I hesitate for a fraction of a second, then add, “And don’t mistake this for trust.”
“I don’t,” he says quietly.
The binders hum softly as he shifts his weight.
“Liaison Ardent,” he says, and my name in his mouth sounds less like a formality and more like recognition, “if the override chain validates, the narrative changes.”
I meet his gaze head-on.
“Only if the tribunal lets it,” I reply.
And in that cold, humming lab, with Kirell rotating silently between us and twelve minutes of missing truth glowing like a wound, I realize this is no longer just about whether he miscalculated.
It is about who was allowed to rewrite the sky.
CHAPTER 6
RHYX
The secured archive lab has the sort of quiet that is never natural, a quiet manufactured by insulation and policy and the unspoken agreement that nothing said here should echo beyond the walls. The room is bright with tribunal lighting that flattens shadows and turns every surface—white composite panels, brushed alloy rails, sealed storage nodes—into something hygienic and impersonal, as though history might be made less obscene if you disinfect the air. Above the central projection table, Kirell’s orbital grid hangs in pale holographic relief, and the corridor line glows faintly across it like a scar traced in light.
My binders hum at my wrists whenever I shift, an even vibration that keeps time with my pulse in an irritating way; the sound is quiet enough to ignore until you are forced to remember that you have been rendered a safe object for inspection. Two tribunal officers stand near the door in the posture of professional indifference, their attention split between me, Selene, and the recording node embedded in the wall that captures every syllable we exchange. They want this to be procedural. They want it to be clean. They want it to be something that can be filed.
Selene stands on the far side of the projection table with her arms folded, her braid tight against her skull as if she has physically bound herself into discipline. The cold light catches her cheekbones and the edges of her mouth, and I can see how she holds her face in a carefully neutral arrangement, as if any visible emotion might be interpreted as confession.
“We are recorded,” the nearer officer reminds us, voice flat.
Selene does not look at him. “Yeah,” she says, and the colloquial softness of the word in this sterile room sounds almost like rebellion.
I angle my head toward her. “That does not change the record.”
“It changes who survives it,” she answers, eyes on the projection rather than on me.
For a moment, I do not reply, because there is too much truth in that sentence to handle carelessly, and I have learned the hard way that careless truth can kill as surely as artillery.
She touches the console, and the corridor map sharpens, overlaying timestamps in neat sequence. “Start from the beginning,” she says, voice clipped back into professional cadence. “Walk me through what you saw. Step by step. Not the summary. Not the legend version. The actual conditions.”
Her insistence is neither sympathy nor accusation. It is hunger for clarity, and I recognize it because I have lived with it.
I draw a slow breath, filling my lungs until my chest expands against the fabric of the tribunal-issued restraints. The air tastes faintly of coolant and sterilized metal, and for a heartbeat I am on the bridge again, where the air tasted of burnt insulation and fear and the iron tang of blood that no one had time to wipe away.
“Kirell orbit,” I begin, letting my voice settle into the chamber’s acoustics with the low resonance my physiology cannot hide. “We were holding a defensive grid againstCoalition artillery positioned beyond the moon’s far side. The evacuation corridor had been plotted three hours earlier, when the bombardment arcs were stable and the satellite coverage remained intact.”
Selene’s fingers hover above the timeline slider. “Three hours earlier,” she repeats. “So it’s not a panic pick in the last minute.”
“No.” I keep my gaze on the projection rather than on her, because if I look at her face while I speak of civilians, my control will fracture in ways that will be unhelpful. “We had already moved eighteen thousand civilians through the corridor before the final escalation. The vector was functioning. It was… it was what you would call safe, given the circumstances.”
One of the tribunal officers shifts his weight slightly, boots whispering against the floor, but he does not interrupt, and the hum of the recording node remains steady.
Selene drags the timeline to 13:45, then looks at me. “When does bombardment intensify?”
“At 13:52,” I answer, and the number rises out of memory as if it has always lived there. “Their artillery pattern changed. Instead of long-range saturation bursts, they began targeted strikes toward our relay nodes. It was deliberate. They were trying to blind us.”
She nods slightly, eyes narrowing. “So you’re seeing the field go unstable before you issue evacuation clearance.”
“Yes. I issued clearance anyway because the evacuation bay below the station was already overwhelmed. Civilians were… stacked. There were medical crews screaming for air. There were children with mask bruises across their faces because the seals were too tight. If I delayed, they would have died in the bay when the next strike hit the station.”
My throat tightens slightly as I speak, the memory pressing like a hand around my windpipe, and I swallow through it with practiced discipline.
