The corridors of Echo Base are quiet in the evenings, the hum settling into its nighttime register, the lights dimming on the schedule Tommy programmed to mimic circadian rhythms.
My fingers trail the cold stone wall, the same grounding ritual I've performed since my first night here, except now the touch doesn't feel like orientation.
It feels like belonging.
The stone is cold and permanent and real, and its indifference is a comfort because the mountain doesn't care about Committee threats or institutional betrayals. It just holds. It held Kane when he carved a headquarters from bare rock. It held the team through every mission that followed.
It's holding me now.
The overlook opens up above me. Montana's sky stretches across ridgelines and distance, dense with stars. My breath clouds in the cold air. The wind carries the bite of altitude and the clean scent of pine and snow.
Footsteps behind me. Tommy's. I know his walk the way I know his keyboard rhythm, by cadence and weight and the particular tempo of a mind perpetually outrunning its body.
"I fixed your tertiary relay again," I say without turning around. "You keep leaving the same blind spot."
"Maybe I leave it so you'll keep finding it."
I turn. He's standing three feet behind me, glasses reflecting the Montana sky, hair falling into his eyes, his hands in the pockets of a jacket he grabbed on the way out.
"How long are you going to keep leaving vulnerabilities for me to find?"
"How long are you going to keep looking?"
"That's a terrible answer."
"It's a perfect answer. You just don't want to admit it because admitting it means you're planning to stay long enough to keep checking, and planning implies commitment, and commitment implies you trust the system, and trusting the system is the thing that terrifies you more than anything the Committee ever built."
"That was a lot of words for someone who communicates better in code."
"I'm trying something new. It's called talking. I hear people do it."
"People are overrated."
"Some people." He steps closer. "Not all people."
The wind pushes his hair across his forehead. I reach up and push it back, my fingers brushing his temple, and the gesture is so casually intimate that it catches us both off guard.
His hand comes up. Catches my wrist before I can pull away.
His fingers wrap around the bone, not tight, just present, holding me in place with the same deliberate restraint he uses on everything that matters to him.
"You're wearing my hoodie again," he says. His voice has dropped into the register I learned in the server room and the gym and his bed at midnight. The one without humor in it.
"Yours smell like you."
His thumb slides across the pulse point at my wrist. Feels the rapid beat there.
His eyes darken behind the glasses, and the shift from banter to heat happens the way it always happens with us, withoutwarning, without transition, as if the conversation was foreplay the entire time and neither of us was polite enough to pretend otherwise.
"When we go back inside," he says, "I'm going to take this hoodie off you."
"Bold assumption."
"Pattern recognition. You wear my hoodies. I take them off. The data supports the prediction."
"Your sample size is statistically insignificant."
"Then we should keep collecting data."
