“Yeah,” Selene mutters. “Because that worked so well last time.”
The officer’s face remains blank. “We will be outside.”
He exits, and the door seals with a soft hiss. A faint hum rises as the privacy field intensifies, muffling the hallway sounds until the suite feels like it’s floating in quiet.
Selene and I stare at each other across the small distance of the room, and the silence between us is heavy with everything neither of us can safely say on an open channel.
I cross to her slowly and stop a respectful distance away, forcing myself not to reach for her immediately, becausereaching can look like claiming, and I refuse to make her feel claimed even in comfort.
“They tried to confine you,” I say, keeping my voice low.
“They did confine me,” she replies, eyes bright and hard. “Temporary tribunal confinement. No charge, just a nice little ‘let’s see if you behave’ box.”
My jaw tightens. “I pushed.”
“I know,” she says, and there’s a flicker of something softer in her expression, quickly controlled. “I heard the Coalition envoy’s voice in the corridor, and I knew you’d thrown your weight at it.”
“I will throw everything I have at it,” I say, and the words come out rougher than I intended, because the hours of waiting have sharpened my fear into anger. “I am not letting them isolate you again.”
Selene’s brows lift, and her voice turns cutting in that Brust-like way, sharp humor concealing a blade. “Again? That implies you’ve been doing a real bang-up job preventing isolation so far.”
I inhale slowly. “Selene?—”
“No,” she says, standing now, her movements controlled but charged, the room suddenly too small for the force in her. “No soft voice. No solemn vow. I didn’t ask you to rescue me.”
“I’m not rescuing,” I reply, and step closer because the distance suddenly feels like cowardice. “I’m refusing to let them break you.”
Her eyes flash. “I am not breakable in the way you think.”
“That’s not—” I begin, then stop, because arguing semantics is a fool’s game when the core is fear. I shift to truth. “I watched them step toward you with detention in their mouth, and I felt the old pattern tighten around my throat. The pattern where the system grabs the vulnerable and I offer myself as payment. I refuse to do that again.”
Selene’s expression softens for a heartbeat, then hardens again as if softness is a trap. “Good. Because I’m not interested in being your excuse to play martyr.”
“I’m not?—”
“You are,” she cuts in, voice low but fierce. “It’s your favorite move. You think if you sacrifice yourself, you can keep everyone else safe, and then you can tell yourself you did the noble thing while the people who actually wrote the doctrine keep walking around polished and untouchable.”
The words sting because they’re accurate, and because the part of me that wants to deny them is the same part that used to call silence strategy.
I let out a slow breath. “Then tell me what you need.”
Selene’s mouth tightens. She looks away briefly, as if searching for the words in a room full of cameras that aren’t supposed to be here, then turns back, eyes bright with exhaustion and stubbornness.
“I need a partner,” she says, voice steady. “Not a shield. Not a corpse. Not a tragic symbol. A partner who stands beside me openly, not one who disappears into silence and calls it stability.”
I swallow hard. The privacy field hum seems louder in the space between her words and my reply, as if the room itself is listening.
“I will stand beside you openly,” I say.
Selene’s gaze narrows. “And you won’t pull the ‘I’ll accept execution to protect you’ stunt again.”
“I won’t,” I answer, and I mean it with the same fierce clarity that made me speak on record. “If they want to punish me, they’ll do it with me resisting, not consenting. If they want to punish you, they’ll do it with the world watching.”
Selene studies me for a long moment, and in that gaze I see how much she is carrying—her parents’ names in a manifest, thedoctrine’s neat tables, the threats on her compad, the life inside her she refuses to let become leverage. She looks like someone who has been forced to become dangerous to survive, and the thought that she should ever have had to become that makes my chest ache.
“You’re scared,” I say quietly, and it’s not accusation, just recognition.
Selene’s laugh is a short, sharp exhale. “Yeah. I’m terrified. I’m also pissed. Fear and rage are roommates right now.”
