in. “Speaking of which. I have a demand. A nonnegotiable, ironclad, absolute demand.”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
I was already pulling up the Moreno server architecture on my secondary monitor, partly because I needed it and partly because it gave me something to look at that wasn’t Sera sitting frozen three feet away. “Your demands are always the same demand wearing different outfits.”
“Proof of life, Travis.” Beckett’s humor was gone now. “Video. Right now. I want to see your face.”
My hands stopped on the keyboard. “My camera’s still down.”
“You’ve been saying your camera is down for three months. You’ve never let a piece of equipment be broken for that long. I know that’s not him. Hunter, boss him around a little.”
“Turn the camera on, Travis.” Hunter said it the way he said everything. Not a request.
I glanced at Sera. She hadn’t moved. She was sitting with her hands in her lap and her eyes on me, and her chair was two inches outside the frame if I angled the camera toward the left monitor. Two inches. Not a margin I loved.
I reached over and adjusted the camera mount. Tilted it three degrees left, framing myself against the server rack and cutting the secondary desk out of the shot. Sera was just outside the edge. Just.
I turned on the camera.
“Jesus Christ,” Beckett said. “What happened to your face?”
The bruise on my jaw. Fading but still visible, green and yellow at the edges. I’d stopped seeing it in the mirror, which was a mistake.
“I hit it on the server rack. Leaned down to check a cable run and caught the edge of the housing on the way up.”
“That’s the most Travis injury I’ve ever heard,” Coop said.
“The man literally hurt himself doing computer work,” Beckett said. “That is peak Hale behavior. You couldn’t injure yourself doing something cool? A bar fight? A bear encounter? Anything?”
“I live underground. My injury options are limited. But I’ll try to be more creative next time.”
“Well, you look like shit,” Beckett said, but the edge under it was concern, not humor. “You’re thinner. Are you eating?”
“I eat.”
“Energy drinks don’t count.”
“He had eggs this morning,” Maude said.
I closed my eyes. In my peripheral vision, I saw Sera press her hand over her mouth.
“Did your computer just snitch on you?” Coop asked.
“Maude is not a snitch. Maude is a system that occasionally overshares.”
“I provided a factual dietary update,” Maude said. “If the truth feels like snitching, perhaps the behavior should change.”
Beckett was laughing. Hunter might have been smiling, which was the Hunter equivalent of laughing. Coop was definitely laughing.
“I like her,” Beckett said. “Maude, what else has he eaten this week?”
“I’m going to decline that question on the grounds that my continued existence depends on Travis not dismantling me.”
“Smart woman,” Coop said.
“Moreno access credentials,” I said. “Send them. I’ll run the scan. Anything else?”
“Not from me,” Hunter said.
“Hey, Trav?” Beckett said.
“What.”
“It’s good to see your face.” A beat. “Even if it looks like you lost a fight with a server rack.”
I turned the camera off. “Bye guys, I’ll talk to you later.”
“Goodbye, hermit.”
The call dropped. The control room went quiet.
I stared at the dark camera for a moment. Then I turned to Sera.
She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t catalogue. Not pity. Not amusement. Something in between that was neither and both, and under all of it was a warmth that I wasn’t equipped to receive.
“They love you,” she said.
“They tolerate me. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.” She paused. “Maude ratted you out about the eggs.”
“Maude has a death wish.”
“I have a self-preservation instinct,” Maude said. “They’re easily confused.”
This time Sera outright laughed. Not the polite sound she’d been offering since she arrived. A real laugh, short and startled. It changed her whole face. Her eyes creased and her shoulders dropped, and for about two seconds she was someone I’d never seen before. Someone unguarded.
I looked away.
We went back to the data. But the room had shifted. She’d seen me with my people. She’d watched me deflect and perform and hold them at arm’s length, and she’d seen through all of it to the thing underneath, which was that the men from Warrior Security were my family and I wouldn’t let them in.
And instead of judging it, she’d sat in the warmth of it like it was something she understood.
The afternoon passed through the work. The exchange between us stayed easy, the earlier guardedness smoothed away by hours of shared effort. She’d make an observation, and I’d build on it. I’d hit a wall, and she’d find the door.
At some point she’d taken off her shoes and was sitting cross-legged in the chair, which should have bothered me because feet on furniture was the kind of deviation from protocol that made my skin itch.
Except…it didn’t bother me. I noticed that it didn’t bother me, and that bothered me more.
Late in the afternoon, Sera sat forward. She’d been running a deeper analysis on the corridor data, cross-referencing route timing against utility consumption patterns that Maude had pulled from county databases.
“Travis. Look at this.”
I rolled my chair toward her screen at the same time she turned to show me her data.
Her face was right there.
Close enough to see the pale line of a scar near her hairline I’d never noticed before. That I could see every golden speck in her brown eyes. That I could feel her breath warm against my jaw.
We both froze.
I could have kept moving forward, let our lips touch. Some part of me wanted to. The same part that had always wanted to, even before…
The part I’d gotten very good at shutting down.
So I straightened. Pulled my chair back to my station. The distance reestablished itself, clean and neat.
“What did you find?” I asked. “Show me.”
She turned back to her screen. Took a breath.
“There’s a timing anomaly in the northern corridor.
Three courier runs in the past month that deviate from the established pattern by almost identical intervals.
” Her voice was steady, but she was talking slightly faster than normal.
“If we cross-reference against Kindt’s known scheduling rhythms, it might indicate a new pickup location. ”
“Pull them up. Let’s see what matches.”
We kept working. Neither of us mentioned the almost that had happened. But the room was different now, and I knew it, and the silence between our keyboards held something it hadn’t held that morning.