It still takes twenty-seven more minutes.
Twenty-seven minutes of signatures, seals, custody conversion language, transit corridor clearance, binder deactivation sequencing, and one spectacular argument in which Pellorin asks a tribunal administrator whether the institution’s true state religion is delay.
When the binders finally release, the sensation is so abrupt it almost feels wrong. The hum stops. The faint pressure around my wrists vanishes. Cool air hits the scales there and for a moment my hands feel too light, too uncontained.
I flex my fingers once.
No one says anything.
Pellorin gathers the release packet, my residency application confirmation, and the remains of his patience. “You realize this is the worst victory I have ever professionally participated in.”
“I know.”
“And yet somehow not the least satisfying.”
We leave through a side custody corridor rather than the main chamber exit. The passage is narrow, gray-walled, sound-dampened, the air cooler than the hearing room and touched with the scent of cleaning solvents and old circuitry. My boots strike the floor in quiet, controlled echoes. Pellorin walks beside me with the stiff-backed fatigue of a man who intends to collapse only in private and only after insulting three more officials.
At the final security threshold, he stops.
“I have transport authority to the Coalition residential wing,” he says. “Temporary, boring, oversecured.”
“I’m not going there.”
“I know.” He hands me a small comm token. “If you change your mind or require legal intervention when civilization inevitably embarrasses itself again.”
I take it. “You assume civilization will be punctual.”
“I assume it will be tiresome.”
For a moment we stand there in the washed gray light, the city’s muted roar just beginning to seep through the outer barriers.
He looks at me closely. “You’re going after her.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
That surprises me enough to show.
Pellorin’s mouth twitches. “Don’t look so shocked. I’m exhausted, not stupid.”
He exhales once, slow. “Leave the capital tonight if you can. It’s splitting open and people do reckless things when they decide ethics are a personal insult.”
I think of the plaza outside. The senators on the feeds. The crackle in the city’s nerves.
“We won’t stay.”
He nods, apparently unsurprised by thewe.
“Then go,” he says.
The outer doors part.
Evening hits me all at once.
Cool air. Wind moving through stone canyons of government architecture. The fading gold of late light sliding over the tribunal façade and catching the white stone until it looks almost holy from a distance, which is offensive on several levels. The plaza below is alive with noise—chants, camera calls, transport engines, protest rhythms striking against the broad steps like waves against a hull.
Security presence is still there, but reduced from the full siege posture of earlier. Fewer hard lines. More observation than containment. The verdict has eased one kind of danger and made room for others.
