Dareth leans one hip against the desk. “The Coalition needs visible proof that it learned something.”
“Then it should try learning something.”
His brows rise slightly. “You have become irritatingly civilian.”
“Thank you.”
“That was not praise.”
“It remains accurate.”
He taps the nomination again. “You renounced strategic casualty calculus in public. Good. Fine. History will write songs. But if you refuse every formal structure afterward, you surrender the field to people who learned nothing and simply became more careful with vocabulary.”
I hold his gaze. “And if I reenter those structures, I validate the idea that they can clean themselves by placing the right wounded man in a chair.”
Dareth’s expression tightens. “That is cynical.”
“It is observational.”
“This committee is not a fleet altar. It is a restraint mechanism.”
I bark a laugh before I can stop myself. “A restraint mechanism designed by the institution it restrains. That should end beautifully.”
For the first time, some actual annoyance flashes in his face. Good. I was beginning to worry he had outsourced his nerves.
“You think refusing makes you pure?” he asks.
“No.”
“Then what does it make you?”
“Consistent.”
The word lands between us with more force than I intended.
I straighten, feeling the workday in my shoulders, the lingering ache from hauling structural crates, the damp coolness in the cuffs of my jacket where rain caught me at the loading bay. My hands smell faintly of machine grease under the soap.
“I stood in a tribunal chamber and publicly renounced the logic that makes civilian deaths acceptable if the political architecture is important enough,” I say. “If I step back into formal command structures now—advisory or otherwise—I undermine that renunciation. I tell every grieving family that the machine can consume them, apologize, and then invite the survivors to help redesign the teeth.”
Dareth’s mouth opens, then closes.
Outside the office, a forklift alarm beeps twice in reverse. The sound is oddly grounding.
He tries another angle. “You could do real good.”
“I’m doing real good downstairs.”
His jaw sets. “This is smaller.”
“Yes.”
“You’re thinking too sentimentally.”
“No,” I say quietly. “You are thinking too institutionally.”
That one gets him.
I can see it in the way his shoulders shift, not much, just enough to show the hit landed somewhere behind the practiced civility.
