And that’s worse.
“You should have seen it,” I mutter under my breath.
Behind me, I hear movement, the soft shift of fabric and metal that tells me I’m not alone anymore.
“You did see it,” Stacy says quietly.
I open my eyes and turn slightly, just enough to look at her over my shoulder.
“Not soon enough,” I reply.
She steps closer, her gaze flicking briefly to the display before returning to me.
“You saw it when it mattered,” she says.
“That’s not how this works,” I counter. “You don’t get to miss internal compromise and call it acceptable because you corrected it later.”
“No,” she agrees. “You don’t.”
I study her for a moment.
“Then don’t soften it,” I say.
“I’m not,” she replies, her tone steady. “I’m framing it correctly.”
“And what’s the correct frame?” I ask.
“That you built something complex enough to be worth infiltrating,” she says.
I let out a short breath, something almost like a laugh, but without humor.
“That’s not a defense,” I reply.
“It’s not meant to be,” she says. “It’s context.”
I turn back to the console, my fingers moving again, pulling up internal command logs, tracking communication pathways, mapping who spoke to who, when, and why.
“Context doesn’t prevent this from happening again,” I say.
“No,” she agrees. “But understanding why it happened might.”
That gives me pause.
Not long.
But enough.
“They believed they could operate inside my structure without being seen,” I say.
“They believed your structure had blind spots,” she corrects.
I glance at her again.
“They weren’t wrong,” I say.
“No,” she replies. “They weren’t.”
Silence stretches between us, not empty, but full of that truth, and I don’t push against it.
