Page 69 of Hollow Code
Gideon stared at the network map on the wall. SYN-7 blinked in its valley.
"Focus on your part of the mission," Darwin said. "On what you know and what you can do. Work with Zadie on that, and let everyone else do what they're good at. That's how this team operates. Everyone has a strength, but no one is an island."
Gideon let out a long breath and dragged his hand over his face. The stubble was rougher than he liked, and he hadn't slept enough, and his eyes still burned from five hours of staring at ORACLE's architecture.
"I never quite fit in with the military," he said. "My unit was full of people like me—engineers, systems guys, the kind of people who'd rather talk to a screen than a room. But it never felt like a unit. Not really. We did our jobs and went home and that was it." He dropped his hand. "Hyperion was different but not necessarily better. Everyone there was performing for someone. I could only take so much of it before I'd close my office door and disappear into the work."
Darwin listened. He didn't interrupt. He just stood there with his arms folded and gave Gideon the same patient attention he'd given him across conference tables and lab benches for seven years.
"This bunker is different." Gideon's voice caught unexpectedly. "These people, they're not colleagues. They're not teammates in the way the military defines it. They're—" He shook his head. "It's like coming home. I didn't know what that felt like until I walked through that door."
Darwin's mouth curved into a small, warm smile.
"And Zadie." Gideon rubbed the back of his neck. "I care about her more than I've ever cared about anyone. Which makes all of this harder because now I've got something to lose that actually matters."
"That's not a weakness, Gideon. That's the whole point."
"It doesn't feel like it when I'm running scenarios in my head at three in the morning."
"It never does." Darwin straightened and put his hand on Gideon's shoulder again. "We're family. And family takes care of one another. Trust that. We’re going to take Finch down. It's just going to take time."
Gideon looked at the man who'd recruited him out of a career he'd outgrown, who'd left Post-it notes on his monitor, who'd stood in a hallway the day Gideon was fired and hadn't known what to say. The man who'd run for his life and built something from the wreckage that looked a lot like hope.
"Thanks."
"Anytime." Darwin dropped his hand and headed for the door. He stopped at the threshold and turned back. "One more thing."
"Yeah?"
"Bring her home safe. Bring all of them home safe. But especially her. I'd like to see what happens when you two aren't running for your lives." He disappeared down the corridor before Gideon could respond.
Gideon stood alone in the comms room. The network map blinked on the wall. The portable drive sat on the desk, loaded and waiting. In less than an hour, they'd be in the vehicles heading for a valley forty minutes from the place that had ended his old life.
Chapter Seventeen
Zadie rolled her shoulders and stretched her fingers over the keyboard. They'd been at the terminal for fourteen minutes. Fourteen intense minutes of inputting activation keys, waiting for handshakes, and watching checkpoints authenticate one at a time while the server racks behind her hummed loud enough to cause deafness.
The hub was a concrete box with no windows and one door. A ventilation unit on the roof rattled every thirty seconds like it was coughing up a lung. Two rows of server racks lined the walls, blinking green in the dim light. The air was warm, stale, and tasted like dust.
Gideon had hard-wired his laptop directly into the mainframe at the terminal station along the back wall, and she'd been staring at the same screen for so long her eyes burned.
"Third checkpoint," Gideon said from behind her. His hand rested on the back of her chair. "Watch the stamp."
The line on her screen flickered.
"Holy shit," she said.
"You're inside ORACLE's core, and it only took eighty-two seconds. Nice job."
"This is fucking amazing," she whispered as she scanned the code. It was sheer brilliance. "You created this."
"I built the architecture. I didn’t write it all. I had really good programmers for that."
"You’re too modest." Her heart pulsed in uneven spikes.
"You're in the permission tree," he said. "Go left at the third branch. That's the administrative partition."
"I see it." The architecture was a programmer’s dream. She'd spent six hours memorizing this map, and now that she was in it, she never wanted to leave. Her fingers flew over the keyboard.
