Chapter 20 Isolation Test
Sloane’s POV
By morning the air in the cabin felt different, tight, as if the wood itself had learned to hold its breath. Eli moved through the kitchen like he always did, pan on the stove, mug in his hand, but something in his shoulders was wound a click tighter.
“What happened,” I asked, before coffee, before pretending.
He did not play dumb. “Nothing concrete,” he said. “I found a scratch by the back door lock. Might be me, might be nothing.”
I went very still. “And when were you going to mention that?”
“I am mentioning it now.”
“That is not the same thing as last night,” I said. Heat climbed up my throat. “Last night when you sat in that chair and listened to every creak while I slept down the hall and did not tell me someone had touched our door.”
His jaw flexed. “You were already spun up. I did not think adding a maybe would help.”
“For my own good,” I said slowly. “You sound like my father when you say that.”
That made him flinch more than I expected. Good.
“I am not your father,” he said. “I am trying to keep you alive without making you crawl up the walls.”
“You do not get to decide what information I can handle,” I snapped. “You are not the only one who knows how to use fear productively.”
We stared at each other across the small space, two people who had built their lives on control now trapped in the same four walls.
“Fine,” I said finally, breath shaking. “We run a test. Forty eight hours. No hotspot, no phone, no sat link. If someone still manages to scratch your precious cabin, then it is not the internet leading them here.”
His eyes widened a fraction. “Cutting contact with Ward and Mila for two days is not a small call.”
“I know,” I said. “It also gives us a clean variable. You want data, this is how you get it. Unless you would rather keep guessing in half measures.”
He hated it. I watched all his instincts rise up against the idea and fight it. Then his shoulders dropped.
“Forty eight hours,” he agreed. “We tell them we are dark by design. No one panics. No one sends a search party that leads anything back here.”
We powered everything down. My phone went into a drawer. His satphone and laptop too. The silence that followed felt different from before. More absolute. No comforting hum from anything. Just us.
Without screens in front of my face, the day stretched in strange directions. We cooked together, which mostly meant he did the actual work and I read the recipe and insulted his technique. We fixed a loose board on the dock that had been bothering him for years, in his words, and chopped wood like two people who had never done manual labor in their lives.
On the trail behind the cabin, under trees dappled with light, the world shrank to the crunch of leaves under our boots and the sound of our breathing.
“What if you walked away from Mercer,” he asked out of nowhere. “Not because they forced you out. Because you wanted to.”
I snorted. “I would make a terrible lady of leisure.”
“Humor me.”
I thought about it. “There is a version where I run a tiny bookstore in some nowhere town. Used paperbacks and coffee that is too strong, a back room with a secret network lab only three people know about.” I kept my tone light, but the longing surprised me. “I write code for fun instead of panic.”
His mouth curved. “You would terrify half the regulars.”
“Good. They would mis shelve things less.”
We picked our way across a narrow log bridging a small stream. My foot slipped on wet moss. Before my brain could calculate fall trajectories, his hand was there, palm up.
I took it. Instinctively. Not because he told me to. Because I wanted to not fall.
“What about you,” I asked when we were both on solid ground again. “If you were not doing this. Not watching timers and doors.”
He was quiet for a few steps. “Sometimes I think about training only,” he admitted. “Designing programs, teaching people how to not screw up the way I did. No live fire. No clients. I am afraid I would feel useless looking in from the edge.”
“Standing back is not the same as walking away,” I said.
He gave me a look like he might actually be considering that.
By nightfall, the cabin felt almost like a bubble outside of time. We played cards by lantern light, laughed at ourselves for being bad at staying off work. For a few hours there were no hackers, no boards, no gods with admin keys. Just us and the soft scrape of cards on wood.
Then the power went out again and did not come back.
We lit candles this time, not waiting for the generator. Candlelight softened everything. The lines of his face. The raw edges of my nerves. It made shadows dance on the walls like the past was further away than it was.
He sat close enough that our knees brushed under the table. At one point I felt his gaze on me, heavier than the air. When I looked up, he reached without thinking, fingertips brushing a rogue strand of hair from my cheek. His fingers lingered a second too long.
I leaned into the touch. It would have been so easy to just keep going. One move forward, then another, until we forgot about the dark pressing up against the windows.
“I do not want our next time to be born out of fear,” I said, words soft but firm.
He swallowed, hand dropping. “Then we wait,” he said. “Until you are choosing me. Not running from them.”
It stung, and it soothed.
Later, in the bed that smelled faintly of his detergent and pine, I woke to a sound that did not fit. Not branch against roof. Not the slow expansion of settling wood. A single, deliberate creak in the hallway.
No hum from electronics. No status lights. Just my own breath and the thin slice of moonlight under the door.
I held my breath, listening. Another soft sound near the back of the cabin. Footsteps or imagination, I could not tell.
“Stay in your room, Sloane.” His voice, low and close to the door, made every muscle in my body lock and then sag with a different kind of fear.
Whatever was out there, we would face it in the dark. Without systems. Without screens.
Just him, and me, and the lines we had decided to draw.