They pitched MY code as theirs to the CEO. Then he asked one question

Explain the cold start weighting on line forty-seven, the CEO said, eyes locked on Brett. Brett smiled the smile of a man who had never opened line forty-seven. He gestured at Chloe. Chloe gestured at her laptop. Her laptop showed a spinning wheel. The silence stretched until it hummed. So technically, Brett started, technically the weighting is proprietary and I would rather not, and the CEO cut him off with a raised finger. He turned his chair one slow inch toward the back row. Maya, he said, and my name in his mouth felt strange, warm, terrifying. You committed that function at two in the morning on March eleventh. Walk us through it. I stood up. My knees did not shake, which surprised me. I walked to the front, opened my own laptop, and pulled up the private repo Brett did not know existed, the one with every commit signed with my key and every design doc timestamped by legal. I explained line forty-seven. I explained lines one through four hundred. I explained why Brett’s version, the one on the slides, would crash under Black Friday traffic because he had copy-pasted a placeholder I had left as a joke for myself. The CEO did not smile. He said, Brett, Chloe, HR is waiting in room three. Sign the papers and get out of my sight, you worthless parasites. Chloe cried. Brett said my name like a question. I did not answer. The CEO turned back to me and said the title Director of Applied AI had been open for two weeks and he had been waiting to see who would earn it by defending it. I signed my new contract with the pen Brett had left on the table. It was engraved with his initials. I kept it.