SEVEN Wells
SEVEN
Wells
The Float's Skirt: Every float hides its chassis and the riders' feet behind a painted skirt, so the crowd sees only the spectacle riding above. The city was shown a mugging. What ran underneath it was never meant to be seen.
I zoom in on the third slide and tap the cluster map Cera built around the Singapore breach. The chart breaks the risk into tiers, colors sorted by threat level, each node sized according to potential exposure.
"This."
She glances up from her laptop. She's perched on the edge of the table in the corner of my workspace, one leg crossed over the other, her pen tapping against her notebook.
"What about it?"
"It's too lean. The leadership will read this and have no clue what kind of risk we are talking about."
"The point is to summarize where the risk is, not run them through every single detail. That's what the visual is showing."
"How can they understand it is interconnected if we don't spell all of it out?"
She sets the pen down and leans forward, her eyes narrowing on the screen. I see a tiny peek of the line where her breasts meet.
"That's the beauty of what we're doing. If I show the connections the way you mapped them, the slide becomes a hairball. No one will understand it."
"They should understand that a breach in one tier cascades."
"They will. Look at the footer annotation."
I scroll down. The text is there, small and precise. Interdependencies detailed in Appendix C.
"They won't read the appendix."
"Then they don't belong on your leadership council. That is their job."
My jaw tightens, and I stop myself from smiling. She doesn't blink, doesn't soften the line. I've worked with her long enough now to know she actually means it.
"The executives need the information in front of them to make decisions every day, not get buried in supplemental materials. You're the one who manages the risks and handles them. My job is to make them feel like they are aware of what's going on. This accomplishes all of that."
"Hmmm," I say, not revealing that she has a point I'm not ready to concede.
"If I map every connection on the slide, they'll tune out before they get to the second point. And then they feel out of the loop and frustrated and possibly make decisions not fully informed. Ridge brought up this point specifically."
She's right, and that bothers me more than it should. I lean back in my chair and study the chart again. The structure is sound, and the hierarchy is clear now that she explains it.
I should let it go. Instead, I scroll to the next slide.
"This one. You buried the Jakarta flag under the regional summary."
Cera tilts her head, and her wavy brown hair shifts over her shoulder. The movement catches the light from the window, and for a second I lose the thread of what I was saying.
"The Jakarta flag is a secondary finding. It doesn't warrant top-level real estate."
"It's a port we route twenty percent of our Southeast Asia volume through. If that vulnerability gets exploited, it's not secondary."
"The slide shows regional risk. Jakarta is part of that region."
Her tone doesn't shift, but her eyes do. There's a challenge there. She's testing how far she can push me, and when she just has to acquiesce to my demands.
I drum my fingers against the desk. "You're saying I need to carry Jakarta verbally."
"I'm saying the slide does its job. You do yours."
Heat flares low in my chest, and I'm not sure if it's irritation or something else. My fingers pause over the keyboard. I scroll back to the cluster map and stare at it longer than I need to.
"Fine. Let's see if they receive it your way better. If it turns out they need more info, then we regroup on how we present this at our weekly Zoom meetings."
"I think that's the right call."
She picks up her pen again and makes a note. I watch her hand move across the page, the line of her wrist, the way her fingers curl around the barrel.
I force my eyes back to the screen.
"The exposure metrics on slide six. Walk me through the scaling."
She flips the laptop around so I can see the chart, her finger tapping the vertical axis. The tip of her finger stirs a warmth in me, almost like a déjà vu, or a familiarity that goes longer than the three weeks she's been here.
"Exposure is scaled logarithmically. It compresses the extremes and makes the midrange visible."
"Which softens the threat perception," I think aloud accidentally. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know she's going to challenge me.
Her finger stops mid-tap.
"Which, again, makes the chart readable."
"It makes the chart inaccurate."
"Wells, it's not inaccurate information. Just like I said a moment ago, it's how you can convey a lot of information in an easily digestible way. Think of it as the Cliff's Notes of your massive spreadsheet you keep. Condense it down and make it understandable to the masses."
