“Take it before I change my mind and throw it into decorative stonework.”
That gets a startled laugh out of her. She takes it with both hands.
“Good luck,” she says.
I almost tell her luck is a scam invented by institutions that don’t want to admit how often they fail people.
Instead I just nod and keep walking.
The lift ride down is too quiet.
No press. No aides. No legal chatter bleeding through half-closed doors. Just me and the glass walls and the city sliding intoview as the lift descends through the tribunal core. The capital outside is washed in late-day light, gold catching on towers and transit rails and the river that cuts through the administrative quarter like a blade laid flat. Even from here I can see the density of bodies around the outer plaza, the flashing lights of press vans, the clustered signs of protesters and counter-protesters, the restless motion of a city trying to decide whether it is horrified or vindicated.
Probably both.
My compad vibrates three times in rapid succession.
Messages.
Mirov. Unknown Senate office. Garran.
Then another.
Pellorin.
I stare at his name for a second, caught off guard enough that I laugh under my breath.
Of course the lawyer texts.
I do not open any of them.
Not yet.
The lift doors part at the lower atrium, and the building breathes noise at me again—far-off shouting from outside, security directives, the rapid click of official shoes on stone, the dry whir of drones moving from interior to exterior patterning.
I step out into it with no badge, no office, no institutional cover, and the strangest thing is that I do not feel smaller.
I feel peeled open.
Raw. Furious. Free in a way that probably comes with future consequences so enormous I can’t even see them yet.
But free.
The outer doors slide apart.
Cold evening air hits my face and lifts the heat from my skin. It smells like rain threatening somewhere beyond the city core, like transport exhaust, like too many people breathinganger into public space. The plaza is a blaze of media lights and chanting bodies and reflected sunset. My hair shifts against my neck in the wind. The stone steps under my shoes still hold the day’s warmth.
Behind me, inside that white-stone machine, the institution is still trying to survive what it finally admitted.
Ahead of me, the whole world is waiting to decide what that admission costs.
I step forward anyway.
CHAPTER 30
RHYX
Freedom, it turns out, does not feel like freedom at first.
