Kane's expression hasn't changed, but something in his stillness shifts. A decision forming behind the calm. "What's his likely response when we counter the framing component?"
"Acceleration. He'll push the deployment timeline forward because the framing was supposed to buy him time. If the framing fails, his operational cover degrades and he'll move before we can trace him to a physical location."
"Can you build the countermeasures?"
"I already have. The framing signature is a fabrication. I can prove it's fabricated because I know Tommy's actual coding patterns well enough to identify every deviation." I feel Tommy shift beside me, a slight change in his breathing that I catalog. "Anyone who's spent real time inside his code would see the difference. Marsh studied the surface. He didn't understand the depth."
The sentence comes out carrying more weight than operational analysis should, and I hear it a beat too late. Spent real time inside his code. The double meaning lands in the room like a dropped glass, and I refuse to look at Tommy becauselooking at Tommy right now would confirm everything Sarah's forensic gaze is already assembling.
The room processes. Victoria makes a note on her tablet. Sarah's typing speed increases.
Dylan pushes off the wall.
Every part of my body goes alert, because Dylan moving toward you in a confined space is an experience that activates survival protocols regardless of context. He's not threatening. He never is, technically.
He's just present in a way that compresses the air and makes the room feel like it has fewer exits than it did a second ago.
He stops at the end of the table. Looks at me with those eyes that calculate threat before they calculate anything else, and for a moment I am absolutely certain he's about to challenge my involvement, question my objectivity, or demand Kane remove me from the operation.
"What do you need from us?"
The question lands in my chest like a system error. Unexpected input. Does not compute.
I stare at him. He stares back, and his expression hasn't softened, not even fractionally, but the hostility I've been navigating since my first day in this mountain is absent.
In its place is something harder to process than suspicion. Recognition. The grudging acknowledgment that I just laid my institutional trauma on a conference table in front of people I barely know, and the act of disclosure itself is a form of currency he understands.
Dylan made that clear from day one. Trust here isn't given. It's earned. My credentials mean nothing until I prove I'll stand when it costs me something.
This cost me something.
"Processing time on the countermeasure verification," I hear myself say. "And access to the full operations network, not thepartitioned sectors I've been working in. If Marsh accelerates, I need to see the whole board."
Kane nods. "Done."
"And I need Tommy." The words come out before I've fully authorized them. "His code is the baseline the fabrication was built against. Dismantling the frame means working inside his systems at a level that requires collaboration, not parallel operation. We need to be in the same code at the same time."
Under the table, Tommy's knee hasn't moved from mine. The pressure is constant. Warm. A closed circuit between two points that the rest of the room can't see.
Nobody smiles. Nobody makes it into something it isn't. Kane says, "Approved," and the meeting moves on to operational planning, and my hands are tapping again because the adrenaline needs somewhere to go and my fingers are the only part of me I trust to handle the overflow.
After the briefing empties, I don't go back to the workspace. My body navigates the corridors on autopilot, feet finding the path to the overlook the way my fingers find code. Stone walls, recycled air, the gradual lightening as the corridor angles toward the surface.
Then sky.
Montana opens up in front of me like a system with infinite bandwidth. Ridgelines stacking against a sky that's turning amber at the edges, the kind of light that makes distances look closer than they are. Cold air fills my lungs and for a few breaths the taste of metal fades.
Neil Marsh. Brown hair and a mild expression and a contractor badge he wore on a lanyard around his neck like everyone else in the building.
Same division. Same years. Same institutional failure.
Same moment when the system cracked and one of us walked out and the other stayed in, and the divergence betweenthose two choices led to this. Him building a weapon. Me standing in a mountain full of people I didn't plan to care about, trying to stop it.
I could have been him. If the anger had curdled differently. If the isolation had calcified into ideology instead of independence. If I'd stayed inside the corrupt structure instead of burning it down from outside, I could be the one building weapons for the Committee, and the realization sits in my stomach like a data packet I can't decrypt.
Footsteps behind me. Tommy's uneven cadence, looping toward me the way his sentences loop toward their point.
He stands beside me at the overlook. Close enough that his shoulder almost touches mine, far enough that the gap is a choice, not a limitation.
