Chapter 11
Sera
Ten days in the compound, and I'd learned Travis's rhythms the way I learned everything: by watching.
Coffee at six, black, no sugar, poured from a pot he set on a timer the night before. Gym by six-thirty, because he was always freshly showered by the time I came out for breakfast. Eggs, toast, sometimes oatmeal. Always two plates. Always the same chair.
We worked together in the control room most days now, and the corridor analysis of Kindt’s network had progressed further in ten days than my solo work had managed in months.
Three new courier waypoints, narrowed timing intervals, a communication map that was starting to look like something an agency couldn't ignore.
The partnership was the easy part. The rest of it was… not so easy for me.
Ten days of shared meals across a small table.
Of working three feet apart in an enclosed room sharing the same air, the same space.
Of reaching for the same coffee pot, brushing past each other in the hallway, existing in the kind of proximity that turned awareness into something I had to actively manage.
I was managing it pretty damned poorly.
His hand on my lower back when he guided me through the control room door had become habitual.
A light touch, barely there, that he probably didn't think about and I had to force myself not to think about for hours afterward.
When he reached across me to adjust something on my monitor, his arm would brush mine, and the warmth of it would stay on my skin long after he'd pulled away.
One morning he came upstairs from the pool with his hair still damp and a T-shirt that clung to his shoulders, and I had to focus on my laptop screen so intently I probably could have recited the pixels.
My sister’s boyfriend. The guilt hadn't changed shape. It had just gotten louder.
Maude, at least, was a welcome distraction.
"He didn't eat lunch again," Maude told me on the fourth afternoon while Travis was in the shower.
"I noticed."
"His caloric intake has been below baseline for six consecutive days. If you could see the spreadsheet I'm maintaining, you'd be concerned."
"I'm already concerned."
"Good. Historically, concern expressed by a human woman carries approximately four hundred percent more weight with him than concern expressed by me. I've run the numbers."
So Maude and I started a quiet campaign.
Not dramatic. Not confrontational. Just the steady, relentless pressure of two people who noticed when he skipped meals and weren't willing to let it slide.
I'd set a sandwich beside his keyboard when he was deep in analysis.
Maude would announce his blood sugar readings at strategic moments.
Travis would eat the sandwich and glare at the ceiling speaker, and we'd pretend we weren't coordinating.
"You two are ganging up on me," he said, holding the sandwich I'd made like it had personally offended him.
"Eat it, and we'll stop," I said.
"No, we won't," Maude said.
He ate it.
The morning I noticed his knuckles was day five.
He was at the stove, spatula in his right hand, and when he reached for the pepper mill the overhead light caught his hand at the wrong angle. The skin across the top two knuckles was split. Not deep, but raw. Fresh enough that it hadn't fully scabbed.
"What happened to your hand?"
He glanced down like he'd forgotten about it. “I, uh, was punching the heavy bag last night. Forgot to wrap."
"You forgot."
"It happens."
"You're the most disciplined person I've ever met. You don't forget things."
He set the pepper mill down. "I was distracted. It's nothing."
I looked at his knuckles again. The split was across the top, not the flat of the fist. I'd never hit a heavy bag in my life, but even I knew the contact point for a straight punch was the front of the knuckles, not the top.
The top got damaged when you hit something at the wrong angle. Something that wasn't hanging still and waiting for you.
I reached for his hand without thinking. He pulled it back before my fingers got there, a quick, controlled movement that looked casual and wasn't.
"It's fine, Sera."
My hand hung in the air for a second before I pulled it back. Right. He didn't want me touching him. Check. I turned to the breakfast table and picked up my coffee and didn't ask again.
Two days later, his forearm had a neat bandage just below the elbow. Said he caught it on a shelf edge in the storage room. I stared at him but had learned my lesson and didn’t offer to assist in any way. He didn’t want me to touch him. No need to require him to make that known more than once.
But still, the wound itself bugged me.
This was not a man who caught himself on shelves. Not in this place where he could probably walk around blindfolded and never run into anything.
The day after that, he favored his left shoulder for most of the morning. He compensated well. I’d only caught it because I was pathetic and had been watching him for ten days straight.
