Chapter 37:


    Grayson took off his sunsses. He stared at the screen. He stared at the small table in the corner, at the woman in the baseball cap. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but the design philosophy of her model—the brutal efficiency, theplete disregard for aesthetics in favor of function—it was familiar. It struck a chord deep in his memory, a style he hadn’t seen in years.


    His mind shed back to the encrypted engineering forums he used to frequent, searching for raw talent. There had been a ghost, a legend who designed with the same ruthless, elegant logic. Valkyrie. The name echoed in his mind. It couldn’t be. But the design signature was unmistakable.


    “What the hell?” he whispered, his voice dangerously low. This wasn’t just some randompetitor. This was someone who thought like a master.


    Belle was fuming. “It’s a glitch! That ugly thing can’t be better than mine!”


    Isolde stood up. She stretched. She high-fived Effie.


    She looked across the room. She caught Grayson’s eye.


    She tapped the brim of her cap.


    A simple, dismissive gesture.


    Grayson felt a shiver run down his spine. He didn’t see the wife he had discarded. He saw a rival. A ghost from the past wearing a stranger’s clothes.


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    “Find out everything about ‘Team Sophia,''” Grayson ordered Daron. “I don’t care how. I want to know who is backing her. And find every file we have on an engineer who used to go by ‘Valkyrie.''”


    Isolde sat back down.


    “Round One to us,” she told Effie. “Now let’s see how they handle the oxygen.”


    To amodate thepetition finals at the Javits Center, Isolde had moved herself and Effie into a nearby hotel for the week. The electronic lock on their room door chirped a soft, cheerful note that felt entirely out of ce. The room was dim, illuminated only by the amber glow of the streetlights filtering through the sheer curtains.


    Effie was already asleep. She was curled into a tight ball in the center of the king-sized bed, her breathing rhythmic and heavy. On the small desk near the window, a chaotic architecture of Lego bricks rose toward the ceiling—a spaceship, or perhaps a colony, half-finished and waiting for tiny hands to resume construction.


    Isolde didn’t turn on the lights. She walked to the desk, her movements silent, honed by years of trying not to disturb a husband who needed his rest. She opened herptop. The screen red to life, casting a blue pallor over her face.


    The countdown clock for the second round of the ISSDC ticked away in the corner. Twelve hours.


    A secure message notification blinked from Harper.


    Subject: K-Tech Dig.


    Isolde clicked it open. The text was brief, attached to a dense PDF of internal testing logs.


    Harper: Got the sensor data. It’s a disaster. Belle cut the safety threshold by 40% to save on unit costs. See page 12.


    Isolde scrolled. Her eyes scanned the numbers, tranting the dry engineering data into a terrifying reality. The thermal runaway point for these sensors was significantly lower than industry standard. In a closed-loop Martian habitat, this wasn’t just a budget cut; it was a death sentence for the virtual inhabitants.


    A cold smile touched her lips. It didn’t reach her eyes.


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