“If you’re physically compromised,” I say, “it matters. They will use it. They already did.”
Selene’s voice turns brittle. “What do you want me to say? ‘Oh yeah, sorry, I’m having a weak little human moment’?”
“I want you to tell me if you’re about to fall over,” I answer, and the edge in my tone is not anger so much as fear translated into something usable. “Because I’m done watching people collapse while institutions clap.”
She freezes, then turns to me with a look that could cut alloy.
“I’m not your responsibility,” she says.
“I didn’t say you were,” I reply, though the truth is more complicated than my words allow. “I said I can see when you’re not well.”
Her mouth tightens. “I’m tired. That’s all.”
“Tired doesn’t look like that,” I say.
“It does when you’re being hunted,” she snaps, and then she inhales sharply, as if realizing she let too much emotion leak out. Her voice drops back into professional cadence. “Proceed with testimony prep. I’ll manage my own body.”
There are a hundred responses I could offer, ranging from sympathy to fury, but none of them would help her keep her fortress intact, and I suspect she needs the fortress more than she needs my concern.
“Alright,” I say softly. “Manage it. Just don’t do it alone.”
Her gaze flickers, something unreadable passing behind it, and then she turns back to the projection as though I have spoken in a language she doesn’t understand.
We spend the next hour rehearsing the tribunal’s preferred rhythm: exhibit, question, answer, controlled emotion, controlled silence. She calls up the corridor map; I confirm the issuance vector; she highlights the blackout onset; I describe the loss of tactical updates. All of it is clean until we approach the seam again, that twelve-minute wound that keeps being stitched shut by procedural hands.
At 14:01, Selene’s fingers tighten around the stylus, and her shoulders lift slightly on an inhale that looks too deliberate.
“You want me to testify to what I experienced,” I say, watching her carefully. “Or to what the record shows.”
Her voice is clipped. “Both, if the tribunal allows it.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
She does not look up. “Then we make the record louder than their denial.”
I feel the faintest grim satisfaction at that, a dark warmth in the chest that is not hope but recognition of shared stubbornness.
A tribunal aide appears at the door and announces the end of our allotted prep window with the tone of someone reading a weather bulletin. Selene dismisses the projection with a tight gesture, and the corridor line collapses into nothing as if it never existed.
As the officers guide me back toward custody, I glance at Selene one last time. She stands in the dim light of the room with her hands braced against the console as if it’s the only stable surface in the world, her face composed into tribunal neutrality, yet the strain around her mouth betrays the effort it takes. She doesn’t look at me, but I can feel her attention anyway, a kind of silent proximity that feels more dangerous than words.
In custody, the walls close in again, and the air returns to its sterile bite, and I sit at the restricted terminal with the same restless fury that has become my companion. The tribunal wants to accelerate sentencing. Thane wants to narrow scope. Drax wants to preserve legitimacy. The Senate wants to use the dead as theater.
I want proof.
The Coalition has not yet responded about releasing comm fragments, and time is a blade against my throat, so I reach for the other thread—the one I have not pulled in years because it leads straight back into the war’s raw nerve.
Encrypted contact protocols still exist, buried in old comm routines like seeds in ash. I access the diplomatic channel interface and request a secure bridge to a name I have not spoken aloud since Kirell.
Draev Korr.
Former Vakutan communications officer. My comms chief during the siege. The man who watched the relays die and kept his hands steady anyway.
The interface warns me three times about monitoring. I ignore it and initiate the encryption handshake using a Vakutan cipher pattern the League never bothered to fully map, because arrogance is the habit of empires.
The holo flickers, then stabilizes into Draev’s face—older now, the scales around his eyes duller, his gaze still razor-sharp. The image is grainy, compressed through layers of diplomatic interference, but the voice is unmistakable, resonant and tired.
“Commander,” he says, and the title in his mouth carries reverence and grief in equal measure. “You’re alive.”
