Chapter 218:


    He knew those hands. He knew the way they looked foldingundry, chopping vegetables, soothing a feverish child. But he had never seen them move like this. They were a blur — a violent, beautifulpetence he couldn’t reconcile with the woman who used to ask him to reset the router.


    On the massive main screen, the wireframe model of the satellite tumbled wildly out of control.


    Isolde typed a final string ofmands. She hit Enter with a sharp crack.


    KERNEL RESET. STABILIZATION PROTOCOL ENGAGED.


    The red lights on the console flickered and turned amber. Then, one by one, they shifted to a solid, calming green.


    On the screen, the satellite’s thrusters fired in short, precise bursts. The tumbling slowed. Stopped. The array locked back onto the horizon.


    SIGNAL RESTORED.


    A cheer went up from the technicians on the floor. Sullivan was staring at Isolde with his mouth open, the expression of a man who had just witnessed something he couldn’t categorize.


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    “How?” Sullivan asked. “Thetency — that should have been impossible.”


    Isolde stood and rolled her shoulders, wincing slightly as her injured arm protested. “I switched to fuzzy logic control. The binary inputs were too slow for the drift rate.”


    She turned and looked up at the observation deck. She looked directly at Grayson.


    She didn’t smile. She just held his gaze, her expression unreadable.


    Grayson felt a chill move down his spine. She wasn’t merelypetent. She was elite. And she had concealed it from him for five years. Or perhaps she hadn’t concealed it at all. Perhaps he had simply never looked.


    Isolde walked out of the control room. Grayson met her in the hallway.


    “Isolde,” he said, his voice rough. “The way you were typing — the system architecture —” He paused, the weight of the realizationnding slowly. “Sophia? It was you, all along?”


    “I’m busy,” she said, walking past him.


    He reached for her arm — gently this time, but firmly. “The ISSDC. The Valkyrie simtions. It was you.”


    She pulled her arm free and brushed off her sleeve where he had touched it. “You had five years to see who I really was, Grayson. You chose not to look. That’s on you.”


    Grayson flinched. “What does that mean?”


    “It means I’m done ying small,” she said — quiet, final, absolute. “You surrounded yourself with yes-men and trophies. I’m neither.”


    Daron appeared behind Grayson, looking flushed. “It was a trick. I’m going to check the logs. And was remote essing — I’d bet on it.”


    Isolde stopped. She turned and looked at Daron with something close to pity. “Check the logs, Daron. Please. Do your due diligence.”


    She turned on her heel and walked away, the click of her heels echoing down the corridor like gunshots.


    Grayson stared after her. Then he turned to Daron, his voice tight. “Do it. Check them now.”


    He followed Daron not to the control room but to a system administrator’s terminal in a quiet side office. Daron’s fingers fumbled as he pulled up the root ess logs for thest ten minutes. The screen filled with dense lines of text.


    Grayson leaned closer, his breath fogging the ss.


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