The amber light catches his glasses and for a moment his eyes are hidden behind reflected sky. The rest of him is gilded by it, the lines of his face warmer and less guarded than they are under the blue-white of his monitors, and the thought surfaces before I can route it to the proper partition: he's beautiful in this light, and the fact that I'm thinking about his face when I should be thinking about Neil Marsh is its own kind of evidence.
"I could have been one of them," I say.
The gap between us closes. His shoulder touches mine. Warm through the fabric, solid in a way that code and data and the clinical detachment I've been performing all afternoon are not.
"You couldn't," Tommy says. His voice is quiet, which means he's serious, which means the words carry the weight he usually distributes across jokes and tangents and pop culture references that nobody in this mountain appreciates enough. "That's why you're here."
"That's a nice theory. Not sure the data supports it."
"The data supports it completely. You found a door in my system and used it to warn me instead of selling it. Marsh found systems all day long at GCHQ and never used any of them to help anyone. That's not the same operating system, Dar. That's not even the same programming language."
My throat tightens. He just translated my entire moral crisis into a metaphor I can process, and the precision of it, the fact that he knew the language I needed to hear it in, burrows under my defenses in a way that raw emotion never could.
My fingers are tapping against the railing. Binary. The same subroutine, cycling and cycling.
Tommy watches them move. He reads the pattern the way he reads code, structurally, completely, and I know he can see the loops repeating because repetition in code means something is unresolved.
He covers my hand with his. Stills the tapping. Not forcefully. Just a warm weight against my knuckles, grounding the signal. His thumb traces a single line across my knuckles, and the touch is so specific, so deliberate, that my breath catches before I can suppress the intake.
"Come back inside," he says. "We have a weapon to take apart."
I look at the sky one more time. The amber is deepening toward rust, and the ridgelines are going dark, and somewhere out there Neil Marsh is finishing the thing he built to destroy the thing Tommy built, and the symmetry of it would be almost elegant if it weren't aimed at people I've started thinking of as mine.
My fingers curl under Tommy's palm. I hold on for one beat. His hand tightens around mine. Two beats. Three.
Then I let go, turn my back on the sky, and follow him into the mountain.
17
TOMMY
After the overlook, we go back to work. Two hours of countermeasure simulations in Kane's office while Dar runs threat models at her station, the operational rhythm absorbing whatever passed between us on the mountain the way the mountain absorbs everything. By the time Kane dismisses me, my eyes are burning and the corridor to my quarters feels longer than it should.
Dar is in my quarters when I arrive.
She's sitting on my bed with her shoes off and her laptop open, her legs crossed underneath her like she's been here for a while.
One of my hoodies is draped over the back of my desk chair, and I don't know if she pulled it out or if I left it there, and it doesn't matter because the image of her in my space, surrounded by my things, laptop screen casting blue light across her face like she belongs in a room lit by monitors, lands somewhere behind my ribs and stays.
"Your door code needs work," she says without looking up. Her fingers move across her keyboard in that burst-and-pause rhythm I've memorized. "I got through it in under a minute."
"Some of us use door codes as a polite suggestion, not a security protocol."
"Some of you need better security protocols." She closes the laptop. Looks at me.
Her eyes in the low light are darker than usual, the kohl heavier, and I realize she hasn't slept since the briefing. Neither have I, but I spent the last two hours in Kane's office running countermeasure simulations while she spent them doing whatever she does when the weight of her past becomes a load she can't distribute.
Something hooks behind my sternum and pulls. It's been doing that a lot lately.
The feeling defies categorization, which offends the part of me that organizes everything into systems, and I should probably examine it except the diagnostic would require admitting the cause, and the cause is sitting on my bed with her rainbow hair and her sharp face and the particular stillness in her hands that means she's keeping something contained.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
"Define bad."
"On a scale of one to GCHQ."
Her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. "Seven."