I knew his baseline the way I knew my own data sets: good enough to see when something was off by a single degree. By afternoon, whatever was wrong had loosened up or he'd gotten better at hiding it. I didn't ask. He didn't explain.
But it stuck with me. I couldn’t shake it.
And tonight, I couldn't sleep. Less because of Travis’s mystery wounds and more because my brain wouldn't stop turning over a routing anomaly I'd been chasing since afternoon. I got up and padded down the hall to the kitchen.
I’d be lying if I said the anomaly was the sole reason I went out.
A few nights ago, I'd come out at two in the morning and found Travis at the kitchen table in the dark. Just sitting there with a glass of water and the kind of silence that meant he'd been up for a while.
I'd almost gone back to my room. But he'd looked up and said, "Can't sleep either?" and I'd sat down across from him.
We'd talked for an hour. Not about Kindt or the model or any of the things that justified my presence in his house. Instead, he’d told me about his life growing up.
A father who’d left early a mother who’d worked doubles.
He’d been a kid who taught himself to code on a library computer because the house was too quiet and the screen was the one thing that made sense.
I just listened, soaking it all up. Wishing he’d tell me more. Wishing he’d tell me everything about himself.
At one point he'd reached across the table and adjusted the glass of water I'd set down, moving it half an inch so it aligned with the edge of the placemat. He'd done it absently, and then he'd looked up and realized, and something crossed his face that was almost embarrassment.
"Sorry," he said. "I do that. Everything has to be exactly right, or it bugs me.”
"I know. I do it too, sometimes.”
He'd looked at me then. Really looked. Not the quick, operational assessments or the careful, controlled glances across the workstation. A long, quiet look that held something neither of us was going to say out loud in a dark kitchen at two in the morning.
"Yeah," he said. "You do."
That was all.
I'd gone back to my room afterward and lain in the dark with my heart pounding and the wanting so thick in my chest I could barely breathe around it.
I'd told myself it was proximity and loneliness and the particular cruelty of living in the same house as a man who I’d been half in love with for years.
Now, three nights later, I walked into the kitchen hoping for a repeat. Evidently a glutton for punishment.
But the kitchen was dark. Empty. No glass of water on the table. No Travis.
I stood there for a minute, feeling foolish. Then, knowing I wasn’t going back to sleep any time soon, I went downstairs to work.
And… in hopes he might be there.
But the room was empty too. His chair was pushed back from the desk at a slight angle, the way it looked when he stood up in a hurry rather than rolling it back with his usual precision.
He must have gone to bed. Reasonable. Normal.
I should go back to my room.
Instead, I sat down at my workstation. The routing anomaly from this afternoon was still open. I pulled it up and stared at it, but my mind kept drifting in a different direction.
The external variable. The one I'd set aside ten days ago because Travis had told me the route gaps were more important, and I'd agreed because he was right.
But I'd never stopped thinking about it. It had been sitting in the back of my mind for ten days, unresolved, and I was done leaving it there.
I pulled up the disruption pattern I'd flagged back in Spokane, the one I'd mentioned to Travis on our first day working together.
At least seven incidents that I'd been able to identify where Kindt's pipeline had been disrupted by something external.
Something that wasn't law enforcement, wasn't a competitor, wasn't anything I could identify.
And those were just the ones visible from my data. There could be more.
With Travis’s intercept data layered in, I had better resolution now.
I started mapping the disruptions against the communication feeds, looking for corresponding chatter on Kindt's side.
Something that would tell me how his organization had reacted to each hit, which might tell me what the disruptions looked like from the inside.
That was when I noticed the gaps in the intercept logs I'd been given access to.
The logs were comprehensive. Months of communication intercepts, courier scheduling, operational chatter inside Kindt’s organization. But when I aligned them against the timeline of the disruptions that wouldn’t leave me alone, there were holes.
Deliberate holes. Gaps designed to keep information from me specifically.
I'd been working in these systems for ten days and I hadn't noticed because the gaps were expertly crafted. Whoever had partitioned my access had done it skillfully, removing specific windows of time without disturbing the data on either side.