I glance up. “That a compliment?”
“That’s me saying maybe don’t look like you’d bite through a bulkhead if someone annoyed you.”
“Can’t promise anything.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That tracks.”
I shift toward the vault. “I have to work.”
He pushes off the wall. “I figured.”
I stop when I hear the change in his breathing, that tiny intake before somebody says something they’re not sure they’re entitled to say.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I’m sorry.”
I turn back. “For what part?”
His face folds a little at that, all that old easy charm burned away until there’s just the human underneath it, tired and ashamed. “For all of it. For being close enough to the system to benefit from it and not seeing what it was doing. For not understanding what kind of machine I was feeding until it started eating people I knew.”
The corridor feels very still.
The hum of the storage arrays. The faint vibration through the soles of my shoes from something heavy cycling two levels up. The cool pressure of the air against my skin. Garran standing there with his collar open and his guilt finally visible instead of scrubbed into institutional language.
I nod once. “Statement room if they call you.”
“I know.”
“Tell the truth.”
His smile this time is tired and crooked and sad. “That does seem to be the trend.”
The vault unlocks beneath my palm with a deep internal clunk, and white light spills across the floor in a long clean stripe. I step through it without looking back.
Inside, the vault is all hard brilliance and controlled silence. Projection tables sit in perfect rows like altars built for data instead of prayer. The air is colder here, dry enough that every breath feels pared down to function. Blue-white light skims across the glossy black console surface and catches in the edges of my nails, in the tiny scratches on the casing of my compad, in the fine shimmer of dustless air moving through filtration currents.
I set Garran’s packet into the chain.
The evidence lattice blooms wider over the table, and the chamber fills with geometry.
Civilian telemetry streams in translucent blue arcs, each shuttle path curving through Kirell’s orbital frame. Convoy routing overlays in amber. Coalition fragments arrive in clipped red bands—partial, broken, but enough. Then the authorization trace emerges in clean white, a rigid line threading straight through all of it.
The effect is beautiful in the way some catastrophic things are beautiful—structured, elegant, horrifying once you understand what you’re looking at.
I isolate the timeline.
13:57 — Rhyx’s evacuation order.
Clean. Broad. Correct.
14:01 — Override.
Subtle inward shift. Corridor compression. Alignment to convoy shielding coordinates.
14:09 — Impact.
I stare at it until my eyes sting.
The vault’s low hum seems to deepen around me. My pulse syncs with the cursor blinking over the projection as if the machine and I have agreed on a rhythm. The cool surface of the console anchors my palms when I lean into it.
