She considers that, nods once, and returns to the dinosaurs. The triceratops launches itself back into battle.
But I know my daughter.
Curiosity is the one thing Lily has never been able to leave alone. When something catches her attention, she circles it. Pokes at it. Asks questions until the entire shape of the thing reveals itself.
And Stratton just became the most interesting mystery in this bunker.
I lean back in the chair, watching Lily orchestrate another prehistoric ambush across the table. Stratton will avoid her. She'll keep her head down. Stay in her room. Focus on the work we need her to do.
But my Lily-bug doesn't understand avoidance. She doesn't recognize the social barriers adults build around themselves. If she decides the pretty lady is interesting, she'll walk straight up to her and start asking questions with that relentless six-year-old logic that never stops until it gets answers.
Stratton won't be able to stop it. She won't even see it coming.
And the moment she breaks the one rule I laid down, whether it's answering a question, smiling back, or simply existing within Lily's orbit, I'll have the justification I've been waiting for. Anticipation settles somewhere dark and twisted in my chest. Part of me welcomes it.
The justification.
The excuse to remind Stratton whose world she's standing in. But the rest of that anticipation doesn't settle as neatly as the first half. Because another part of me doesn't just welcome it.
It waits for it.
Not for the rule-breaking itself, but for what follows. The moment Stratton looks at me with that same infuriating calm she had outside.
But that's Stratton.
She's already accepted the price she thinks she's going to pay.
From the moment she stood in that control cell with the barrel of my gun pressed into the center of her chest, she made her calculation.
I recognized it in her eyes. No panic. No bargaining. Just the quiet shift of someone who had already run the equation to its end.
She believes this is temporary.
That once she finishes the work we need, once the last patient carrying ML-273 is found and the damage she built is contained, that will be the end of it.
Clean.
Final.
The same way she stood there and accepted the possibility that I might pull the trigger.
What she doesn't know is that death would be the easy version of justice. What she doesn't understand, what that brilliant, structured mind of hers hasn't factored into the equation, is that I'm not interested in ending her life.
I'm interested in owning the rest of it.
That's her debt.
Because the moment she stepped into this bunker, the moment she crossed the threshold into the same space where my daughter sleeps, Stratton stopped being a problem to eliminate.
She became a debt to collect.
And debts like that don't get erased.
They get paid.
Slowly.
Every day, she wakes up under the same roof as the child whose blood carries the thing she built. Every hour, she works to find the other patients who received it. Every moment, she exists inside the world she broke.
