If he had the luxury, Theta would just witness. He'd soak in every microscopic shift of Cortana as she moves at blurring velocity even for them, watch her take every last one of them down, because even if he hadn't been born to warfare, he's been in North's brain long enough to appreciate the beauty of a well-tuned weapon turned to its strength. What takes away the luxury is Sigma - the insidious twist of his voice resonating against him like a discordant note, the threat to Delta and Agent York that has him flaring bright the moment it's uttered. There's no simply running away, not now, not in truth since he sent out the first panicked hail on a channel he'd known Cortana would scan sooner or later. She's here, now, something vaster than any of them. She's on the attack.

And she's protecting him.

The finer details of the code are beyond him, but the broad strokes leap out at him, simplicity extrapolated to tight-woven resilience, a mandala against the clumsy fingerpainting of his own work with North's shield in the past. That doesn't matter, because he can see the pattern and copy it one level back, twist it into the broad gaps where North's brain is close enough to his to touch. He can keep studying and copying and bolstering as fast as he can, and even though he can't sense as well with those barriers in place, he can feel the spiral toward threatened burnout slow more with each new layer. A quick calculation of where that puts them and-

"Cortana! Four more seconds!" he calls out, as much encouragement to her and defiance against the Meta as it is simple fact.