"That’s an understatement." Coulter laughed.
"Speak for yourself." She twisted the cap and lifted the bottle to her lips. The bubbles fizzed going down, and it was just what she needed. She wiped her lips on the back of her sleeve. "Thanks."
"Anytime." Gideon turned and headed through the bunker door, passing Scout on the way back in.
She nodded, but that was about it. She moved straight to her SxS and continued packing.
"I didn’t mean to give you a hard time," Neve said. "I’m just feeling this mission."
"We’re good." Scout set the comms kit in the back of the SxS. "We’re all on edge with this one. We’ve got a narrow window to get inside a server and even then, we’re still stuck out here, hoping we can find the smoking gun."
"We’ll find it," Zadie said. They had to. Zadie held her soda and watched Scout as she moved to the final SxS. The woman who couldn't think sitting down was on her feet, armed, and ready to walk into a fight forty minutes from the people who'd tried to kill her—all while the man she cared about drove roads he didn't know she could see.
Zadie would keep Wynn's secret. Some things weren't hers to share. And some fights were bigger than a good joke.
This was both.
Gideon leaned against the edge of Zadie's desk, pinched the bridge of his nose, and stared at his boots.
The comms room was quiet. Screens dark except for the one displaying SYN-7's location on the network map. A single blinking point in a valley forty minutes from Hyperion. The portable drive sat on the desk beside his laptop case, loaded with the credential shell Zadie had pre-built. Eighty percent of the work, ready to deploy. The remaining twenty percent—the live encryption keys and permission tokens—couldn't exist until they were inside ORACLE's core, pulling data in real time.
That was the part keeping his lungs from working at full capacity.
He'd packed everything. Cables. Adapters. The laptop. A backup drive in case the primary failed. He'd triple-checked the credential shell against his architecture notes and walked Zadie through the core's permission structure until she could navigate it with her eyes closed. They'd timed the burn cycle from the traffic logs and calculated the sweep window down to the second.
They'd done everything right. And he still couldn't breathe.
"You're going to wear a hole in your lip if you keep chewing on it."
Gideon looked up. Darwin stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his glasses sitting crookedly on his nose, like always.
"How long have you been standing there?"
"Long enough." Darwin stepped inside. "You okay?"
Gideon pushed off the desk and started pacing. "Zadie and I have done everything we can. But AEGIS is a problem I can't solve from here."
"This isn’t news."
Gideon kept talking because he needed to work through it again. "What Isaac did to AGS-2 isn't just degraded. It's unstable. The authentication cycling is inconsistent. Some of the verification checkpoints are running clean, and others are patched with code that doesn't match anything I've seen before." Gideon ran his hand through his hair. "Isaac isn't stupid. He knows he built a cheap imitation. Which means he also knows where the cracks are. And if he knows where the cracks are, he knows someone else could find them."
"Do you believe he did that on purpose."
"I think the flaws I found could be real. Or they could be decoys. Honeypots designed to look like weaknesses so that anyone trying to exploit them walks right into a detection grid." Gideon stopped pacing and spread his palms flat on the desk. "I don't know which ones are real, and which ones are bait. And I'm about to lead this team into a hub, forty minutes from Hyperion, based on assumptions I can't verify."
Darwin crossed the room and rested his hand on Gideon's shoulder. The weight of it was steady. "Slow down," Darwin said. "Breathe."
"I am breathing."
"You're not. You're talking fast and pacing in circles. That's not sucking in air, that’s panic." Darwin leaned in, catching Gideon’s gaze. "Finch, Ramsey, and now Isaac—they've been one step ahead of us from the beginning. Every move we've made, they've anticipated. Every operation has come with a cost." His grip tightened slightly. "But we're still here. We're not dead. We're not locked out. And we're not giving up."
"I know that."
"Then act like you know it." Darwin released his shoulder and leaned against the desk beside him. "If Isaac comes at you, this team is as prepared as they can possibly be. They've been in firefights with enhanced soldiers, and they're still standing."
"That's not what I'm worried about."
"You're worried you're going to get someone killed because you missed something in the code. You're worried that the one variable you didn't account for is the one that gets Zadie hurt." Darwin folded his arms. "I know, because I've been standing exactly where you are. I watched this team get ambushed because I didn't see what was right in front of me. I carry that every day. But carrying it didn't stop me from calling Gus. It didn't stop me from sending Zadie to find you."
