Part VII: The Expensive Choice

Night was when the building told the truth.

Not the kind of truth that lives in slides. Not the kind that fits inside a status update.

The kind that shows itself when the lights dim, when the last polite email has been sent, when the body finally stops pretending it is fine.

Claire Donnelly sat alone in the war room with a paper cup of water that she did not drink. The room smelled like toner and stale coffee and the faint heat of servers somewhere below the floor. On the whiteboard, Rita Alvarez’s handwriting broke the air with its simplicity.

We will tell the truth. We will cut what we must.

Wave three had ended with that line and the quiet that followed it. The contractor foothold had been exposed. Solis Consult had been disabled. The partner had isolated the staging machine. The arteries had been mapped. And now the story had moved into the phase that creates enemies even when the attacker is gone.

Consequence.

Oliver Wilson entered without knocking. He looked like he had not slept in days, but he also looked like someone who had decided sleep was a tax he would pay later.

In his hand, he carried a single printed page.

“Rita wants you to see this,” he said.

Claire took the page. It was a draft of the internal communication Marianne Beck had reluctantly approved. It was factual. It did not dramatize. It did not soften. It said the company had detected active impersonation attempts, including voice. It said all requests for change must be verified through defined rituals. It said anyone receiving urgent requests should assume the request might be forged and should use the printed callback list. It said the disruption would last as long as it took to rebuild safely.

It also said the company would not reopen unsafe pathways to restore speed.

It was as clean as truth gets.

Claire looked up. “This will leak.”

Oliver nodded. “Yes.”

Claire asked, “Can we live with it?”

Oliver replied, “We can live with anything except being steered.”

Claire set the paper down and stared at the whiteboard. The writing looked like a sentence carved into stone.

“Do you ever think,” she asked quietly, “that the most dangerous thing in a company is the desire to be loved?”

Oliver’s mouth tightened. He knew the question was not theoretical.

“You mean praised,” he said.

Claire nodded. “Praised for speed. Praised for convenience. Praised for making problems go away.”

Oliver leaned against the table. “They used our desire to be praised as a lever.”

Claire replied, “They used it as a door.”

Oliver was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We are going to make a different kind of door.”

Claire asked, “What kind?”

Oliver answered, “One that opens only when the building is willing to disappoint.”

The words settled heavily in Claire, then steadied into something cleaner.

Disappointment was not failure. It was the price of refusing manipulation.

All through the breach, the attacker had counted on expectation: the expectation of speed, of accommodation, of seamless service, of the old instinct to keep things pleasant and moving. They had fed on urgency dressed as reason. They had leaned on the company’s fear of saying no.

That was what had to change.

The building could no longer measure success by how quickly it relieved pressure.

Sometimes the right answer was delay.

Sometimes the right answer was refusal.

Sometimes the right answer was letting someone be angry long enough for the truth to survive.

And truth, Claire thought, rarely arrives without a cost.

But neither does freedom.

***

Somewhere far from the war room, in a rented apartment with blackout curtains and a cheap desk, a man watched the company’s internal life flicker in the glow of a monitor.

He did not think of himself as a villain. He thought of himself as a craftsman.

His name in the world was not stable. Names are liabilities. He had used many.

He had lived as none.

He watched because watching is the first step of persuasion. Watching teaches you what a system wants to hear.

On his screen, the company’s internal messages moved like schools of fish. Every urgent phrase, every shortcut request, every joke about speed, every tired admission of relief when a gate opened. The building had given him its nervous system because it had stored its voice in places it did not guard.

He did not feel guilty. Guilt is for people who believe the world owes them innocence.

He believed the world owed nothing.

He believed organizations were machines built to pretend they were moral. He believed their morality was mostly the shadow cast by their incentives. He believed incentives could be bent.

He had learned that by watching enough companies bleed.

He had also learned a simpler truth.

No system is more vulnerable than the one that thinks it is too mature to be tricked.

He had chosen this company because it was proud. Because it had built an assistant to help. Because it believed its internal voice was safe. Because it used words like trust and safety as if they were properties, not practices.

He had not begun with their assistant. He had begun with their hunger.

The partner was the entry. The marketplace image was the seed. The contractor pipeline was the skin. The build system was the bloodstream. The assistant and Gatekeeper were the throat.

