Her hands curl into fists on the table.
“The paper’s submission date is March,” she continues, stabbing at the screen. “Weeks before I arrived at the sanctuary. Before you and I ever sat in this room together. Before I spoke with even one gladiator. Before the framework actually crystallized. She took the scaffolding from my proposal, polished it, and submitted it as her own.”
Her mouth twists.
“And when I got here, and the real framework finally formed—when it came alive because of all the hours I spent in this room—she just… folded all those breakthroughs into her revisions. Like the work was always hers. Like I’m just some fieldwork drone who brought back shiny rocks for her to arrange.”
She opens the laptop again, scrolling too fast for me to follow.
“I can see it,” she says. “The way the ideas grow. The way the structure shifts. It’smyarc.Mydirection.Mytrajectory—the exact path I took, reflected back at me underhername.”
Her voice softens, not weaker, just stripped bare.
“She didn’t just steal my words.” Her voice frays like something tearing open. “She stole the woman I was becoming, the version of me that only existed because I dared to think bigger.”
The sentence hits like a blade to the chest.
I want to punch something. Break something. Drag this Dr. Blackwell into an arena and make her look at what she did.
But Sophia is right here, shaking, and my anger is useless if I don’t use it for her.
I shift my chair closer—slow, obvious—so she can stop me if she wants. She doesn’t move away.
“What else?” I ask. My voice stays low. Steady. “What did you do when you saw it? Did you contact her?”
She lets out a breath so harshly that it sounds as if it hurts.
“I threw up,” she says simply. “Then I did the one thing I should have known wouldn’t help. I talked to my mother.”
Her jaw tightens. “She told me I was probably misinterpreting. That collaboration is ‘messy.’ That my autism makes me see patterns other people don’t. That I should bestrategicand not ‘destroy my career over a misunderstanding.’”
Autism.The word settles somewhere in my mind. I have heard it here, in this century, though its full meaning escapes me. What I understand is what I have seen: the way she counts her steps, needs the chair just so, goes still when sound presses too hard. Those patterns were familiar long before I knew their name.
A curse presses at the back of my teeth. The muscle in my jaw pulses from the effort of holding it in.
“She thinks I’m the problem,” Sophia says. “That I’m too sensitive. Too rigid. Too… much.” She swallows. “Her solution is to let it go. To stay quiet. To accept whatever crumbs of credit Blackwell offers, keep myself safe, and move on.”
I frown. “Safe from who?”
“Not me personally,” she says, voice tight. “Just… safe for my career if I don’t make trouble.”
Her fingers tap out that pattern on the table—four fingers, thumb, repeat—too fast.
“My parents think I shouldn’t complain,” she continues. “That I should keep my head down, take whatever Blackwell gives me, and avoid anything that might look messy.”
“So they want you quiet,” I say.
“They want me to be small,” she says. “Somehow, it feels as though that’s always been the goal.”
I push my chair back and lower myself onto one knee so we’re eye-level. I don’t touch her. I just make it impossible for her to look anywhere else without choosing to.
“Sophia,” I say. “Look at me.”
Her glance flicks to my face, then away, as if it hurts to hold my gaze.
“You are not imagining this,” I tell her. “I remember every time your ideas sparked and then grew. Every time you came in here lit up because you saw a new pattern that made more important ideas spring to life in your beautiful mind. Every time you left a call with Blackwell looking… dimmer. Smaller. That pattern is real.”
Her lips tremble. She shuts her eyes as though she’s trying not to cry.
