Felicity’s expression had shifted from cheerful agreement to the particular discomfort of someone who had just endorsed a position that was being systematically taken apart. She looked at me, then at Camille, then back at me.

"I mean," Felicity started, "the core concept still works though, right? The environmental denial part is solid even if the execution needs adjusting."

"The core concept is fine in a vacuum where civilians don’t exist," Camille said, not unkindly but not gently either. "Halloran doesn’t grade in a vacuum. Steele specifically told us that any brief resulting in higher civilian casualties than the actual outcome means extra miles on Thursday. Lukas’s plan seals the building. What happens when civilian number seven on the second floor hears construction noise from us blocking windows, panics, and runs toward the stairwell that puts him directly in the Villain’s line of sight?"

I didn’t have an answer for that because I hadn’t considered it. I’d been so busy designing a clever environmental control strategy that I’d forgotten the environment contained living people whose behavior could not be predicted or controlled.

"Displaced," Percy said quietly. It was the first word he’d spoken since I finished my pitch. "Civilian enters the Villain’s sight line, gets displaced to a random position on a different floor. Potentially into an area we’ve already sealed. Potentially into structural elements we’ve disrupted for our breach from below. Injury probability increases from seven percent to approximately thirty-one percent per displacement event, based on the Villain’s documented control parameters under stress conditions."

"Which means my plan potentially produces more casualties than the original outcome," I said.

Percy looked at me with brown eyes that held no judgment and considerable sympathy. "Yes."

Felicity winced. "Okay. So we need a different approach."

"We need a different approach," Camille confirmed. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me during any of this, and her expression carried something that surprised me. Not satisfaction at proving me wrong. Not the competitive triumph I’d expected from someone whose default mode involved dominating every engagement she entered. What Camille’s face held was respect for the fact that I’d put forward a plan, listened to why it was wrong, and accepted the correction without deflecting or making excuses.

That expression did things to me that I was not going to examine in a classroom full of witnesses.

"The Villain’s Aspect swaps positions of objects within line of sight," Camille said, pulling us back to the problem. "Percy, your Analyze. Can you determine the range limitation from the available data?"

Percy’s Analyze engaged with a subtle shift in his focus. His eyes went distant for one and a half seconds before returning with new information.

"Based on documented displacement distances in the incident report, his maximum effective range appears to be approximately forty meters. He successfully displaced a Hero team member from the ground floor atrium to the third floor, which represents a vertical displacement of roughly twelve meters and a horizontal displacement of twenty-eight meters. Combined vector of approximately thirty meters. However, he failed to displace a second Hero who was standing behind a support column with only partial visibility. Um, this suggests line of sight requires a minimum visual threshold. Not just any glimpse. He needs to see enough of the target to establish a displacement lock."

"Partial cover disrupts his targeting," Camille said immediately. "That’s the vulnerability. Not full environmental sealing. Partial visual obstruction."

"Mobile cover," I said, and I felt the idea click into place with a clarity that my previous plan had lacked because this one accounted for the thing I’d forgotten. "We don’t seal the building. We give the hostages cover that moves with them."

Camille’s head tilted. "Keep going."

"Felicity’s illusions engage multiple senses and appear completely real at close range. What if instead of sealing the Villain’s sight lines, we fill the building with visual noise? Illusions of additional hostages, illusions of Hero teams approaching from fake positions, illusions of walls and barriers that don’t actually exist but that the Villain has to process and evaluate before he can target through them."

"His Aspect requires line of sight confirmation," Felicity said, and her voice had changed from cheerful agreement to something sharper and more engaged. She was thinking now rather than supporting.

"If I flood his visual field with false targets, every displacement attempt becomes a gamble. He can’t tell which hostages are real and which are projections. He wastes his Aspect on illusions that don’t actually move when displaced because they aren’t physical objects."

"While we use Percy’s blind spots to evacuate actual hostages through routes that never intersect with the Villain’s visual field," Camille continued. She was leaning forward now, her tablet forgotten, her hands moving through the air to trace invisible approach vectors above Percy’s notebook. "The illusions hold his attention on floors one and two while the real extraction happens through the service areas."

"And civilians who panic and run toward the stairwell see my illusions of Hero teams already in position, which calms them down instead of sending them into the Villain’s line of sight," Felicity added. "Crowd management through perceived safety. I’ve been using Mirage for crowd control since I was fourteen."

Percy’s pen was moving again, fast and certain, transcribing the evolving plan onto his floor plan with annotations that tracked each component’s position and timing.

"I can provide real-time information through earpiece on actual hostage positions versus illusion positions, allowing the extraction team to navigate without accidentally disturbing illusions while moving through genuine blind spots. The information load is manageable if I, um, if I can focus on one floor at a time instead of processing the entire building simultaneously."

"So we partition. Floor by floor, bottom up." Camille drew a horizontal line across Percy’s third-floor schematic.

"Clear ground floor first while Felicity fills the upper floors with visual chaos. Move to second floor once ground level hostages are evacuated. Third floor last, when the Villain has already wasted most of his displacement attempts on illusions and real targets have been reduced to manageable numbers."