“It’s not about violence,” I said quickly.“It’s about geometry.Look.”
I connected my laptop to her monitor.I typed in Ben’s stolen password.
The screen filled with a wide-angle, top-down view of the ice.Grayscale, grainy, and perfect.It showed the crease—the blue paint—and Luke.
“Where did you get this?”Thorne asked.
“I acquired it.”
“Illegal acquisition.Good start.”She leaned forward.“Just don’t get caught.”
I hit play.
On screen, the play developed.A pass from the corner.Luke didn’t scramble.He didn’t lunge.He rotated his hips and pushed—a sharp, clean vector—arriving at the post exactly as the puck arrived.
“Watch the efficiency,” I said.“Most biological subjects in high-stress evasion scenarios exhibit panic—wasted energy, erratic movement.But Subject G…”
I pointed to Luke.
“He minimizes the hypotenuse,” Thorne whispered.
She grabbed a dry-erase marker from her desk and drew directly on her monitor screen, tracing Luke’s path in red.
“He doesn’t track the object,” she murmured, drawing a line from the shooter to the net.“He tracks the probable trajectory.Predictive topology.”
“Exactly,” I said, feeling the rush of validation.“I want to map his efficiency against the standard ‘save percentage’ model.Traditional stats reward volume.They don’t account for difficulty.I want to build a model that quantifies positional success.”
Thorne sat back, capping the marker.She looked at me, a small, knowing smile playing on her lips.
“Subject G,” she said.“Does Subject G have a name?”
My face heated.“Luke.Carter.The transfer.”
“I see.”Thorne’s eyes sparkled.“And does Mr.Carter know he is being reduced to a set of topological variables?”
“He… knows I’m helping him with accounting.”
Thorne laughed, a rich, throaty sound that echoed in the small office.“Accounting.A tragic waste of bandwidth.”
She stood and walked to a filing cabinet in the corner.She rummaged through a drawer markedConfidential/Do Not Touch, pulling out a dusty external hard drive.
“You’re lucky, Lovell,” she said.“I consulted for the Athletic Department three years ago on a biomechanics grant.They wanted to know if their conditioning program was working.”
She tossed me the hard drive.I caught it with two hands.
“That drive contains the raw Catapult data,” she said, sliding the sleek black rectangle across the mahogany.
“Catapult?”
“The GPS vests they wear under their jerseys,” she explained.“It tracks heart rate, acceleration, metabolic load, and spatial positioning to within ten centimeters.”
My mouth fell open.“You have his biometrics?”
“I have theteam’sdata.I consult for the athletic department on performance analytics.If your Mr.Carter is wearing his vest, his data is in there.”
She leaned against her desk, crossing her arms.
“Here is the deal.I am formally adding your name to the Kinetic Efficiency in Sport grant as a research assistant.That legitimizes your access to the video server and the biometric files.You aren’t hacking anymore, Lovell.You’re working.”
