Valmont Series - Inheritance Code

Chapter 5.2 - The Shape of Overcorrection

The kind of fabric that didn't wrinkle, didn't catch light, and couldn't be bought without clearance.

The fact that she was here — at this hour, in this room — said everything.

She moved like she didn't care whether you noticed.

Because she knew that if you mattered, you already had.

She logged in without pause.

No delay.

The system accepted her without question.

She began working immediately.

No greeting.

No glance in his direction.

Just hands moving through the holo-array — smooth, exact, silent.

For a while, that was it.

Two minds. Two arrays.

One symmetry trace, unfolding from different sides of the same silence.

Then she spoke.

Not loud. Not casual.

Just calibrated.

"You're tracking the symmetry drift from 12:12."

Aiden didn't answer right away.

Because he hadn't mentioned a time.

And no one should've known there was a drift.

Not unless they'd felt it.

But her screen — now quietly mapping resonance threads — told a different story.

She wasn't guessing. She'd seen it.

Aiden's eyes moved across the mirrored drift projection she was building:

A near-symmetrical trace with one shallow indentation.

Subtle. Unacknowledged.

The kind of dip the system usually smoothed over before anyone could see it.

She was isolating it — the overcorrection point.

She hadn't felt anything.

She had simply noticed... what responded too quickly.

He shifted slightly.

"What makes you say that?" he asked, neutral.

She didn't look away from her array.

"Because you're not scanning for system drift," she said. "You're isolating overcorrection."
A pause.

"Same range I flagged."

She let that hang, then continued — still working.

"I couldn't sleep either. But not because of that."

Aiden didn't respond.

She flicked a layer closed.

"Your trace pattern... matched mine."

She let that hang in the air for a moment, then continued — still working.

"My team's accelerating rollout for a metaverse link beyond Avalon. I've been watching the streams for behavior that doesn't belong."

Another silent command. Her holo-array refracted into mirrored bands of trace activity.

"That's when I saw your scan pattern."

She finally glanced at him. Not with challenge — just quiet recognition.

"So either I accidentally caught your side project..."

"Or we're both looking at something no one's naming."

Aiden's gaze lingered on her screen for a moment longer, then returned to his own.

He didn't correct her.

Didn't confirm or deny.

She already knew enough.

Instead, he adjusted the angle of his scan — subtly narrowing the spectral band, isolating the distortion with fresh calibration.

He could feel her watching, not openly, but in the way someone listens to the silence between notes.

"Did your system log it?" he asked finally.

Low. Controlled.

She shook her head once.

"No anomaly recorded. No flag raised. Just... compensation."

She sounded almost bored saying it — but Aiden knew better.

Compensation was the word AVNX used when it didn't want to admit something happened.

The system hadn't caught the distortion.

It had absorbed it.

That was worse.

She was still watching her array, but there was no doubt — she was tracking his reaction now, not just the data.

Then she said, quietly:

"You caught it because you weren't looking for failure."

Aiden didn't answer, but the corner of his jaw shifted — barely.

She knew.

Only three students had passed EC-01B before him within the last decade.

She was obviously one of them.

The test hadn't been about solving a problem.

It had been about noticing a correction made too soon.

A distortion erased before it could form.

Celia didn't say any of that. She didn't need to.

Instead, she adjusted one layer of her mapping field — a flick of her fingers.

Her array responded instantly, isolating a mirrored pulse, low frequency, barely visible.

"It was too elegant to be a glitch," she said.

Then she looked at him.

"So the question is — who was it for?"

Aiden didn't answer.

The symmetry spiral slowed on his array, dimming into silence.

Neither of them moved.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked:

"Name?"

She didn't look up from her screen.

"Celia Huang."

A beat.

"Aiden Lancaster."

Nothing dramatic.

Just a name exchanged in silence —

like a code being entered.

Or accepted.

Next: Visibility Index: Activated – You don't choose when the system starts watching. You only decide how well you perform.