His mouth twitches. Just barely. I feel mine twitch back. The almost-smiles say everything that the operational situation doesn't allow.
Then Sarah's voice comes through the comm, sharp enough to cut through all of it. "Tommy. We've got a problem."
"Define problem."
"The weapon isn't just here. I'm reading coordinated activity on external channels. The Committee is pushing data through networks that connect to Echo Ridge's institutional contacts. Government liaisons. Intelligence community partners. The framing evidence is deploying simultaneously with the attack."
Tommy's hands stop.
I've seen Tommy's hands in motion every day since I arrived. Fast, certain, the physical expression of a mind that processes information at a speed most people can't match.
Watching them stop is like watching a heartbeat flatline. The absence of motion is louder than any alarm.
"They're attacking my reputation and my systems at the same time," he says. His voice is quiet. Controlled.
The kind of quiet that, from Tommy, means the humor isn't just dropped but destroyed, rendered inoperative by a payload too heavy for deflection to carry. "The weapon fails; the frame sticks. The frame fails; the weapon succeeds. Either way, they win."
"No." I reach across the gap between our stations and put my hand over his on the keyboard. His fingers are cold. Mine are warm from hours of typing. The temperature differential makes the contact sharper, more specific.
"Either way, they expect to win. That's a modeling assumption, and assumptions are vulnerabilities."
His eyes meet mine over the rim of his glasses. Red alert light reflects across the lenses, and behind them his expression is something I've never seen from him before.
Raw. Unmediated. The face of a man who has spent his entire professional life being the person behind the screen and is now watching both his screen and his identity come under simultaneous assault.
"I can prove the framing is fabricated," I tell him. "Sarah can trace the distribution channels. Victoria can counter through her own intelligence contacts. You don't have to fight this alone."
"I've never fought anything alone." His voice cracks, not with weakness but with something more dangerous: sincerity. "That's the whole point. I built this system for the team. Every line of code, every security protocol, every redundancy. It was always for them. And if this weapon brings it down..."
"It won't."
"If it does, they still have each other. That's not something the Committee can hack."
I squeeze his hand. Hard. The kind of grip that leaves marks, because marks are data and right now he needs physical evidence that someone is in this fight beside him.
"Stop writing your farewell speech and start writing code," I say. "We have a weapon to kill."
His mouth twitches. The ghost of the grin from before, dimmer now but present. Alive.
"Yes, ma'am."
We turn back to our screens.
The weapon's secondary offensive activates forty minutes later. A cascade attack targeting the central communications hub, exploiting a vulnerability in the relay synchronization protocol that Marsh identified through what had to be months of patient signal analysis.
The attack is timed for maximum impact, hitting during the brief synchronization window when the backup channels handshake with the primary system, and the precision is surgical.
I see the attack vector a half second before Tommy does. My offensive pattern recognition, trained on Marsh's GCHQ methodology, reads the signature in the timing of the cascade and identifies the kill shot before it reaches the relay.
"Tommy!" The word tears out of my throat at a volume I don't use. "Central comms, sync window, now!"
His hands fly. Keystrokes so fast the individual clicks merge into a continuous sound, a white-noise burst of everything he has thrown at the problem in the space between my warning and the weapon's arrival.
The cascade hits.
The central monitor dies first. Then the secondaries, left to right, each one blinking out like a candle in a draft. The diagnostic panels follow. The security feeds. The communication relays. Each system shutting down in a sequence I can track because Marsh designed the cascade to propagate through the network in exactly this order, layer by layer, methodical even in destruction.
The blue-white light that has been the baseline of my existence since I arrived gutters and dies, and the darkness that replaces it is absolute. The thick, mineral darkness of a mountain with no windows, pressing against my skin like something solid.