She pulls up the raw data file I sent her three days ago. The numbers stack in columns, unformatted, brutal in their precision.
"This is what you gave me. Forty-seven rows of exposure metrics with no context and no baseline. You want me to put this in front of a bunch of suits who have no clue what half of these words mean? They'll check out."
"I want you to show them what the data says."
"The data doesn't say anything until someone translates it." She turns it back to herself and types something in a notes file. "I'm translating it."
I lean back in my chair, and she doesn't retreat. Damn. I don't want to, but I like the way she owns her shit and gives it to me without blinking. She's fucking brilliant, just in a different way than my brain works.
She turns the screen back toward me and points to the chart again. I stare at it.
The heat under my collar shifts, and I'm not sure if I want to argue with her because I think she's wrong, or because I want to keep her talking.
Her voice has a cadence I track without meaning to, sharp on the edges and warm in the middle.
When she goes quiet, I catch myself waiting for the next thing out of her mouth. I do not like what that means.
We go through every slide like this. I push on her interpretation, she argues a similar point that I essentially give too much information and bog everyone down with minute details they don't need.
And every single time, I end up conceding in my own way by moving on, rather than telling her she's right.
She shifts in her seat, and her knee brushes the edge of the table. I catch the movement in my peripheral vision and force my eyes back to the screen.
I notice movement on one of my back channels, so I pull it up on my main screen. After determining it's nothing to worry about, I look up to see she's watching me. Her pen is still in her hand, and her posture is unchanged.
"Polish this and make sure it's ready to go. Our Zoom meeting is in two days, and I want to review it one more time the morning of."
"I'll make it shine."
She makes a note, and the silence stretches.
I hate that she was right. More than that, I hate that we've gone through the entire deck and there's nothing else to say.
The night before our Zoom meeting, Cera and I meet to go over our presentation.
I pull up the revised deck and click through the updated slides with her to make sure everything is ready to go.
The Jakarta flag sits where it should now, nested under the regional overview with a callout box that directs attention without screaming.
The cluster map holds its structure. The exposure chart balances precision and readability in a way I didn't think was possible three hours ago.
She did it. She took my findings and made them understandable in a much more efficient and cleaner way. Once I finish clicking through each one, I look at her. She's packing her notebook into her bag, her pen clenched between her teeth. My mouth waters.
"This is good work."
Cera pauses and glances up. Her expression doesn't change, but something shifts in her posture, a looseness in her shoulders that wasn't there before.
"High praise from you."
"I'm not one to applaud, you're right. But you stuck to your guns, and you were right."
"I'll take it."
She zips the bag, and I turn back to my monitor. The briefing draft sits in a folder marked Board Materials. But the real work, the layer underneath, stays where it always stays, behind access levels Cera does not have and queries she will never see.
I open a terminal window, scanning all of the dark web monitors I have set up. My fingers hover over the keyboard as I glance at her. She's checking her phone, her thumb scrolling, her attention somewhere else.
I angle the monitor away and minimize the windows.
She doesn't notice, and she has no reason to. She doesn't have clearance for the deep forensics, and probably wouldn't even know what she was looking at if she saw them anyway.
The truth sits heavier. I don't want her in this layer. I don't want anyone in this layer. The work I do here, the cyber surveillance and the breaches and the money I trace through accounts that don't officially exist, that's mine. It's the part of me no one touches.
I pull up the sanitized summary I'm already building for next week, the version that shows risk without showing method. She and the leadership council get threat assessments, vulnerability scores, and clean data points stripped of the ugly mechanics that produced them.
I send it to her inbox. Her phone dings a second later.
"That's next week's source file. There will be updates between now and then, but you can start building it out with your template."
Cera glances at her screen and nods.
"Got it."
She doesn't ask what's in the file and what isn't. She takes what I give her and builds from there. I'm grateful for that boundary, even as it bothers me.
I close the summary and open the next tab. Cera stands and slings her bag over her shoulder. Sadly, the pen is gone.
"I'm curious how the leadership team takes to our new presentation method."
Ours? I clear my throat.