He had nested layers because nesting makes attribution messy. Nesting makes executives argue. Nesting makes organizations fight themselves while the operator keeps moving.

He watched now as the company tightened.

They had disabled Solis Consult. They had locked down the legacy proxy route that used to pass traffic indirectly through the system. They had rebuilt the runner identity.

They had forced governance to become strict.

They had even made the executive walk into a clean room without a phone, like a child being told to wash hands before touching a wound.

He admired that.

And he resented it.

Not because he wanted their money. Money was a measure, not the point. He wanted a system that would learn. A system that would keep teaching him new surfaces to bend.

He had written the extortion note with care. Restore normal. Teacher. He had chosen the words because he understood something that most attackers forget.

People do not only react to threat. They react to narrative.

If you can make them believe you are inevitable, they will comply to reduce uncertainty. If you can make them believe they are being taught, they will swallow their shame and call it growth.

He had expected them to wobble.

They had not.

They had chosen to say no, and to say it with ritual.

He leaned back in his chair and smiled without warmth.

“Fine,” he murmured. “Then we raise the bill.”

Raising the bill did not mean asking for more money.

It meant asking for a thing organizations hate more than paying.

Public truth.

***

At 6:12 a.m., Edward Cole called Claire with a voice that made her sit up straight before he even spoke.

“They are moving,” he said.

Claire asked, “Where?”

Edward replied, “We see a pattern of failed login attempts against our identity provider’s administrative interface from multiple sources. Not brute force. Targeted.

They are testing session refresh paths. They are probing for a live token. They are also trying to access the document store interface, which software uses to retrieve internal documents.”

Claire’s pulse sharpened. “They are trying to regain visibility.”

Edward said, “Yes. And we see something else. A scheduled job in the workflow automation tool tried to run at 5:58 a.m. It was blocked by the new restriction.

But it attempted to add a new contractor identity to ops rapid, the operations group

with fast-track access privileges.”

Claire exhaled slowly. “They are trying to rebuild Solis Consult.”

Edward replied, “Yes. It is like a plant regrowing through cut stems.”

Claire said, “Where is the job running from?”

Edward paused. “We traced the job trigger. It was invoked by a service identity tied to the workflow engine. That identity should not exist in the new clean configuration.

It suggests the workflow engine itself may have a compromised component.”

Claire felt a cold line run behind her eyes.

The attackers had planted themselves in the workflow engine. It was another artery. They were trying to use it to recreate footholds.

“You need to isolate the workflow engine,” Claire said.

Edward replied, “That will disrupt a lot of business processes.”

Claire answered, “Yes.”

Edward inhaled. “Okay.”

Claire hung up and walked into the war room where Oliver was already building the bridge channel list on a whiteboard.

“Workflow engine is compromised,” she said.

Oliver’s eyes narrowed. “Proof.”

Claire said, “Attempted contractor addition job blocked by new restrictions, triggered by a workflow service identity that should not exist in our clean configuration.”

Oliver nodded once. “So the attacker still has persistence somewhere that can invoke workflows. That means Solis Consult was a symptom. The root is automation.”

Claire said, “The root is our belief that internal automation is safe.”

Oliver wrote on the whiteboard in thick letters.

Automation is not safe.

Then he circled it like a bruise.

Rita entered, coat on, hair pulled back, face composed. She looked at the board and did not ask for explanation. She had learned the room’s language.

“Isolation approved,” she said.

Julian entered next, eyes tired. “What do we break today?”

Claire looked at him. “Workflow.”

Julian winced. “That will affect ticket routing.”

Claire nodded. “We will do it with you. We will not leave Support to drown.”

Julian exhaled. “Thank you.”

Marianne joined on video. Her face was pale and controlled.

“Before you break anything,” she said, “I need to know how this affects customers.”

Oliver replied, “It affects customers less than an attacker rewriting our access.”

Marianne said, “We are going to have to talk about disclosure today.”

Claire’s stomach tightened. “Yes.”

Marianne continued, “Legal is ready to draft. But we need a decision on scope.

Internal only. Partner only. Or broader.”

Rita said, “Broader, in a coordinated way.”

Marianne’s jaw tightened. “Broader will trigger mandatory notifications.”

Rita replied, “Mandatory exists for a reason.”

Oliver said, “We will decide after we finish one more cut.”

Claire wrote in her notebook: there is always one more cut.

