She nods once. “There you go.”
I hate how much she sounds like command review right now. I hate more how necessary it is.
She folds her arms tighter under the blanket. “Do you have a structural reform plan attached to this disclosure.”
“No.”
“Do you have protected oversight succession in place if the current channels fracture?”
“No.”
“Do you have guarantees the reform coalitions won’t turn it into a purity war and rip each other apart trying to own the revelation.”
“No.”
She leans in. “Then all you have is truth and velocity.”
The sentence hits like a hand to the sternum.
Because yes.
That is exactly what I have.
Truth and velocity.
It was enough, once, to move fleets.
It is not enough to rebuild a government without breaking a ceasefire.
I look away from her and back at the draft on the table. The words still look righteous. They also look young. Young in the worst sense. As if naming a thing and surviving its impact are naturally paired events.
Selene’s voice softens by one degree.
“If we throw this into public space right now,” she says, “we don’t get cleansing fire. We get uncontrolled fragmentation.” She pauses. “And the child growing inside me doesn’t get points because we were morally pure while the whole region destabilized.”
That one goes in clean.
I sit back down.
Not because I concede. Because standing suddenly feels like posturing.
My fingers hover over the slate. The draft statement waits, bright and simple and not remotely equal to the damage it would do.
Selene eases into the chair across from me more slowly now, one hand braced on the table’s edge. The blanket slips into her lap. She looks exhausted. Furious. Right enough to make me dangerous to myself.
I say, quieter, “Suppressed truth perpetuates doctrine.”
“Yes,” she says immediately. “But destabilizing peace without a structural reform path risks repeating it.”
We hold each other’s gaze across the projection field.
No court. No bench. No audience.
Just two civilians at a scarred table trying to decide whether history deserves the truth fast or survivable.
I hate this choice.
I hate that she understands it better than I do tonight.
