That will do.
CHAPTER 33
SELENE
The apartment is too quiet for the kind of night this is.
Not peaceful quiet. Not restful quiet. The other kind—the taut, listening kind, where every little sound gets outlined in ink. Rain has stopped, but the windows still hold a sheen of damp city light, smearing the towers outside into silver and gold streaks. Somewhere below, a late transit line groans around a curve, metal singing against metal. The heating vent clicks on, breathes a stream of warm air across the room, then settles back to its low mechanical murmur like it knows better than to interrupt me for long.
I’m standing at the table in bare feet, one hip braced against the edge, staring at a prepared statement I already hate.
It floats above the compad in neat blue text. Too neat. Too diplomatic. Too dry around the bones. Every sentence has that faint institutional smell, even without smell—sterile wording, polished edges, grief filed into acceptable shapes.
I scroll back to the top and read it again anyway.
“On behalf of the civilian families affected by the Kirell corridor collapse, I acknowledge the significance of public memorial restoration and?—”
“Oh, absolutely not,” I mutter.
From the kitchenette, Rhyx looks up from the kettle he’s filling. “That sounds like violence.”
“It should.”
He leans one hand on the counter, watching me with that maddening, measured calm he wears when he knows I’m about to do something reckless and approves of it in principle.
“What did the statement do to deserve execution,” he asks.
I jab a finger at the hovering text. “It sounds like a tribunal clerk crawled into my spine and started writing from there.”
“That does seem inconvenient.”
“Inconvenient?” I look at him. “It sounds like I’m accepting a plaque for procedural excellence. My parents died in that corridor.”
He nods once. “Yes.”
“And this—” I slice half the projection away with a frustrated flick of my fingers. “—this sounds like I’m thanking them for eventually noticing.”
The deleted text dissolves in pale fragments.
A weird, fierce satisfaction flashes through me.
I delete another paragraph. Then another. By the time I’m done, half the statement is gone and what remains looks less like a speech and more like a set of raw nerves held together by punctuation.
Rhyx carries two mugs over and sets one by my hand.
The ceramic is warm against my fingers, steam lifting in thin curls that smell faintly of black tea and the ginger he keeps putting in everything now like he’s personally declared war on nausea. The heat sinks into my skin. Outside, a siren passes somewhere far off, high and distant and gone in seconds.
“You’re cutting aggressively,” he says.
“I’m cutting lies.”
His gaze drops to the shortened statement. “You may need at least one sentence that sounds like you are not about to bite a senator.”
“I have one,” I say. “Look.” I point. “‘The dead deserved truth before they were memorialized by it.’ That’s measured.”
“That is extremely close to biting a senator.”
I take a sip of tea. It’s hot enough to sting my tongue and I welcome the sting. “Then they should move faster.”