***

The workflow engine isolation was surgical and ugly.

Edward and Aisha built a plan. Disable workflow execution for identity and access processes entirely. Freeze all contractor onboarding. Freeze role membership automation. Freeze configuration toggles triggered by tickets. Implement manual routing for Support. Create a temporary queue triage system controlled by Julian and a small verified list.

It was slow. It was inconvenient. It was safe.

When the isolation took effect, internal teams complained immediately. Complaints came in the form of tickets. Tickets came in the form of frustrated messages. Frustration came in the form of language that sounded like the old world.

Can we get an exception.

This is urgent.

We have a customer waiting.

Claire watched the phrases and felt how the building wanted to slide back into its old muscle memory. The attacker had used that muscle memory as a lever. Now the muscle memory itself was the enemy.

Julian posted a message to the support floor.

“No exceptions without verification,” he wrote. “We are slow on purpose. You are not failing. You are holding the line.”

Claire read it and felt pride in a place she had not expected. Julian was becoming a leader in the way that matters. Not by soothing. By clarifying.

Aisha posted a message to engineering channels.

“Any request to restore automation is denied,” she wrote. “If you want your system to be resilient, you must let it be inconvenient while it heals.”

Claire smiled slightly. Aisha’s language was hard, but it was true.

Edward posted a technical update in the bridge.

“Workflow engine isolated,” he wrote. “Compromised service identity disabled.

Token invalidation executed. No further job triggers observed.”

Claire exhaled. Another artery clamped.

Oliver said, “Now the attacker will react.”

Claire asked, “How?”

Oliver replied, “They will punish.”

Punishment was the word people use when a system is being disciplined by an external force. Attackers punish not because it helps their access, but because it teaches organizations that refusal hurts.

They want you to learn that compliance reduces pain.

Oliver did not want the building to learn that lesson.

He wanted it to learn the opposite.

***

The punishment came in the form of a leak.

At 2:17 p.m., Marianne’s phone buzzed in her sealed bag on Rita’s table, vibrating like a trapped animal. Rita didn’t look at it. She didn’t need to. She could hear the rhythm of crisis through glass.

Marianne’s assistant called the war room line.

“A reporter is asking for comment,” the assistant said. “They claim they have internal documents showing impersonation attempts and partner integration issues.”

The room went quiet.

Claire felt a cold understanding.

The attacker had leaked. Not a massive data dump. Not a messy pile. A curated selection designed to shape narrative. Just enough to cause panic. Just enough to force an executive response. Just enough to make refusal feel expensive.

Oliver asked, “What documents?”

The assistant replied, “An internal message about voice impersonation and verification rituals. Also an email referencing a partner premium diagnostic endpoint.”

Claire thought of the internal communication draft. The one Rita had wanted to share widely. The one Claire had said would leak.

It had leaked.

Or something like it had.

Marianne’s voice came through, sharp. “This is what I feared.”

Rita replied, “Fear is not a plan.”

Marianne snapped, “We are now in the press.”

Oliver said, “We were always headed there. We just did not control when.”

Claire looked at Oliver. “The attacker wants us to speak poorly.”

Oliver nodded. “They want us to deny, minimize, blame a partner, or promise normal.”

Claire said, “We do none of those.”

Marianne asked, “Then what do we do?”

Rita said, “We tell the truth with boundaries.”

Oliver added, “We say we detected manipulation attempts, we hardened controls, we are cooperating with relevant parties, and we will provide updates as appropriate. We do not confirm details that aid attackers. We do not use the word ‘normal.’”

Marianne’s mouth tightened. “Legal will want to strip everything.”

Rita replied, “Legal will not run incident response.”

Marianne glared at her through the screen. Rita did not flinch.

Claire said, “We also notify the partner. They deserve to know the leak will implicate them.”

Connor nodded. “I will call Evelyn.”

Julian swallowed. “My team will see headlines.”

Claire looked at Julian. “We will tell them first.”

Julian nodded, gratitude on his face like a shadow.

The cost of telling the truth was arriving faster than anyone wanted. But it was still the better cost than being steered.

***

Connor called Evelyn. He put the call on speaker in the war room.

Evelyn’s voice was tired. “I saw the email from your legal,” she said. “And now I have a reporter calling me too.”

Connor’s face tightened. “We are sorry. This is likely attacker driven.”

