No one says anything for a second.
It’s one thing to know. Another to hear it pronounced into the room by someone whose job is to make the finding survivable on paper.
“Can you confirm that on-record?” I ask.
Her gaze shifts to me. “Yes.”
The breath that leaves me feels like it’s been lodged behind my ribs for days.
Mirov rubs at the back of his neck. “Good. Because upstairs, prosecution is already trying to soften their language.”
I look at him. “Soften?”
He makes a face. “Fog of war. Command complexity. Expanded ambiguity. All the favorite classics.”
“Oh, screw that.”
The words are out before I can dress them up. The human analyst actually startles. The Pi’Rell’s expression flickers at the edges, almost amusement.
Mirov, to his credit, just nods. “Exactly why you’re presenting chronologically. No interpretation layers. No editorial escape route.”
He slides a hearing tablet across the console to me.
PUBLIC EVIDENTIARY HEARING — OVERRIDE RECONSTRUCTION REVIEW
My fingers tighten around the edge of it.
The weight of the thing is ridiculous, because it’s barely anything in my hands. Smooth polymer, warmed by somebody else’s touch. But my body reacts to it like it’s made of lead.
Mirov watches me. “Can you do this?”
I look at the chain again. At the blue civilian arcs. The amber convoy path. The red Coalition fragments. The white line of Vol’s code threading through all of it like a blade laid into a seam.
“Yes,” I say.
And this time the answer lands in me cleanly.
By the time I step into the hearing chamber, the building feels different from the inside out. Not just louder. Tighter. Charged.
The chamber lights are hotter than the vault’s, brighter in a way that flattens nothing. Broadcast drones hover above the central well with a faint insectile whirr. The polished stone underfoot throws back fractured reflections of moving bodies. Screens along the walls crawl with muted live captions, their pale bands of text sliding past in relentless succession.
OVERSIGHT HEARING BEGINS
VOL DIRECTIVE REVIEW
TRIBUNAL SCOPE EXPANDS
The sound in the room is layered and restless—whispered arguments, stylus taps, chair legs shifting, camera servos adjusting, a cough cut off too quickly. Fabric rustles. Jewelry clicks faintly when someone turns too fast. Somewhere in the upper gallery, somebody drops something small and metallic, and it skitters across stone before disappearing into the noise.
I take my place at the presentation dais and dock my compad into the chamber feed.
My palms are damp. The base of my throat is dry. I can feel my own pulse behind my ears, too fast and too loud, but my posture holds.
Across the chamber, the prosecutors look like people who have walked into the wrong version of their own trial. Marris Thane is pale and furious and pretending he’s neither. Drax sits at the central bench beside the oversight chair, shoulders squared, expression so controlled it might as well have beenmachined. Mirov is one tier down with the analysts. The Pi’Rell who confirmed Vol’s code has both hands folded over her tablet as if she isn’t about to drop a warhead into the center of the proceeding.
And behind the transparent partition, under guard, is Rhyx.
He is very still.
