CHAPTER 26
RHYX
The custody room smells like recycled air and warm alloy—like the building is exhaling stress through vents that were never meant to carry this much history. The light overhead is too clean, too white, and it makes the metal table look surgical. Makes my hands look like they belong to someone else: scaled, scarred, wrapped in diplomatic binders that hum softly whenever I flex.
I’ve been staring at the same sentence for six minutes.
Not because I can’t write it.
Because writing it makes it real.
The terminal’s holo-projection floats over the table, lines of my draft statement stacked neatly in Coalition legal formatting. I hate how tidy it looks. I hate how the words sit there like they’ve never tasted smoke or blood.
I drag a clawtip over the edge of the table, feeling the faint vibration in the alloy. Grounding.
Then I speak, low, and the dictation program catches it with a soft chime.
“Revise.”
The statement dissolves and re-forms with the cursor blinking like a heartbeat.
For weeks, my “final statement” has been a confession dressed in procedure—accept the blame, accept the execution, let the ceasefire stay stitched together even if it was stitched with corpses.
But the world shifted today.
Independent Oversight Panel. Subpoenas. Statutes invoked like someone finally remembered the law is supposed to have teeth.
That changes the shape of my truth.
It doesn’t absolve me.
It makes the lie unnecessary.
I start again.
“I entered League jurisdiction voluntarily,” I dictate, voice steady, “not to defend my reputation, but to preserve an accurate record of the Kirell evacuation failure. The tribunal’s original framing—individual negligence—was incomplete. Not because it lacked grief, but because it lacked the full command chain.”
My throat tightens. I swallow and taste something metallic—old adrenaline, the kind that never quite leaves.
“The evacuation corridor reroute at 14:01 local orbital was not issued by my command. The override authorization—now under independent review—originated from League command. Civilian casualties were not incidental to the reroute. They were foreseeable variables.”
I stop.
The cursor blinks, impatient.
Foreseeable variables.
That phrase is a knife. It cuts clean, even when you want it dull.
I hear Pellorin’s voice in my head, from the surrender chamber:You’re walking into their arena without armor.
He was wrong. I had armor.
It was silence.
And it was killing me.
The door seals open with a soft hydraulic sigh. Two Coalition security officers step in first, scanning the room like they expect an assassin to emerge from the air vents. Then a human in a dark uniform follows—older, shoulders squared, eyes sharp in the way that saysI don’t waste time and I don’t lose wars.