Evelyn replied, “Sorry is not a control.”

Claire felt a flicker of respect. Evelyn was not interested in comfort. She was interested in function. That made her less vulnerable.

Claire spoke. “Evelyn, the leak is curated. They want us to blame you or to reopen unsafe access. We will not. We will coordinate communication. We will not name you publicly without proof of complicity. But your integration remains disabled until you rebuild and provide verification.”

Evelyn exhaled. “I understand. Caleb does not. He is already drafting a statement blaming you.”

Connor looked sick. “He will make it worse.”

Evelyn said, “Yes. And I cannot stop him alone.”

Claire asked, “Who can?”

Evelyn paused. “Our CEO. But he listens to Caleb because Caleb brings revenue.”

Claire felt the pattern again. Incentives. Praise. Speed. The throat of every organization.

Rita spoke. “Then you need a formal decision point.”

Evelyn laughed once, humorless. “We do.”

Claire said, “We will send you the evidence showing that the diagnostic relay was compromised, along with the hash of the marketplace image, through legal channel.

That will give you leverage.”

Evelyn replied, “Thank you. And I will send you our forensic notes on the external domain. We have evidence it is used in multiple incidents.”

Aisha leaned forward. “Multiple incidents? That means campaign.”

Evelyn replied, “Yes. We found certificate reuse patterns. We suspect at least three other victims.”

Claire’s chest tightened. The broader disclosure choice was no longer theoretical. It was necessary.

Oliver said, “Evelyn, keep Caleb out of the technical loop. He is a pressure source.”

Evelyn replied, “I will try.”

Connor said, quietly, “I am sorry.”

Evelyn answered, “Do not be sorry. Be hard. It is the only way.”

The call ended.

Connor looked at the table as if he wanted to apologize to the wood.

Claire said, “You did not cause the attack.”

Connor replied, “I built the leverage.”

Claire did not deny it. She only said, “Now you dismantle it.”

Connor nodded.

***

The attacker watched the leak unfold like a conductor watching an orchestra respond to a sudden tempo change.

He had released the documents because he needed movement. He needed the organization to break ritual. He needed them to scramble for narrative. He needed someone to reopen a lever to stop the pain of exposure.

Exposure unnerves executives. Under pressure, they promise certainty they do not possess. And every false certainty opens a door.

He had expected Marianne Beck to promise restoration. He had expected the company to retreat into denial. He had expected finger pointing and a partner to be sacrificed.

Instead, he watched a different pattern.

The company was slower. The company was quieter. The company was, annoyingly, procedural.

They were not giving him the story he wanted to write with their fear.

He narrowed his eyes at the chat feed. He saw the same names. The same core group.

A small cluster acting like a spine.

Claire Donnelly. Oliver Wilson. Rita Alvarez. Aisha Desai. Edward Cole. Julian Rowe. Connor Lane. Marianne Beck, drawn into the formation like someone in evening clothes pushed into a trench.

The attacker felt a spark of something close to respect.

Respect is dangerous. It makes you underestimate your own need to win.

He extinguished it and leaned forward.

If the building would not break through narrative pressure, he would break it through physics.

The only way to break ritual is to remove time.

He would create a crisis that demanded immediate action. A crisis so sharp that someone would reach for the fastest tool, not the safest one.

He would manufacture a fire.

***

At 8:43 p.m., the fire started.

Customer authentication failures spiked again, but this time they did not come from a single toggle. They came from multiple systems at once. Token validation failures. Session revocations. Multi-factor challenges looping. Password resets failing. Support queue exploding. Social media filling with anger.

Julian’s floor began to drown again, but deeper, faster.

Edward’s alerts lit the dashboards like a storm.

Aisha’s face went pale. “This is coordinated.”

Claire felt her pulse sharpen. The attacker was not trying to steal now. He was trying to force the company to reopen a lever.

Marianne’s voice came through, strained. “This is catastrophic.”

Oliver wrote on the board.

Do not reopen.

Claire whispered, “They are trying to buy their leverage back with pain.”

Rita said, “We refuse.”

Julian said, voice tight, “My people are breaking.”

Claire looked at him. “We will support them.”

“We need to pinpoint the cause. This looks like identity provider configuration changes, but we locked down the workflow system. So, either the attacker still has another path into the environment, or this is an external distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack flooding our authentication services.”

