"Yes," I agreed, proud of myself for once.
Mateo was on page three, going slowly, reading the way he did most things, with his entire body somehow engaged in the process. His forearms were on the table, his brow furrowed, and he was tapping one finger against the paper in a rhythm that probably meant he was running numbers. "You're assuming good faith from the arbitration panel in section six," he said. "If Vance or anyone like him has people on the Designation Compliance Board, they'll route every challenge there. It's a choke point."
"That's why the secondary mechanism goes to civil court, not the Board," I said. "The Board doesn't get jurisdiction unlessboth parties consent in writing. I removed their automatic standing."
Mateo stopped tapping. He looked at the page, then at me. "You removed the Board's standing."
"They're a private body with no legal enforcement power. They only have standing because contracts give it to them. So I wrote a contract that doesn't."
A pause.
"You can do that?" he said.
"I just did it." I shrugged.
He sat back and looked at me the way I'd seen him look at exits and entry points: calculating dimensions, measuring what fit and what didn't. "Vance is going to try to have you killed," he said, but it came out sounding almost like admiration.
"He's already trying. This just gives him better reasons." I looked across the table. "Juno?"
Juno was still reading.
That was unusual. Juno processed everything fast, absurdly fast, the kind of fast that made you wonder whether some people were just operating on different software. Juno read and synthesized and had three responses ready before most people finished their first pass.
But he was only on page four and had been on page four for almost two minutes.
I watched.
Stephen and Mateo watched me watch.
Nobody said anything.
Juno reached the bottom of the page. Turned it. Read page five. Stopped.
Not the stop of someone who'd found a legal gap or a logical inconsistency. This was something different, like he was holding his breath. It was the stop of a person who had encountered something in text that they weren't expecting.
The room felt, abruptly, like a room that had been waiting for something.
"Juno," I said.
A beat. Then Juno looked up, and for a moment, just a fracture of a second, the smooth, controlled face was doing something that didn't have a professional name, something that was purely emotional.
"This clause," Juno said, tapping page five. His voice was careful, measured. Each word placed with the deliberate weight of something being carried very precisely across uncertain ground. "The one requiring the erasure of all archived biological data upon contract termination." A pause. "This would have saved someone I knew."
The room sat with that. All of us processing what he’d just said in our own ways.
"Seven years ago," Juno continued. Quietly. "This exact mechanism. If it had existed, they wouldn't have lost their contract, their residency, and—" A stop. Not a graceful one. A wall. "They would have been fine."
Nobody asked.
I understood, viscerally and without needing specifics, that nobody was going to ask.
Stephen's hand moved very slightly on the table, like he'd considered doing something with it and then decided against it. Mateo had gone completely still, the particular stillness of a man who knew exactly when to stop being large.
And I sat with the knowledge that I'd accidentally built something that was more than a legal document. I'd built something that was, for at least one person in this room, a retroactive apology from an industry that would never actually give one.
That sat in my chest like a rock.
"We'll make it stronger," I said. "The archival erasure clause. I want it waterproof."
