Victor let the silence stretch, weighing Mike's words not as an abstract theory but as a live weapon. He leaned back slightly, his chair creaking like a warning in the quiet coffee shop.
His mind was working through the calculus of Mike's proposal, measuring the distance between genius and catastrophic failure.
"What exactly does she find when she looks through you?" Victor asked, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "When she peels back the layers and sees what's underneath?"
"She finds someone who was genuinely useful from the first conversation," Mike said, his voice steady as a heartbeat. "Someone whose analysis hasn't just been plausible but consistently, surgically accurate."
"Someone whose presence in the Phoenix structure she has already acknowledged she hasn't cut me loose, Victor."
"She has chosen to continue the relationship because the utility outweighs the complexity."