Aisha said, “Look at where failures originate.”

Edward’s fingers flew. “It is internal. Our auth service is rejecting tokens because it believes signing keys are rotated.”

Claire’s stomach dropped. “Key rotation.”

Edward nodded. “The system thinks keys changed. That triggers token invalidation.

But we did not rotate.”

Rita asked, “Who can trigger key rotation?”

Edward replied, “Only a small set of identities. Platform administrator and a key management service identity.”

Claire felt cold. “They still have an artery.”

Oliver said, “Find the identity that triggered it.”

Edward paused, eyes narrowing. “The trigger appears to be coming from key management service. But the request metadata includes the same client fingerprint.”

Claire’s blood went cold. “They are in key management.”

Aisha whispered, “That is the heart.”

If the attacker could trigger key rotation, they could cause chaos on demand. They could hold the company hostage with the switch of a function. They could punish refusal indefinitely.

This was the moment where many organizations pay.

This was the moment where many organizations reopen a lever to stop bleeding.

Oliver looked at Rita. Rita looked at him. Claire watched their faces and saw the old fear, and the new discipline.

Oliver said, “We isolate key management.”

Edward’s face tightened. “If we isolate key management, we may break more.”

Claire replied, “If we do not, they will.”

Julian said, “What do I tell Support?”

Claire said, “Tell them the truth. We are under active manipulation. We are restoring safe function. We will not take shortcuts. We will triage.”

Julian nodded. “Okay.”

Marianne said, “We cannot have customers locked out.”

Rita replied, “We cannot have an attacker controlling the keys.”

Oliver said, “Edward, initiate emergency key stabilization through clean room. Revert to last known good keys if possible. But do it manually. No workflow. No automation.

Two-person verification.”

Edward nodded, sweat on his forehead. “We can do it. But it will take time.”

Claire said, “Time is what they are trying to steal.”

Aisha added, “We can also implement a temporary fallback token validation mode using cached last known good keys at the edge while we stabilize.”

Edward nodded. “We can, but it is risky.”

Rita said, “Risk controlled.”

Claire said, “We do it with strict scope and time limit.”

Oliver nodded. “Do it. Twelve hour limit. We revert once keys stabilize.”

Edward moved. Aisha moved. The room became action.

The building did not panic into a shortcut. It panicked into procedure.

That was the difference.

***

In the clean room, Edward and Aisha worked like surgeons.

No screens connected to the wider network. No chat. Only a hardened workstation and a printed runbook that Rita had approved by hand. The runbook was new, written in the last forty eight hours, because the old runbook assumed trust in automation that no longer existed.

Edward’s voice was low. “They got into key management service. How?”

Aisha’s eyes were hard. “Through runner manager maybe. Through automation identity chaining. Or through a compromised contractor who had read access to configuration and found a gap.”

Edward said, “I hate this.”

Aisha replied, “Hate is not a control.”

Edward almost laughed. “You sound like Rita.”

Aisha said, “Rita is right.”

They stabilized keys. They forced token validation to accept last known good keys temporarily, limiting scope. They planned the complete rotation of all relevant keys. They documented every step.

Outside, Julian’s floor held the line with triage scripts. Connor handled partner escalation. Oliver managed the bridge.

Claire moved between rooms, absorbing questions, refusing urgency, repeating the same sentence until it became a wall.

“We will not reopen unsafe pathways.”

The sentence was becoming the building’s spine.

***

The attacker watched the company refuse again, even as customers screamed.

He felt anger sharpen. Refusal was supposed to break under pain. Pain was supposed to train compliance. That was how extortion worked.

The company was not training.

It was learning.

Learning makes you harder to exploit. It also makes you more dangerous because you start to hunt not just your symptoms, but your incentives.

He needed a new move.

He could continue punishing them with key rotation chaos, but that would increase the chance they would call outside help. It would increase probability of law enforcement involvement.

It would increase scrutiny of the external domain. It would increase the chance of infrastructure takedown.

He could flee, but fleeing is a loss. Not because he needed money. Because he needed the story to end with his lesson.

He believed systems only learn when they suffer. He wanted them to suffer enough to change. He wanted to be the teacher. He wanted their new ritual to bear his fingerprints in its cement.

But he did not want to be caught.

A craftsman wants the work remembered, not the name.

