Page 51 of Duty Compromised
I mentally jotted down how everyone was reacting to Charlotte’s request to work alone to provide more focus on who to investigate. Charlotte’s team wasn’t aware of the Cascade Protocol being sold on the black market or the critical deadline for the stabilizer code. For them, this was just one more of many important projects they’d worked on.
Except for the traitor. That person knew everything and would want to keep Charlotte from working alone.
The silence that followed was thick with resentment, but people started dispersing, returning to their stations with muttered complaints and dark looks. Charlotte stood frozen in the middle of it all, looking like she wanted to disappear through the floor.
“Thank you,” she whispered to Darcy.
“Always got your back,” Darcy replied, squeezing Charlotte’s arm. “Now, go be brilliant. I’ll handle the children.”
Thirty hours.
Thirty fucking hours we’d been in this building.
I checked my watch again—6:47 p.m. Charlotte had been holed up in what she’d claimed as her new office for the past day and a half. A janitor’s closet, of all places. When I’d asked why, she’d said it was the only room in the building where people couldn’t find her.
The only room where she could work without interruption.
I sat at an empty desk in the main lab, laptop open to the background reports Jace had sent. Page after page of financial records, employment histories, personal details on every Vertex employee. Nothing jumped out. No sudden wealth, no suspicious connections, no obvious red flags. Even Raymond’s expensive miniature addiction.
My eyes burned from staring at screens. My neck ached from the uncomfortable chair. And I was running on maybe four hours of sleep grabbed in shifts while Charlotte worked through the night, refusing to leave the building.
“I need to stay,” she’d explained during hour fifteen, when I’d suggested she needed real rest. “I’m too close to a breakthrough to stop now. If I leave, I’ll lose the thread of what I’m working on.”
So we stayed.
I’d been trying to give her space to work while keeping watch. The lab had emptied and refilled and emptied again—normal people with normal jobs and normal lives going home to dinners and families and beds that didn’t require constant vigilance.
But something about this place had changed over the past thirty hours. The feeling of being watched had intensified since Charlotte had started working alone. Security cameras were expected in a place like this—I’d cataloged them all my first week here. But this felt different now. More personal. More targeted. Like someone was specifically monitoring us, waiting for something.
I stood, stretching muscles that protested thirty hours of mostly sitting, and made my way to Charlotte’s janitor’s closet. The door was cracked open, and I could hear her talking to herself—or to the code, more likely.
“If I adjust the recursive function here… No, that breaks the stability matrix. But what if…”
I knocked gently and pushed the door open. She sat surrounded by monitors balanced on boxes, cables running everywhere like digital vines. Empty food containers from the meals I’d brought her throughout the day littered the floor. Her hair had escaped its braid almost entirely, auburn waves falling around her face as she hunched over her keyboard.
She looked exhausted. Beautiful, but exhausted.
“Hey,” I said softly. “How’s it going?”
She didn’t respond, fingers flying across keys, eyes locked on scrolling code.
“Charlotte.”
Nothing. She was completely gone, absorbed in whatever quantum realm her brain was navigating. I’d seen this before—that total focus that blocked out everything else. But thirty hours of it was taking its toll.
I stepped into the cramped space, careful not to trip over cables, and touched her shoulder gently.
She jerked like I’d shocked her, spinning in her chair with wide, unfocused eyes.
“What? I’m… What?”
“Just checking on you,” I said. “You’ve been at this for thirty hours straight.”
She blinked at me like she was trying to remember who I was. “I’m close. So close. The recursive loops are stabilizing, but the error rate is still too high for implementation. If I can get it below point-zero-three percent?—”
She stopped mid-sentence, her whole body going rigid. Her eyes went wide, focused on something I couldn’t see.
“Oh my God.”
