Owen touched my sleeve.

I softened. “You’re done for today.”

Victor shook his head. “That will interfere with training protocol.”

I stared straight through him. “He is not taking another step in that device today.”

Nobody spoke.

Victor stepped close to Nathan and lowered his voice. “Admiral, your contract has strict non-disparagement and liability provisions. Public claims about a defect could get very expensive.”

Nathan’s expression hardened. “Are you threatening me in my house?”

“I’m protecting both parties.”

“No,” I said. “You’re protecting yourself.”

Victor’s technician crouched by the left knee assembly. He ran a diagnostic, then stopped. His eyes flashed to Victor.

I saw it.

Nathan saw it.

“What did you find?” I asked.

“Nothing conclusive.”

Victor answered for him. Too fast.

That night, I spread the exported error logs across Nathan’s garage workbench, next to my sketchbook and the simple mechanical brace I’d been building by hand—carbon composite, aluminum joints, adjustable tension bands.

Expensive isn’t always safer.

Complex isn’t always smarter.

At 1:17 a.m., I found the pattern.

Every lockup fired at nearly the same torque threshold. Not random. Not calibration. A hardware protection fault tripping under normal walking load.

Then I saw the worst part.

Three entries had been marked “resolved.”

I hadn’t cleared them.

Nathan hadn’t cleared them.

SOMEONE ELSE HAD.

The machine had been hiding its failures. And whoever rewrote that log was still out there, still protecting the defect, still willing to let a child fall.

What else were they hiding?

And who was watching Owen through that machine’s sensors?PART 2:

My blood turned to ice.

I scrambled to my feet and yanked the StrideCore X9 off its charging dock. The battery was still warm. Someone had powered it up recently.

Nathan spoke from the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“Whoever cleared those logs didn’t do it from a laptop. They did it from inside the machine.”

I tore open the controller housing.

Nestled beside the primary circuit board was a second device. Smaller than a matchbox. A micro-cellular modem with a SIM card soldered directly to the board.

“Son of a—”

“What is it?”

“Unknown network hardware. This isn’t stock. Someone installed this after the device shipped.”

Nathan stepped closer. “Can you trace who it’s communicating with?”

I grabbed a screwdriver and carefully pried the modem loose. The SIM card was still active.

“Dana need to see this. Right now. But first—” I looked at the machine. “Whoever put this in here has had eyes and ears inside your home for months.”

Nathan turned pale.

“Get Owen out of bed,” I said. “Bring him to my place. Now.”

—

We left the X9 behind, unplugged, sealed in a plastic bin with the modem still inside.

Dana Reyes met us at my apartment at 3 a.m. She wore sweatpants and a hoodie, but her eyes were wide awake.

“You’re sure the modem is transmitting?” she asked.

“It pinged twice on the drive over. Even powered down, the backup battery kept it alive.”

Dana plugged the modem into a portable analyzer. Her fingers flew across a laptop keyboard.

“Encrypted,” she muttered. “Military-grade. This isn’t some hobbyist setup. Whoever built this knew exactly what they were doing.”

Nathan was sitting on my couch, Owen curled up asleep against his shoulder. “Can you trace it?”

“Give me time. But the encryption suggests a serious operation. Not just one angry employee.”

“Victor Lang,” I said.

“Maybe. But the access patterns don’t match his behavior. He was too public, too confident. This feels like someone who wanted to stay hidden.”

Dana’s screen lit up with a map of the Eastern Seaboard.

“There,” she said, pointing at a cluster of pings. “The transmissions are routing through a series of relay towers, but they terminate here.”

I leaned closer.

A facility in Virginia Beach. A high-rise near the naval base.

“That’s not StrideCore’s office,” Nathan said.

“No,” Dana replied. “It’s a company called Halcyon Dynamics. Defense contractor. They specialize in remote biometric monitoring.”

“Biometric?”

“Vital signs. Movement patterns. Location data. The kind of data a medical exoskeleton collects every second it’s worn.”

I felt sick.

“The machine wasn’t just walking Owen. It was reporting on him. Every step, every heartbeat, every breath.”

—

At sunrise, I left Owen with a nurse colleague and drove to Virginia Beach.

Nathan insisted on coming. He wore civilian clothes—jeans, a golf shirt—but he still moved like an admiral on a mission.

“Are you sure you want to do this alone?” he asked.

“You’re here. That’s not alone.”

We parked across the street from the Halcyon offices. A sleek glass tower with tinted windows.

“Halcyon,” Nathan read the sign. “The company Victor Lang used to work for. Before StrideCore.”

I turned to him. “What?”

“Victor’s LinkedIn just updated. I have a contact who monitors defense industry executives. Lang ran their medical robotics division for eight years.”