Chapter 13 - The Prodigies' Countermeasure
"Dinner was delicious, Mama, but you salted the rice twice," Marcos said calmly as he pushed his plate back, his sharp hazel eyes fixing onto Lucía with uncanny precision.
Mateo nodded in agreement, wiping his mouth with a napkin. "And Uncle Arthur has checked his watch six times in twelve minutes, despite the fact that his phone is on silent mode. So, who is trying to sue us now?"
Lucía exchanged an astonished glance with Arthur Vance. No matter how much she tried to protect her sons from the dark realities of the world, their genius wasn't confined to circuit boards and mathematical theorems. They read human behavior with the same terrifying speed.
"No one is suing us, boys," Lucía began gently, but Arthur raised a hand.
"They're too smart for comfort, Lucía. If we lie, they'll just hack my firm's server by midnight to read the correspondence anyway," Arthur said dryly. He looked at the thirteen-year-olds. "A consortium called Apex Global claims Álvaro sold them an advance stake in your grandfather's foundational theory. They are demanding the complete code, or they threaten to seize your mother's family trust through a legal loophole."
Mateo didn't flinch. Instead, his mouth curled into an icy, familiar smirk—the exact same razor-thin smile he had worn right before tossing the Blue Folder onto the judge’s dais.
"Apex Global," Mateo mused, leaning back and lacing his fingers behind his head. "Registered out of the Cayman Islands, operational headquarters in Zurich, majority holdings owned by Hector Sterling—Álvaro’s aristocratic godfather."
Lucía blinked in disbelief. "How do you know that, Mateo?"
"Because when Álvaro tried to discredit us in Chapter 6," Marcos explained matter-of-factly, pulling a slim black laptop from his canvas satchel, "we didn't just download his local bank statements. We mirrored his entire encrypted cloud backup. We had three gigabytes of encrypted correspondence labeled 'Venture Collateral'."
Marcos opened the laptop. The screen glowed with lines of glowing green script, rapidly parsing through nested directories.
"Álvaro was terrified of Hector Sterling," Marcos continued, his fingers flying across the mechanical keys like lightning. "He knew he didn't have the brains to finish Grandpa's algorithm. For five years, he fed Apex partial simulations, promising the finished architecture was 'in phase testing.' When we beat his protégé on national television and proved the code was ours, Apex realized Álvaro had been taking their money under false pretenses."
"So Apex isn't coming for Álvaro," Mateo concluded, his eyes flashing with brilliant, calculating fire. "Álvaro has nothing left to give them. They're coming for the only people on planet Earth who can actually make the machine work."
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"And what do you intend to do?" Arthur asked, fascinated despite himself.
"We don't run from bullies, Uncle Arthur," Mateo whispered, looking directly at his mother. "Álvaro learned that lesson the hard way. It seems his masters need the exact same education."
