I brace one hand against the wall.
The surface is smooth and cool under my palm.
I let myself breathe.
One breath.
Then another.
We didn’t fix anything.
We didn’t save anyone.
We just dragged the mechanism into the light and forced it to keep moving where everyone could see.
And what it crushes next is still coming.
CHAPTER 28
RHYX
The chamber tastes like old metal and restraint.
That is the first thing I notice when they bring me back in after the hearing fractures the room and remakes it. Not the lights. Not the drones. Not the rows of officials moving in clipped, urgent paths like blood cells through a wounded artery. The taste. Dry, metallic, faintly electric at the back of my tongue, as if the air itself has been overhandled by machines and frightened people.
The binders at my wrists hum when I sit.
The sound is soft enough that no one else would hear it over the chamber noise, but I feel it in my bones. A quiet warning. A reminder. Still in custody. Still contained. Still the body the institution can point to while it decides what version of itself survives the truth.
The transparent partition in front of me reflects the chamber in pale, fractured layers. Lights. Movement. Screens scrolling updates too fast for most eyes to catch. The floor is polished stone veined with silver filaments, and every time someone crosses the central aisle, those lines catch the overhead glare and throw it back upward in cold strips. It makes the room look like it is lit from beneath by something surgical.
Pellorin stands at my right shoulder, hands clasped behind his back, jaw set hard enough to crack teeth.
“Well,” he says at last, low enough that the nearest League guard can pretend not to hear. “That was subtle.”
I keep my eyes on the central bench. “You say that as if you expected subtlety.”
“I expected panic,” he says. “I did not expect public institutional collapse before midday.”
“That sounds like a failure of imagination.”
He lets out a breath through his nose that might have been a laugh in a different life. “You’re in a mood.”
“I’m in custody.”
“You’ve been in custody for weeks.”
“And somehow it keeps losing its novelty.”
That draws a brief sideways glance from him, the kind he uses when he is deciding whether I am stable enough to be left with my own thoughts. His voice softens by a fraction.
“You saw her do it.”
There is no need to ask who he means.
Across the chamber, Selene stands in a cluster of oversight personnel near the lower analyst tier. She has one hand wrapped around her compad and the other braced lightly against the edge of a desk while a Pi’Rell analyst speaks to her in quick, precise tones. Even from here I can tell she is exhausted. I can see it in the tension at the base of her throat, in the way her shoulders hold too carefully, in the stillness that only comes when movement is being rationed.
And yet she is inside it now.
