Read Chapter 4: The Budget Knife

The conference room at AlgoSens had never felt smaller. Paul Bresson, their CFO, stood at the head of the table with a single slide on the screen—a jagged red line sloping down to zero. He didn’t bother with pleasantries.

“We have six weeks of runway,” he said, tapping the slide with his pen. “Six weeks before we miss payroll. The seed round won’t close if we can’t show a clean burn rate. Something has to give.”

Camille felt the air leave her lungs. Six weeks. She’d known the GPU costs were a problem, but Paul’s numbers suggested something worse—a bleed she hadn’t accounted for. She glanced at Antoine across the table. He sat very still, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on the red line like he was trying to memorize the shape of his own failure.

“We need to cut,” Paul continued. “Operationally, that means headcount. I need you two to decide who stays and who goes by Friday.”

“Friday?” Camille’s voice came out sharper than she intended. “You want us to decide who loses their job in less than forty-eight hours?”

Paul shrugged. “I want you to decide before the bank does it for us. The board is watching. They’re not happy about the demo leak, and they’re not happy about the churn numbers Antoine flagged. They want to see decisive action.”

Antoine finally spoke. “What’s the target?”

“Two hundred thousand euros a month in savings. That’s roughly five roles, or one department.”

The silence stretched. Camille could hear the faint hum of the servers through the wall, the same servers that were bleeding money. She thought of Élodie in the data science pod, laughing at some inside joke with the junior analysts. She thought of Marc, the first engineer she’d ever hired, who’d painted his desk orange and called it “a statement.”

“We need time,” she said. “Layoffs this blunt will kill morale. We could renegotiate the GPU contract, switch to a cheaper cluster, find savings elsewhere.”

Paul shook his head. “The GPU spike isn’t operational. It’s anomalous. Someone’s been running training jobs around the clock for the past three weeks. That’s not our normal load. That’s someone’s side project, or a script they forgot to kill.” He slid a printout across the table. “Accounts show it launched under Antoine’s credentials.”

Camille froze. Antoine’s face went pale, then red.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “I haven’t run a training job since I started here. I’ve been in meetings, reviewing code, prepping the demo. I don’t even have access to the cluster’s high-priority queue.”

“The system says you do,” Paul said flatly. “Credentials, IP address, timestamps. It’s all there.”

“Then someone framed me.” Antoine’s voice was calm, but Camille saw his hands trembling beneath the table. “You have to believe that.”

“I don’t have to believe anything,” Paul replied. “I have to make sure we survive. The cuts happen Friday. Figure out who goes.” He left without another word, the door clicking shut behind him like a sentence.

The room felt suddenly too quiet. Camille stared at the printout. Antoine’s name was all over it—login timestamps, session durations, GPU-hours consumed. But she remembered something from the week before: Antoine had been in a client meeting at the exact moment the first job launched. She’d seen him present, seen him argue with a procurement director about API rate limits. He couldn’t have been running a model at the same time.

“You were in the meeting,” she said slowly. “Tuesday afternoon. The LVMH one. You couldn’t have launched that job.”

Antoine looked at her, surprised. “You noticed?”

“I checked the calendar. You were scheduled for three hours.” She picked up the printout. “Who else has access to your credentials?”

“IT set up my account. I changed the password on day one, but I shared the laptop with the team during the demo rehearsal. Someone could have accessed it then.”

“Who?”

He hesitated. “Théo was the last one to use it. He said he needed to test a presentation file. I didn’t think anything of it.”

Camille’s stomach dropped. Théo. The intern she’d been texting about infrastructure. He had a habit of volunteering for tasks nobody else wanted—a people-pleaser with his own quiet agenda. She’d trusted him with small things, never anything sensitive. But he had technical skills, and he’d been unusually interested in the server logs last week.

“I’ll talk to him,” she said, though the words tasted bitter. “But first, we have a bigger problem. Five people. Who do we cut?”

Antoine ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of exhaustion she hadn’t seen before. “I have a suggestion, but you’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

“The infrastructure team. All four of them, plus the contract dev. That hits the number.”

Camille’s chest tightened. The infrastructure team kept Sentio’s core stable. They were the ones who’d pulled the system through the demo-day crash, who’d patched a security hole at 3 a.m. last month. Cutting them would gut the product.

“That’s insane,” she said. “Without them, Sentio collapses. We just stabilize churn, and you want to remove the people who keep the servers running?”

“I want to cut the biggest cost center,” Antoine said. “Infrastructure is the most expensive team in the company. We can outsource it after the seed round, rehire cheaper talent in a year. But Élodie—she’s your friend. That’s not a reason to keep her if the numbers say otherwise.”

“The numbers don’t say otherwise. She’s the only data scientist who understands our forecasting model. If she goes, the churn problem gets worse, not better.”

“Then it’s a judgment call,” Antoine said. “And I don’t know that we’re equipped to make it together.”

The words hung between them. Camille felt the weight of the last week—the demo sabotage, the united front, the scarf. She’d been ready to hate him, to destroy his career, and now she was sitting across from him trying to decide who lost their livelihood.

“We need a truce,” she said quietly. “Not a temporary one. A real one. If we fight over this, we’ll make more mistakes than the ones we’re trying to fix.”

Antoine studied her for a long moment. “You trust me that much?”

“I trust that you don’t want Sentio to fail,” she said. “And I know you didn’t launch that training job. Someone wants you to look like the villain, and they want me to believe it. So we have a common enemy.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet.” She folded the printout and tucked it into her blazer pocket. “But I’m going to find out. In the meantime, we cut together. One team, partially. We keep the core function.”

“You’re suggesting a scalpel, not a knife.”

“Exactly. I’ll handle infrastructure. You handle the go-to-market team. We each protect our best people, and we both cut fairly.”

Antoine nodded slowly. “And Élodie?”

“She stays,” Camille said firmly. “I’ll defend her if you defend your lead researcher. We need our best minds if we’re going to survive this.”

“Deal.” He extended his hand. She shook it, feeling the tension in his grip, the shared weight of what they were about to do.

After he left, Camille sat alone in the conference room. She pulled out her phone and scrolled to her message thread with Théo. The last exchange had been about server load. She’d asked him to check for anomalies. He’d replied: *“All clear. Nothing weird on my end.”*

But the printout said otherwise. Someone had launched a runaway job under Antoine’s account. If Théo was lying, he was a security risk. If he was innocent, someone else was using him as a cover.

She remembered the red scarf, Lucas Moreau’s cryptic note demanding a meeting at Café de Flore. He knew about the GPU secret. He wanted to talk. Maybe he knew who was behind the framing, too.

Camille stood, smoothing her skirt. She had two days to decide who to fire. She had a meeting with a rival investor who knew too much. And she had a friend who might be hiding something.

But first, she needed to look Théo in the eye and ask him the one question she was afraid to hear the answer to.