The stillness is involuntary. My body shuts down nonessential output because every available processing cycle is tracking the man who lives behind screens walking toward a room where a retaliatory surge is about to hit.
The data I'm computing is a probability assessment I don't want to complete.
He disappears around the corner. His footsteps fade against the stone.
The silence of the dead mountain swallows him.
"Dar." Sarah's voice, sharp and clinical, the scalpel that cuts through the silence. "He'll signal when he's ready. Stay on the node."
I turn back to my screen. The backup server's pale glow is the only light in the room besides the emergency red, and myoffensive position against Marsh's control node is holding but degrading.
The weapon's adaptive protocols are testing my containment perimeter, probing for the weakness that a moment of distraction might create. Marsh, wherever he is, can feel me losing focus because his code pushes harder against the breach I've been maintaining.
I can't afford to lose focus. Tommy's life depends on the timing of what happens next.
My fingers move.
Force of will overriding the animal part of my brain that wants to run down the corridor after him and drag him back to the keyboard where he belongs, where he's safe, where the worst thing that can happen to him is carpal tunnel and bad coffee.
The comm crackles. Backup comms, limited range, the thin signal that Sarah rigged from the backup server's minimal output.
Tommy's voice comes through with a quality I've never heard from him in the workspace, stripped of distance and mediation. Raw audio. No processing.
Just his breath and his words and the cold acoustics of a room full of silent servers.
"Primary core intact. Hardware undamaged. I'm reconnecting to the backup system now."
"Copy." My voice matches his in register. Flat. Precise. The emotional bandwidth required for anything else has been allocated to the operation, and what's left for communication is pure function.
I hear him working. The sound of physical connection, cables being seated, switches being thrown. The mechanical simplicity of it is almost absurd after hours of fighting through code. Hands on hardware. The digital world reduced to its most fundamental physical reality: a man plugging in a cable.
"Reconnection in progress," Tommy says. "Primary core is accepting the backup system's handshake. Signal integrity looks stable."
"How long until full integration?"
"Three minutes. Maybe less. The primary core's processing power is intact. Once the connection stabilizes, it can absorb whatever the weapon throws at it."
Three minutes.
I spend them fighting alone and alone feels different now than it used to.
Marsh's weapon senses the shift in my defense patterns. Without Tommy's systems feeding me data, my response time degrades and the weapon's adaptive protocols exploit every gap.
A probe hits the backup server's secondary buffer and nearly punches through before I catch it, reroute, and slam a containment wall into the breach with a block of code I write in real time, fingers moving faster than thought.
Another probe. A different vector.
This one targets the connection Tommy is building between primary and backup, testing the handshake for instability, and I have to split my attention between fighting the weapon and protecting the bridge he's constructing on the other end of the comm channel.
Callum died because I couldn't protect him and fight the threat at the same time.
The memory surfaces without permission, cold and precise, and I shove it into a locked partition because I am not losing someone else to a system failure. I am not.
My fingers accelerate. The code I write is vicious, precise, every countermeasure carrying the accumulated fury of a woman who has already buried one person because an institution failed and will burn this weapon to its foundations before she lets it happen again.
Marsh pushes harder. I push back.
The weapon tests a lateral attack on the comm channel itself, trying to sever the connection between my console and the primary server room. Trying to cut me off from Tommy's voice.
