Art nods. “Speaking of Theo, if you haven’t already told him the stunt his father is pulling, make sure you tell him the truth before the situation escalates.”
“I know.” The words scrape their way out. “And I need to tell him about my family too. There’s no more putting it off.” I attempt a smile. “I just need to, as you Brits say, crack on with it.”
Alice’s face brightens instantly. “That’s the spirit! And from everything you’ve told me, he doesn’t sound like the type of man who scares easily.” She bumps her shoulder into mine, her voice dropping into a comforting hum. “But tomorrow’s problem is tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, we are going to eat Art’s latest, greatest invention, watch someBaking Championship, and mercilessly mock every contestant who messes up their sponges.”
“Which, frankly, is most of them,” Art says, returningto the sofa with the steaming plates. “If your sponge is dense, it’s an automatic fail. I don’t understand how that’s still a surprise to people in the tenth season.” He places a plate in front of me with a flicker of mock arrogance. “This one won’t be dense. Mine has the correct aeration.”
Alice giggles.
“You two are adorable.”
“We know,” they say in perfect unison.
I take my first bite. The pull-apart is still warm. A little caramel goo squirts out and onto my tongue. It’s so sweet, but perfectly balanced out by whatever spices are in this thing.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell Theo the truth. The whole truth. I know there’s a chance he’ll want nothing more to do with me after that, but like Alice said, that’s tomorrow’s problem. For the moment, all I want is a second, third, and maybe fourth helping of this dessert.
Twenty
Idon’t sleep. Even with Art’s cinnamon bread filling my stomach, and a plan of attack half-formed in my head, the moment I lie down, everything unravels. I toss and turn for hours, Mr. Harris’ voice looping through my thoughts.
By morning, there’s a dull pounding behind my eyes. No amount of coffee helps. I’ve never been more tempted to call in sick and stay buried under the covers all day. But what would that accomplish? Nothing. Especially because today is the day I tell Theo everything. No matter what.
When I arrive at the office, I immediately know the day is about to become a dumpster fire. The atmosphere is eerily quiet. The Vortex Rise team is clustered in the glass conference room. Their faces are all pale and their shoulders stiff.
At a workstation near the window, Leon is typing like the keyboard swallowed his ATM card. When I set down my bag and coffee, he grunts, “Morning.”
“Hey,” I reply, my voice small. “What happened now?”
“The launch sequence,” he mutters. “Again.”
I inhale sharply. A cold knot forms in my stomach.
“The transient we fixed yesterday is gone, but it’s introduced a cascade into the secondary safety checks. See this?” He points to a few lines of code on his monitor. “The new buffer delay is making the backup sensors read as out of range. The system doesn’t know how to process the overlap, so it defaults straight into an emergency shutdown.”
Translation—The fix birthed a new monster. The software is now so confused about which safety mode it’s supposed to be in that the entire system is effectively having a panic attack. The result is a total lockout the second you try to launch it.
Maybe I should’ve taken that sick day after all. “This is on me. I’m the one who suggested reassigning the redundant buffer.”
“Nope.” Leon swivels in his chair to face me, his expression uncharacteristically stern. “Kiddo, we both signed off on that fix. We tested it, and it passed. Don’t start playing the martyr, Kaori. It’s. Not. Your. Fault.”
Just then, the conference room door swings open. Theo stands in the doorway. The muscle ticking in his jaw tells me he’s moved past annoyed and straight into a cold, focused fury.
“Kaori. Leon.” His voice is clipped, leaving zero room for debate. “Conference room. Now.”
We grab our tablets and follow him inside. Whiteboards are layered with diagrams and frantic arrows, half-erased notes bleeding into new failed ideas. Every outlet is choked by a rat’s nest of charging cables. The table is a graveyard of empty coffee cups and grease-stained takeaway containers.
Theo walks to the front, marker in hand. “Here’s where we stand,” he says, exhaling deeply. “The last update stabilized the launch timing, but now the backup sensors don’ttrust the new parameters. They’re flagging a false positive and triggering a hard emergency stop.”
He gestures toward the diagram of a looping line showing the coaster’s acceleration that ends with a jagged vertical drop. “We know the issue is not the hardware. The track is fine. The mechanical systems are fine. It’s the logic. The set of rules the computer uses to decide what’s safe and what’s not.”
I nod.
“Kaori,” he says, his eyes locking on mine, “what’s your first impression?”
I shift in my seat, feeling the weight of the room’s gaze. Is he really putting me on the spot right now? I guess so. I take a deep breath. “Um, well... if the backup sensors are panicking because the timing shifted, maybe we just need to teach the system what the new normal looks like? Give it a fresh baseline to measure against.”
Behind a row of laptops, I hear a few of the London engineers whispering. I catch the tail end of a snide laugh.
