The world shifts slightly as I straighten, the strain along the wound tightening, but I hold it, forcing stability where my body resists it. I don’t look away. Neither does she.
“You made a decision,” I say, stepping closer, closing the space, despite the cost. “Without authority. Without consultation. You altered the outcome of the mission.”
“I prevented it,” she replies.
“From succeeding.”
“From collapsing.”
The words land cleanly between us, neither raised nor softened, and I study her for a moment, measuring the conviction behind them, the absence of hesitation that tells me she has already decided how this conversation ends.
“That’s not your call to make,” I say.
“It was,” she answers, “because you were about to make the wrong one.”
There it is. I take another step forward, close enough now that the space becomes deliberate rather than incidental, forcing her to either retreat or hold position.
She doesn’t move.
“You can’t decide that,” I say quietly.
“I already did.”
The certainty in her voice sharpens something under my control, something that doesn’t respond well to interference, and I let it surface just enough to carry weight.
“You removed me from the field,” I continue. “You interfered with a controlled objective. You cost me the artifact.”
“I kept you alive.”
“That wasn’t the objective.”
“It is now.”
That stops me. Not because of the words. Because of the way she says them.
I watch her more closely, reassessing, recalibrating the structure of this exchange, because she isn’t defending herself in the way I expected. There’s no retreat in her position. No attempt to soften what she did. She stands by it.
“You think that justifies it,” I say.
“I know it does.”
“And you expect me to accept that.”
“No,” she replies. “I expect you to understand it.”
I let out a quiet breath, something colder than frustration, more focused than anger, and I step even closer, pushing into her space fully now, testing the boundary she refuses to acknowledge. She holds it. Of course she does.
“You don’t control the outcome,” I inform, my voice lower now, closer. “You interpret it. That’s not the same thing. You were withholding information, you were alerting decisions, you were doing everything else, but to do what you were hired for.”
“I did it, because I’ve seen what happens if you take it,” she fires back.
Something shifts in that.
I narrow my focus. “Then say it.”
She hesitates.
Then, “You destroy everything,” she says. “Not immediately. Not in a way you’d even notice at first. But it spreads. Through your house. Through your bloodline. Through everyone tied to you.”
