I looked at the revised plan taking shape on Percy’s notebook and felt two things simultaneously.

First, genuine admiration for how Camille had taken my failed concept, identified the critical flaw, and redirected the group toward a solution that actually accounted for civilian behavior under stress conditions.

Second, a particular warmth in my chest that had nothing to do with tactical appreciation and everything to do with the way Camille’s entire body had changed when she engaged with the problem on her own terms. Her shoulders had dropped. Her jaw had relaxed.

The aggressive performance she’d maintained for two days of avoiding me had evaporated the moment she started doing what she was genuinely great at, which was reading a situation for its breaking point and restructuring the approach around it.

She caught me looking.

Her cheeks darkened by half a shade. She pulled her attention back to the notebook with aggressive focus.

"Your original plan wasn’t terrible," she said, and the words came out directed at the notebook rather than at me. "The environmental denial concept has applications. You just forgot that environments contain people."

"I forgot that environments contain people," I agreed.

"Don’t do that."

"Do what?"

"Agree with me when I’m criticizing you. It makes it harder to stay irritated."

Felicity looked between us with the expression of someone who was watching something unfold in real time and finding it far more interesting than the tactical exercise they were supposed to be completing.

"So," Felicity said brightly, "should we talk about the presentation format, or should I give you two a minute?"

"Presentation format," Camille and I said at the same time.

Felicity smiled in a way that communicated she was filing away everything she had observed for future deployment at the worst possible moment.

We spent the next thirty minutes refining the plan into a presentable brief. Percy handled the tactical diagram, transferring his notebook sketches onto a digital overlay of the Silverbrook floor plan with annotations tracking extraction routes, illusion deployment zones, and real-time information feeds. Felicity drafted the crowd management section with particular attention to the psychological impact of perceived safety on civilian behavior, drawing on her Aspect’s practical applications in ways that demonstrated she understood her power far better than most people gave her credit for. Camille structured the overall approach, organizing the partition-by-floor methodology into a timeline with contingency branches for the three most likely failure scenarios.

I contributed by shutting up and letting them work.

This was not false modesty. My plan had been wrong. Not wrong in the catastrophic way that gets people killed, but wrong in the fundamental way that reveals a gap in how someone thinks about problems. I’d been so focused on the clever solution, the environmental denial angle that would make Steele nod with approval and Dravid recognize his own lesson reflected back at him, that I’d forgotten the most basic principle of hero work. The people inside the building are not obstacles to navigate around. They’re the entire reason you’re there.

Camille had seen this immediately. Not because she was smarter than me in raw processing terms. Percy’s Analyze could outrun her pattern recognition on pure data speed any day of the week. She’d seen it because Camille Ortega thought about people first and strategy second, and she’d built her entire combat philosophy around the principle that every situation has a breaking point and her job is to find it before anyone gets hurt.

The fact that she’d broken my plan instead of a person was, in Camille’s particular framework, an act of professional respect. She’d treated me as someone worth correcting rather than someone to dismiss.

This realization was doing exactly zero helpful things for the complicated feelings I was actively attempting not to have about the woman sitting across from me with her hair falling across her jaw and her brown eyes alive with tactical engagement.

At the forty-minute mark, Percy completed the final version of our tactical brief. The diagram showed three simultaneous operations: ground-floor extraction through service corridors while Felicity’s illusions held the Villain’s visual attention on the upper floors, second-floor extraction through the maintenance access points once the ground floor cleared, and a final third-floor approach using the combined information advantage of Percy’s Analyze and Felicity’s sensory chaos to create a window where the Villain’s displacement Aspect was functionally useless because he couldn’t distinguish reality from projection.

"This is good," Camille said. She looked at each of us in sequence. Felicity, who had provided the operational framework through Mirage. Percy, who had provided the information architecture through Analyze. Me, who had provided an incorrect plan that became the foundation for a correct one.

"The original concept was yours," she said to me. "The environmental control angle. It was wrong as executed but the instinct was right. You just need to stop thinking about problems as things to solve and start thinking about them as situations that contain people who matter."

There was nothing aggressive about the way she said it. No edge. No performance. Just Camille Ortega telling someone the truth about where they needed to grow because she considered them worth the investment of her honesty.

"I’ll work on that," I said.

"You’d better."

Felicity cleared her throat. "Group hug?"

"Absolutely not," Camille said.

"Noted. Rain check."

Steele called for presentations. Our group went third, after a team that proposed a standard multi-vector breach with suppressive fire, which Steele eviscerated for its complete disregard of civilian proximity, and a second team that suggested negotiation, which Steele dismissed with the observation that negotiation requires leverage the Hero teams in this scenario did not possess.

Camille presented the tactical overview. Felicity covered the illusion deployment strategy. Percy handled the extraction routing with a confidence that made his voice steady and clear for the full duration of his segment, a feat that would have been impossible two weeks ago.

I presented the original environmental denial concept and explained why it failed. I described how Camille’s identification of the civilian vulnerability had redirected our approach. I outlined how the revised plan incorporated elements from every team member’s Aspect and analytical capability.

Steele listened without expression. When we finished, she looked at her tablet for six full seconds that felt like geological ages.

"Belmont," she said. "Your original plan was elegant. It was also wrong in exactly the way that gets civilians killed."

"Yes ma’am."

"Ortega caught it."

"Yes ma’am."

Steele’s pink eyes moved to Camille with something that lived in the narrow space between approval and respect. "Good catch. The civilian behavior under stress analysis was the strongest element of this brief. Don’t let your teammates forget that the environment includes the people inside it."

Camille nodded once. Her shoulders were straight and her chin was level and she did not look at me, though I felt the weight of the not-looking as clearly as I would have felt her eyes.

"Group grade," Steele announced. "Acceptable. No additional miles."

Percy exhaled so hard his notebook ruffled.

"But Belmont." Steele’s attention found me again with that particular focus I’d come to recognize as the look she gave me when she was updating her mental file on the discrepancy between what I presented and what I was capable of. "Your instincts are good. Your execution needs civilians. Remember that."

"Yes ma’am."