He reached into his coat and took out a cream-colored envelope.
“I’ve spoken with my attorneys.
We’d like to return full patent rights for the original design to the Bennett family.
Every license, every royalty, everything Daniel created.
In addition, I would like to establish a scholarship in his name that would cover Leo’s education anywhere in the world.”
The living room went quiet.
Anna stared at the envelope.
“In exchange for what?” Leo asked.
Sloane looked at him approvingly, the way a teacher looks at a student who has asked the right question.
“A small thing.
The storage chip from the left temple of your glasses.
It contains sensitive corporate material, and the version already given to investigators may have been tampered with.
I’d like to have it examined by independent specialists.”
“And?”
“And a brief statement clarifying that your father’s accusations were speculative and based on incomplete information.”
“You want me to say Dad was wrong.”
“I want you to say he was human.”
Leo felt his heartbeat in his throat.
“No.”
Sloane didn’t blink.
“Think carefully, Leo.”
“I did.”
“You’re seventeen.
You can’t see all the ways the world works yet.”
“I’m starting to.”
Sloane’s smile thinned.
“Everyone has a price,” he said softly.
“Usually it’s the thing they’re most afraid of losing.”
He turned his head, just slightly, toward Anna.
“Your laboratory, for instance.
Several of its grants come through foundations I’m associated with.
Such arrangements are fragile.
One phone call could change them.”
Anna rose to her feet.
“Get out.”
“Anna—”
“You sat in our house and threatened my job in front of my son.
Leave.”
Sloane stood slowly, buttoning his coat.
He placed the cream envelope on the coffee table.
“Keep it,” he said.
“Read it when you’ve calmed down.”
At the door, he stopped beside Leo.
“I admired your father,” he said quietly, almost kindly.
“I truly did.
But he never knew when to stop.
I hope you’re smarter than he was.”
Then he walked down the hallway, and the lilies remained on the welcome mat like a funeral arrangement.
For a long minute, nobody spoke.
Then Leo removed his glasses and turned them over in his hands.
The tiny blue light was glowing.
“Mom,” he said.
“Yes?”
“He just threatened us on tape.”
Anna stared at him.
Then, to Leo’s astonishment, she began to laugh.
It was shaky and breathless, the laugh of someone whose fear had nowhere else to go.
She pressed a hand over her mouth, tears shining in her eyes.
“Your father would have loved that,” she whispered.
The next day, Leo told Maya everything.
They sat on the bleachers behind the football field, where nobody could overhear.
Maya listened with her knees pulled up to her chest.
“He actually said ‘Everyone has a price’?”
“Almost word for word.”
“That’s such a villain thing to say.”
“I know.”
“Do real people say that?”
“Apparently.”
Maya shook her head.
“Okay.
What do we do?”
“There’s no ‘we.’”
“Leo.”
“I mean it.
This is dangerous.”
“So was throwing Troy Maddox over your shoulder, and I notice you didn’t ask my permission for that.”
Leo almost smiled.
“My brother has been telling me something for weeks,” Maya continued.
“I didn’t think it mattered.”
“What?”
“Ethan studies network security.
After he left Westbridge, he got curious about why the cameras never worked when Troy was involved.
He said the system wasn’t broken.
It was being managed.”
“Managed?”
“Remotely.
Cameras with a special maintenance mode that deletes footage on command.
Ethan found the manufacturer’s name in the firmware.”
She pulled out her phone and showed him a screenshot.
The logo was a simple silver triangle inside a circle.
Under it, in clean lettering, were the words AEGIS CAMPUS SAFETY.
Leo’s breath stopped.
Triangle inside a circle.
The symbol engraved on the chip hidden in his glasses.
“That’s my father’s mark,” he whispered.
“What?”
“He used it on his first prototypes.
Sloane must have taken it and rebuilt the technology without Dad’s restrictions.”
He stared at the screen.
“Aegis stole the design.
Then they sold it to schools as a protection system, while quietly giving certain people control over what the cameras remembered.”
Maya swallowed.
“How many schools?”
Leo opened the district’s public procurement records on his phone.
It took him less than five minutes.
“Forty-one in Georgia,” he said.
“Seventy-eight across the Southeast.
And these are only the public contracts.”
The bleachers seemed to tilt beneath him.
Forty-one schools.
How many students like Ethan?
How many reports had vanished?
How many boys and girls had been told, in quiet offices, that the truth did not matter?
“Leo,” Maya said, “you’re shaking.”
“I’m not scared.”
“I know.”
She looked at him steadily.
“You’re angry.”
He nodded.
“Good,” she said.
“Use it.”
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