“They already broke evidence to stop me,” I say. “So yeah. I’d say afraid is one word.”
He leans forward slightly, as much as the binders allow, and his voice drops further, intimate in spite of surveillance. “Then you must move faster than their fear.”
I stare at him. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
His mouth tightens faintly. “Fair.”
I inhale slowly, forcing my voice back into procedure. “I’m going to reconstruct the chain through civilian relay backups and municipal archives. I already have indicators pointing to a League strategic clearance marker.”
His eyes sharpen. “Vol.”
I freeze. “How do you?—”
He tilts his head slightly. “I do not know. I suspect.”
The fact that he can say that—suspect—and still sound steady makes my stomach twist. “I’m not handing you conclusions,” I say quickly. “Not until I can verify.”
“I did not ask for conclusions,” he answers. “I asked for proof.”
A bitter laugh escapes me. “And you waited years for it.”
He holds my gaze. “Because years were better than another century of war.”
The statement is calm, and that calm is what infuriates me most, because it implies he has made peace with a bargain I never agreed to.
I lean back in my chair, hands gripping the edges, and I feel the cold alloy bite into my palms.
“You know what’s wild?” I say, voice low, rough. “Everyone keeps telling me I’m compromised because I lost people. But what compromises a tribunal isn’t grief. It’s convenience. It’s everyone being willing to trade truth for a timeline.”
Rhyx watches me. “Then do not trade.”
“I won’t,” I say, and the words come out like a vow, not because I trust him, but because I trust my own refusal to be used as a prop.
He nods once, as if that is the only answer he expected.
The door hisses open abruptly. The officer steps in, expression impassive. “Time.”
I stand quickly, chair scraping softly.
Rhyx rises more slowly, restrained by binders and escort protocol, but his eyes stay on mine as if he’s trying to memorize the shape of my resolve.
At the threshold, I pause, then look back at him.
“You didn’t contest it,” I say quietly, the anger still there but sharper now, refined. “You didn’t fight for the record. So I am going to. And if it turns out you’re lying, I will be the one holding the blade.”
His mouth tightens, not offended, not defensive.
“I expect nothing less,” he replies.
I swallow hard, then turn and walk out, the officer’s footsteps falling in behind me like a metronome.
In the corridor, the tribunal’s sterile air hits my lungs again, sharp and cold, and the building’s hum wraps around me like a warning. Somewhere above, senators are already drafting statements about accelerated timelines and diplomatic urgency, and the Holonet is chewing on the spectacle like a beast.
But beneath all of it, beneath the noise and the politics and the labels they slap on my grief, there is still a twelve-minute seam in the sky over Kirell, and someone powerful enough to corrupt evidence just admitted—by their panic—that the seam leads somewhere they don’t want exposed.
I keep walking, faster now, because if they want to rush sentencing, then fine.
Let them try.
