Reid's gaze dropped to his hands—those same hands that had once rewritten skylines and broken empires—and for the first time since I had known him, they didn't look certain.
They looked… human.
Then he looked back at me.
And I saw it.
The fracture.
Not in his power. Not in his intelligence.
In his belief.
The Architect who trusted systems… facing the possibility that his greatest failure wasn't in code or steel—but in judgment.
His jaw tightened, a slow, controlled motion, like he was physically forcing the pieces in his mind to realign.
"If you're right," he said quietly, his voice dropping into something darker—colder—something that hadn't touched us since Oregon, "then she's not just studying you."
A pause.
His eyes sharpened.
"She's replacing you."
The words didn't echo.
They settled.
Heavy. Final.
"And if she can breach my safe…" he continued, slower now, more deliberate, "if she can access private archives, mimic behavior patterns, anticipate responses—"
