Page 85 of Hollow Code
Gideon moved to the front of the room and picked up the box with the melted watch and patches inside. He pointed to the waypoints on the screen. "We’re going to take Finch down if the last thing we do."
"When this is over," Zadie said. "When we have what we need, and Finch is standing in a courtroom instead of a corner office—what do you want?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean afterward. When Darwin's name is cleared and we're not ghosts anymore. When we can walk outside without looking over our shoulders." She leaned into him and wrapped her arms around his body. "What does Gideon Rhodes want?"
He smiled. "I want to cook you a terrible meal in a kitchen with windows." He smoothed her hair from her face. "I want a dog. I've never had a dog." He kissed her cheek. "I want to take you to The Soggy Beaver and order whatever your dad used to order and sit in his favorite booth."
She wiped the tears that fell from her eyes.
"I want to sit on a porch somewhere and rebuild a broken clock while you write code next to me, and we don't say anything for three hours because we don't need to." He took her hand. "I want to grow old with you in the sunlight."
She threaded her fingers through his and held on. "I want to go to your parents' gravesite. Pay proper respect. And I’d like to visit Babs's grave. Bring her flowers. Thank her for keeping you alive long enough for me to find you."
"Babs would've liked you."
"My dad would've have loved you," she said. "I want to be with you without a shadow over our heads, and in order to have that, we need Finch in handcuffs. Not dead. Not disappeared. I want him sitting in a courtroom watching Darwin testify. I want him hearing his own data read into the record. I want the world to see exactly what he did, and I want him to have to sit there and listen."
"That's very specific."
"I've had a lot of time to think about it."
He squeezed her hand. "Then that's what we do."
She looked at the monitor. Eight dots on a map. A melted device that might be the key to everything or nothing. A backdoor into a system that had tried to kill them twice.
It wasn't enough. Not yet. But it was a start. And starts were what this team was built on.
"Come on," she said. "Shepherd made brownies, and Coulter eats everything."
* * *
