Lost & found: A Sister Reclaimed
Not confusion exactly.
But sharp, intense attention. "Explain."
I looked at him directly now, letting him see that the laughter had been real. "You think removing patterns creates chaos."
Hale's eyes narrowed slightly, reassessing. "It does. That's empirically demonstrable."
"No." I shook my head slowly, deliberately contradicting him.
"It creates noise."
A pause, letting that distinction settle.
Then I stepped closer to him, closing the distance he'd maintained. "But noise still has structure. Underlying mathematics, frequency distributions, patterns that emerge from apparent randomness."