"She's right," Mace says. "That's not equipment failure."
"I know," Kraken says.
He says it quietly. Not to me. He's already moving back to the console, already shifting gears, and I feel the dismissal of it like a door closing. I watch him pull up the timestamp logs and start cross-referencing and I think: he's not going to say anything. He's just going to use it.
"You're welcome," I say.
The room goes still. Ghost looks at the ceiling. Mace finds something very interesting on his laptop screen. Kevin’s quiet from his spot across the room.
Kraken turns around slowly. His eyes are gray and flat and very, very controlled. "Excuse me?"
My heart is hammering but I keep my voice even. "I said you're welcome. I know you'd prefer I sit quietly in the corner and wait to be rescued, but I handed you something useful twice now and you've taken it both times without acknowledging that I gave it to you. So. You're welcome."
The silence stretches. I can hear the camera feeds cycling.
"You're a civilian," he says. "In a dangerous situation. My job is to keep you alive, not to?—"
"Brief me? Trust me? Treat me like a person who can contribute something?" I cross my arms. "I'm not asking to go out there. I'm asking you to stop acting like I handed you a drawing from a child."
Something moves across his face. Not anger exactly. Something more complicated, kind of like I've pushed on a wall he didn't know he'd built.
"Sit down," he says. But it comes out different than before. Less like an order.
"Iamsitting down." I pull the chair out and sit in it. "See? Perfect prisoner. But I'm right about the intervals."
"I know you are." He holds my gaze for one long second. Then he turns back to the console.
It's not an apology. It's not even close to an apology. But it's the first time he's saidI knowinstead ofI'll have someone look at it, and in this room, with these men, I think that's the closest thing to one I'm going to get.
I uncross my arms and look at the screens. "The interval suggests they're on a timer. Which means whoever's running the camera kills has to execute within a fixed window. If you change your rotation by twelve minutes in either direction?—"
"It breaks the pattern," Mace says slowly. He's looking at me now. Actually looking, not the polite-nod-at-the-civilian look. "Forces them to improvise."
"Or tip their hand," Ghost says from the wall.
I shrug. "I'm just good at anomalies."
Nobody laughs at that this time.
Kraken is still facing the screens. But I can see his reflection in the dark monitor on the left—the set of his mouth, the way his eyes have gone somewhere interior. Thinking. Working through it.
He glances at my reflection. Catches me watching him in the glass.
Neither of us looks away for a long, charged moment.
Then he says, to the room, "Change the rotation. Twelve minutes. Starting now." And everyone moves.
I stay in my chair. The compound outside settles into a tighter, quieter kind of vigilance. The camera feeds cycle. I watch them and don't say anything else.
Kraken doesn't look at my reflection again. But before he leaves he sets a cup of coffee on the table next to me. Black. No comment. Just sets it there and walks away.
I look at the coffee.
Kevin would absolutely have something to say about this.
I drink the coffee. It's very good.
Whatever comes next I know one thing for certain. I'm exactly where I shouldn’t be.
