Page 26 of Duty Compromised
“He should be. If the Cascade Protocol gets out…” Alex didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
I stood up and walked to the window, looking down at the street below. People went about their lives, completely unaware that their safety might depend on one exhausted genius finishing her work in time.
“George doesn’t know Charlotte. Hell, I barely know Charlotte. But I know enough to agree with you that traditional threats aren’t going to do much.”
Alex was quiet for a moment. “Vertex was lucky to get her. MIT tried to recruit her for their research program. Stanford wanted her for their think tank. But she chose us.”
“Why?”
“Freedom, I think. We leave her alone to work at her own pace, in her own way. No committees, no bureaucracy, no politics. Just the work.”
“And she’s never let you down?”
“Never. Not once in five years.” Alex joined me at the window. “But she’s not like normal people, Ty. I don’t mean that in a bad way. She just…operates differently.”
Tell me something I don’t know. “How so?”
“She doesn’t have much of a social life. Actually, scratch that. She doesn’t have any social life. Darcy might be her only friend, and she just joined the team about three years ago.”
I thought back to the handful of times I’d seen Charlotte interact with her colleagues—polite, professional, but always keeping a buffer zone around herself. Even with Darcy, who clearly wanted to be her BFF, Charlotte treated the friendship like it was radioactive.
“Family?” I asked.
“Only child. Both parents deceased.” Alex’s voice softened. “She’s definitely been alone since she started working here.”
I exhaled slowly. “That’s not an easy way to live.”
“I think it’s the only way she knows.” Alex circled back to his desk, shuffling through papers like he might find the magic answer in the margins.
“In terms of getting her to work faster, I could call her up here. We could try the hard-line approach. Scare her, like George said. Threaten her job, her clearance. Make it clear what’s at stake.”
I pushed off the window frame, the glass cool at my back. “That’s a terrible idea.”
He glanced up, one brow raised. “You have a better one?”
I thought about Charlotte on the rooftop garden a few days ago—the way her voice had caught when she admitted she hated weekends, the faint cracks in her armor she clearly didn’t want anyone to notice. Not hardness. Fear. A woman who’d built walls out of code and lab coats because she didn’t know what else to use.
“Let me talk to her,” I said. “Alone. No threats, no pressure. Just…a conversation.”
Alex leaned back in his chair, studying me like I was one of his lab rats that had just asked to redesign the maze. “You think you can get through to her?”
I crossed the room, dragging a chair closer before dropping into it. The damn thing creaked under my weight. “I think threatening her will make her shut down completely. She’s already running on empty. Push her over the edge, and we’ll get nothing.”
His fingers drummed a restless beat against the desktop, eyes narrowed. “And if your approach doesn’t work?”
“Then we try yours.” My jaw tightened. I hated the idea, but I wasn’t blind to the stakes here.
For a long moment, the only sound was that damned drumming. Finally, Alex exhaled and gave a single nod. “Fine. But Ty, we need results. Fast.”
“I know. Trust me—I know.”
I stood and headed for the door, my mind already working through approaches. How did you tell someone who was already killing herself with work that she needed to work harder? How did you add pressure without breaking someone who was already at their limit?
I left his office and headed back to my temporary desk. I’d been watching the lab for days now. Twelve-thirty was when everyone in the lab headed out to lunch. Charlotte never went. They’d probably asked her at some point but didn’t bother to ask anymore. Instead—if she remembered to eat at all—it was by taking her little lunch box and her laptop into the break room by herself.
She wouldn’t be by herself today.
At twelve twenty-five, I positioned myself where I could see the break room entrance. Sure enough, at exactly twelve-thirty, Charlotte appeared, looking even more exhausted than yesterday. She carried a small metal lunch box in one hand and her laptop in the other, shoulders hunched like she was carrying the weight of the world.
