His mother had, as expected, useful thoughts.
She had them quickly, in the specific compressed way she had useful thoughts when she’d already been thinking about the situation in the background for some time and was simply waiting for the conversation that would let her say them.
“You should have told me the first time you noticed the data queries,” she said.
Not accusatory — observational, the tone of someone noting a systemic error rather than assigning blame.
“I know,” Kai said.
“I kept telling myself it might be nothing.”
“And now it’s something.” She looked at him through the terminal screen, steady.
“Three-step response, Kai. First: Vasquez, formally, tomorrow morning. All of it — the queries, Wexley’s visit, the archive search. She needs the full picture to provide the right kind of backing. Second: I’m going to contact a commercial contracts advisor I know from the Builder Consortium trade network — someone who understands IP protection for relic discoveries. You need to know exactly what your rights are before the next conversation with any external party.” She paused.
“I told you tonight,” Kai said.
“Three days after it started becoming serious,” she said.
“Better than before. Not where we need to be going forward.” Her expression softened.
“I’m not criticizing. You’ve been raised in a workshop that depended on you handling things. I know that habit well because I built it in you. I’m just asking you to build a new one alongside it.”
“I’m working on it.”
“I know you are.” She looked at him with the thing she rarely let him see directly — the full weight of what it cost to raise a child alone in a place like Ring-9, and the full weight of what it felt like to see that child managing better than she’d feared.
“You built something real out there this month, Kai. Not just the Frame. The people. Don’t let the external attention make you forget that the people are actually the more valuable thing.”
He went to Vasquez the next morning.
Told her everything, in the order it had happened, as accurately as he could manage.
She redirected the security report from ARIA’s monitoring through the Academy’s own network.
She handed him a formal statement of student IP rights that covered relic discoveries made under Academy enrollment.
And she said, at the end, with the specific dry precision of someone who’d watched many situations like this before and had developed strong opinions: “The Consortium moved faster than I’d expected. Which suggests they are more certain about what they think your Frame is than they told you they were.” She paused.
“I would recommend continuing to be exactly as non-committal as you’ve been. The more uncertain you appear about A-01’s nature and value, the less pressure you attract. The more it becomes clear that you know what you have, the more organized the interest will become.”
“She is correct,” ARIA told Kai, on the walk back.
“I would extend her advice: I know things about my own architecture that I have not shared with anyone except you. I recommend maintaining that boundary. What I carry is not fully understood even by me. The Consortium and others are building their interest on what they’ve inferred from my behavior in the evaluation and the tournament. They do not know what we’ve found in the memory fragments. They do not know about the fragment itself.”
“And we’re keeping it that way,” Kai said.
“For now,” ARIA agreed.
“Until we understand it better ourselves.”