Page 84 of Duty Compromised
“Did you even pass?” Leonard asked Ty with a knowing grin.
“Eventually,” Ty muttered. “With a C minus.”
“After three attempts,” Donovan added helpfully.
Frank gestured at Ty with his fork. “You barely passed calculus, but your tactical mind is sharper than anyone’s at this table.”
“It’s just training,” Ty deflected.
“Training?” Leonard scoffed. “You redesigned the church’s evacuation plan when you were twelve because you said theirs would cause a bottleneck.”
“It would have,” Ty muttered. “Still would, actually. They never fixed it.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Frank continued. “We’ve all got our strengths. Leonard sees patterns in numbers. Annabel reads bodies and birth. Donovan has amazing aptitude with animals. Bridget can argue anyone into submission?—”
“I prefer ‘vigorous negotiation,’” Bridget interrupted.
“—and Ty keeps people alive. Different applications of intelligence. And Charlotte here? She’s building something to save millions of lives with math and physics. We all use what we’ve got.”
The conversation shifted to childhood memories, Ty’s father and mother joining into the conversation a lot more, but I found myself studying Ty. He laughed at the right moments, contributed when called upon, but there was a tension in his shoulders. Like he was performing a role he’d never quite learned the lines for. His siblings clearly respected what he did—Frank had just said as much—but Ty didn’t seem to hear it. Or believe it.
Back at the guesthouse, with Ethan and the others, he’d been secure, focused, in his element. Here, he seemed much less secure of himself.
He started carrying dishes into the kitchen.
“I should help with that.” I began collecting plates.
“Absolutely not,” Ty’s mother said, appearing from the kitchen where she’d been putting together dessert. “You’re a guest.”
“I insist.” I followed Ty into the kitchen anyway, needing to move, to process what was rattling around in my brain.
We worked in companionable silence for a few minutes, loading dishes into the dishwasher. Through the window, I could see Ben outside with Jolly, maintaining their security so we could have a dinner.
“Your family’s wonderful,” I said.
“They’re something.” He handed me a plate, our fingers brushing in the exchange.
“They really love you,” I said, watching how his jaw tightened slightly. “The teasing, the stories—it’s how they show it.”
“Yeah, well, they’ve got plenty of material to work with. The family screwup who barely graduated high school.”
I set the plate in the drying rack, turning to face him. “Is that really what you think? Because that’s not what I saw at dinner.”
His hands stilled in the soapy water. “What do you mean?”
“Frank literally spelled it out—different kinds of intelligence, all equally valuable. Your siblings know exactly how smart you are, just in a different way than them. They respect what you do, Ty. They trust you.”
He was quiet for a moment, processing what I’d said. Then he turned off the water and dried his hands slowly, like he was buying time to think.
“Maybe,” he said finally. “It’s just hard to see it that way when you’ve spent your whole life being the one who couldn’t keep up academically. Even Donovan went to college.”
“I agree that your intelligence isn’t necessarily traditional—maybe you’re not book smart—but that doesn’t mean your intelligence isn’t there. It’s adaptive. You see the variables and adapt as needed.”
I froze, the countermeasure materializing before my eyes. The solution that had been dancing at the edges of my consciousness crystallized with perfect clarity. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Different applications. Adaptive responses. Context-dependent variables.” I dropped the towel, my hands already moving like I was typing. “I’ve been trying to create a universal counter-frequency, but that’s not how the Cascade Protocol works. It adapts. So the stabilizer code needs to adapt too, but inversely. Not one solution—multiple solutions applied contextually.”
