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The screen she pulled up was almost blank. Just a dark background, command-line interface, a cursor blinking in the upper left corner.

“This is an approximation of what you’ll probably find on the Diehls’ computer system. The actual screen you see will likely look different, but the logic is the same.” She pointed at the cursor. “Our goal is for you to get in, find the files, copy them, and get out. No alerts. No logs. Nobody knows you were there.”

“How many steps?”

“Seven.”

Seven. He could handle seven. Jesus, a kindergartener could handle seven.

She walked him through each step. Her voice was clear, patient, methodical. Access the admin level with a specific command string. Navigate the directory structure. Identify the target files by naming conventions she taught him. Initiate a copy protocol that bypassed the system log. Verify the copy was clean. Remove the access trail. Exit.

She made it sound straightforward. But the commands were arbitrary strings of characters with no relationship to one another, and by the time she finished explaining step seven, step four was already dissolving.

“Ready for you to try?”

“Sure.” Maybe he’d get lucky.

She reset the screen. The cursor blinked at him.

He typed the first command. Got it right. Second command, right. Third command, right. The fourth required a specific string of characters, and he transposed the last two.

“Stop.” She leaned over and pointed at the screen. “Those two characters are reversed. On a live system, that flags the access attempt.”

He fixed it. Moved to step five. His fingers hesitated over the keys. The command was right there, she’d just said it two minutes ago, and his brain was reaching for it and grabbing nothing.

“Directory navigation,” she said. “This command.” She typed it on a separate keyboard so he could watch.

He entered it. Got through step five, step six. Stumbled on seven. Wrong syntax.

“Again,” she said. She reset the screen.

Second run. He got the first four right this time. Felt a flash of something that might have been confidence. Step five, good. Step six, and he transposed two characters in the removal command. Different characters from last time. Same type of mistake.

“That’s the same error in a different place,” she said. “You’re rushing through the strings and swapping characters when the pressure picks up.”

“I may not have a lot of time, so I can’t just sit around with my thumb up my ass.”

She glanced at him then back at the screen. “I get it. Fallon sometimes had the same problem. But you’re going faster on steps five through seven than you are on one through four. Your accuracy drops when your speed increases. And this is just the first set of instructions for getting into the system.”

He stared at the screen. She was watching his typing speed and tracking where his error rate changed. She’d been sitting next to him for fifteen minutes, and she already knew the pattern of how he failed. He was so much better at reading people than dealing with fucking computers.

“Again,” he said.

He forced himself to slow down. Got through one, two, three, four, five. Step six, he entered the command and sat there staring at the screen because step seven was gone. Completely gone. He could feel the shape of it somewhere in the back of his skull, but the actual characters wouldn’t surface.

“What’s the exit command?” she asked. She knew he didn’t have it.

“Give me a second.”

She gave him ten. He didn’t get it.

“It’s this.” She typed it on her keyboard.

He looked at the characters and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t stay in his head. He could sit across a table from a stranger and catalog thirty data points in under a minute. Breathing rhythm, pupil dilation, hand position, vocal pitch, the way someone held their shoulders when they were about to lie. His brain was built for that. It had been trained for that in rooms where getting it wrong meant⁠—

He shut that thought down.

The point was that his brain worked a certain way, and this wasn’t it. These commands were arbitrary. There was no logic connecting one string to the next, nothing to observe, nothing to read. Just characters in a sequence that had to be exact every single time.