Page 81

“That is not a measurable standard.”

“It is for me.”

I almost answered. Stopped. Because underneath the humor, she was right. Not about measurement. About the pattern.

Talia looked out through the front viewport for a few seconds. “When I worked on Earth, most mistakes were boring.”

I glanced at her.

She kept watching the terrain beneath us. “Wrong label. Number entered backward. Specimen put in the wrong rack. Someone too tired at the end of a shift and trying to pretend they weren’t.” Her mouth tightened faintly. “I liked boring mistakes.”

That was not what I expected. “Why?”

“Because you could fix them.” She rubbed one thumb along the side of her palm. “You found where the number changed, figured out who touched it, corrected the record, and moved on. There was usually a reason.”

Her gaze returned to me. “Even when everything outside the lab was a mess, the work made sense if you followed it carefully enough.”

I understood then. Not merely why she noticed discrepancies. Why she needed to.

“You trusted the records.”

“I trusted that records could be checked.”

A distinction. Important.

She looked toward the terminal. “That’s probably why this is making me crazy. Every time I think I’ve found the mistake, there’s another system underneath it.”

I said nothing. There were answers I could have given. None improved what she had said. So I reopened the portable terminal instead.

She leaned toward it. “What are you doing?”

“Checking the identifier format.”

“I thought we were escaping.”

“We are.”

“You’re flying.”

“The transport is flying.”

Talia looked through the front viewport and then back at me. “That distinction is terrifying.”

I ignored her and accessed an offline fragment of my mission profile. Only local data. Nothing transmitted. My current operational designation appeared. Encrypted.

I stripped away the mission layer, then the personal biometric key beneath it. A sequence populated.

Talia leaned closer. “Wait.”

I turned the screen away from her. Too late. Her expression changed.

“What?”

“That format.”

“What about it?”

“I saw it.”