"That’s what you were doing at the node," Isaac said. "And that brought you here for a handshake."
"Activated within the cipher window." Gideon let out a breath.
"What did you do inside the core?" Isaac asked.
"Looked around. Pulled some data. Nothing you won't find in the access logs." Gideon scrolled to the credential mapping.
Isaac crouched. His knee touched the ground. The hand with the gun shifted—still pointed at Zadie's head, but the angle had changed.
"This is my architecture," Isaac said. "You mapped my system."
"It was never yours." Gideon looked up from the screen. "You stole AEGIS from the military. You made a shitty copy . You bolted it onto the backbone I designed and patched the cracks with code that a second-year student would be embarrassed by. You didn't build anything, you just wrote a wrapper."
The vein in Isaac's temple throbbed faster. "I improved it."
"You broke it. The authentication cycling is inconsistent. The verification checkpoints are unreliable. The randomization pattern is so thin that a traffic analysis could crack it in a day." Gideon kept his voice as level as he could when his pulse was higher than it ever had been. "I found six vulnerabilities in the first twenty minutes inside the core."
"Those were traps."
"One was a trap. Two of them were actual flaws that you don't know about because you don't understand the architecture well enough to see them." Gideon tilted the laptop toward Isaac. "Here. Let me show you."
Like the fool he was, Isaac leaned in.
His elbow dropped another inch. The barrel of the gun drifted away from Zadie's temple and pointed toward the ground. His free hand reached for the laptop, fingers stretching toward the trackpad.
Zadie drove her elbow backward into Isaac's solar plexus. The compound made him strong, but it didn't harden his organs. His breath exploded out of him, and his gun hand jerked sideways. Zadie ripped free of his grip and threw herself to the left.
Gideon slammed the laptop shut on Isaac's fingers.
He groaned. His hand wrenched free, and the gun flew from his grip, tumbling into the brush. He staggered backward, hunched, curling his crushed fingers against his chest.
Gideon lunged for the gun. His fingers found pine needles, dirt, a root, everything but the weapon. He scrambled forward on his hands and knees.
Isaac recovered faster than any human should. He straightened, reached behind his back, and pulled a knife from a sheath mounted on his belt.
Gideon got to his feet and faced him.
Zadie inched closer, but Isaac spun, swinging the knife in her direction, missing her by an inch as she stumbled backward, landing on her ass.
"You always thought you were smarter than me," Isaac said. His voice had changed. The controlled calm was gone. "Every briefing. Every project review. You'd look at my work, and I could see it in your face. The pity. Like I was some washed-up old man."
"I never pitied you."
"Bullshit." Isaac circled left. The knife sat low in his hand, blade angled up, the grip of someone who'd been trained. "You looked at me the way Darwin looked at everyone who wasn't you. Like I was furniture. Like I filled a seat."
"That's not what happened."
"That's exactly what happened." He feinted right, and Gideon moved back. The trees pressed in around them. The ground was uneven—roots, rocks, a slope that fell away to the left toward the access road. "Finch saw me. Finch understood what I could do. And when I brought him your breach, he didn't look at me like I had one foot in retirement. He looked at me like I mattered."
"Finch used you."
"Finch promoted me." Isaac lunged. The knife cut the air where Gideon's chest had been a half-second earlier. Gideon stumbled backward over a root and caught himself against a tree trunk. "He gave me your office. Your clearance. Your system. Everything you had, I got. Because I earned it."
"You earned it by planting an anomaly in my test run and watching me take the bait." The words came out harder than Gideon intended. Seven years of trust. Seven years of answering Isaac's questions, explaining architecture, treating him like a colleague. And the whole time, the man had been building a trap. "IY-SEED-ETH9. You signed it. You couldn't even sabotage me without taking credit. You needed me to know it was you."
Isaac smiled. "I only wanted you to know that you aren’t as smart as you thought you were. That you have flaws."
"We all have them," Gideon said. "I don’t need to sabotage people or systems to earn my place."