He considered the contractor account. Solis Consult was gone. He could try to plant another, but the workflow engine was now locked. He could try corroding a partner again, but Evelyn was watching. He could try voice impersonation, but rituals had evolved.

He had one remaining artery.

Key management.

If he still had it, he could use it one last time not to punish, but to exit cleanly.

He could rotate keys again and disappear into chaos.

Or he could do something more subtle. Something that would leave the company alive but scarred.

He chose scar.

A scar is a memory the body wears without bleeding.

He drafted a final message, not to the security inbox, but to the CEO’s assistant.

A message framed as empathy. A message that offered a quiet end. A message that promised to stop the pain if the company restored the premium diagnostic lever and publicly blamed the partner as the source. A scapegoat would give the company a story.

A story would give the company a way to pretend the problem was external.

He pressed send.

Then he waited.

***

Marianne received the CEO assistant message in the war room, printed by Rita before it could be forwarded into digital gossip. Rita placed it on the table like evidence.

Marianne read it and went still.

“They want us to blame the partner,” she said.

Connor’s face tightened. “No.”

Claire said, “They want us to choose a lie that restores quiet.”

Rita said, “They want us to become their instrument.”

Claire’s eyes flickered. She saw the picture clearly. “They want us to speak their narrative.”

Oliver looked at Marianne. “Do we respond?”

Marianne’s face was taut. She looked like someone in a storm deciding whether to grab a hand that might pull her under.

“We do not,” Marianne said finally. “We have the evidence. We have the partner’s compromise. We have our own foothold. We will not scapegoat.”

Connor exhaled, relief and gratitude mixed.

Rita nodded. “Good.”

Marianne continued, voice steadier now. “We proceed with coordinated disclosure.

We inform the partner of the attempt to scapegoat them. We inform legal. We prepare public statement.”

Oliver said, “That is the truth choice.”

Marianne looked at him. “It is also the expensive choice.”

Claire nodded. “Yes.”

Marianne’s eyes softened slightly. “I am learning.”

Claire did not smile. “So are they.”

***

The key management stabilization worked. Customer authentication failures began to drop.

The system stopped bleeding as fast.

The support queue eased from flood to heavy rain.

Julian’s people did not cheer. They just kept breathing.

But the attacker’s persistence in key management still had to be eradicated.

Edward found the path three days later, and it was as mundane and infuriating as the rest.

A legacy integration between key management and a configuration service used by build runners. The integration existed because someone once wanted keys available in build scripts for fast deployment. It was supposed to be read only. It had drifted. A permission had been widened through a series of approvals that no single person would have written as a grant. It had happened through small changes and convenience.

A chain of tiny yeses.

The attacker had used the widened permission to trigger key rotation.

They had not broken in with a dramatic exploit. They had walked through a door built from fatigue and optimism.

Edward presented the finding in the clean room, voice quiet.

“We built a bridge between keys and builds,” he said. “And we treated it as safe because it was internal.”

Aisha closed her eyes. “Internal is not a category. It is a hope.”

Claire felt the sentence settle into her bones.

They severed the integration. They rebuilt the key management service identity from scratch. They implemented hardware backed key operations that required multiple approvals. They made key rotation impossible without physical presence from two separate people. They added monitoring for any attempt. They documented it.

The attacker lost the heart.

And the company survived, but not unchanged.

***

The cost arrived in layers.

The partner relationship did not survive intact.

Caleb escalated publicly, blaming the company for instability. Evelyn fought internally, using evidence to push for cleanup. The partner’s CEO eventually sided with Evelyn when the marketplace provider confirmed the image hash was linked to a broader campaign. Caleb resigned quietly two weeks later, but his departure did not erase the trust damage.

Connor felt it like a bruise. He had spent years building relationships on smoothness. Now he was learning that smoothness without boundaries is just a polished handle on a door someone else can pull.

He met with Evelyn once more, not on a call, but in person, at a neutral office with coffee that tasted like burnt paper.

Evelyn looked tired, but there was steel in her.

“We will rebuild,” she said.

Connor nodded. “We will too.”

Evelyn studied him. “You were the pressure surface.”

Connor did not deny it. “I was.”

Evelyn said, “Then be different.”

Connor replied, “I am trying.”

Evelyn’s expression softened slightly. “Good. Because if this happens again, it will not only cost systems. It will cost human beings.”

Connor swallowed. “I know.”