My stomach twists again, sharper now, and I grip the edge of the table to steady myself, letting the cold bite into my palm as a distraction.
“You’re saying you didn’t know,” I repeat.
“I’m saying,” Hale replies, voice rising with a crack of genuine panic, “if I’d known, I would’ve— I would’ve flagged it, I would’ve escalated, I would’ve?—”
He stops, breath hitching, as if realizing how fragile “would’ve” is in the face of forty-seven thousand dead.
I keep my voice even. “Then prove it.”
His eyes flash. “How?”
“Give me your access authentication token,” I say. “The one you used to grant convoy clearance. If the corridor alteration was executed using your token, then you’re lying or your token was misused. If the corridor alteration used a different token, your convoy clearance was exploited as cover.”
Hale blinks, then reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out a small metallic cylinder—an old-styleauthentication token, physical for redundancy, the kind that gets issued when systems can’t be trusted and humans become the last firewall.
He places it on the table with a careful precision that looks like surrender.
“Take it,” he says tightly. “Scan it. Verify it. I didn’t authorize the corridor shift.”
I pick it up. It’s warm from his body heat, faintly ridged, with tiny etched serial markings along the side. The tactile reality of it makes my skin prickle. This is the kind of thing people kill over because it turns responsibility into something you can hold.
I slide it into the scanner.
The console pings and projects the token’s authentication trail: convoy clearance granted, shield perimeter request approved. No direct corridor recalibration authorization attached.
Hale exhales sharply, relief and fury mixing into something that almost makes him shake.
“See?” he says. “That’s all I did. I cleared convoy movement. I didn’t touch civilian traffic.”
I nod once, slow. “That helps.”
His eyes narrow. “Helps who?”
I meet his gaze. “Helps the record. Helps you if your name is about to be dragged into politics you didn’t ask for.”
Hale’s mouth twists. “Politics? This is—this is war all over again.”
“It is,” I say, and my voice is quiet. “Only cleaner. That’s what makes it worse.”
He stares at the projection, then back at me, and his voice drops. “Why are you doing this?”
The question isn’t procedural. It’s human, and it’s dangerous.
I could saybecause my parents died, and it would be true, but it would also give him a narrative to file me under, a neat label that makes everything I do look predictable. So I don’t.
“Because the corridor shift was deliberate,” I say. “Because the math says it wasn’t chaos. And because someone corrupted evidence to stop me from proving it.”
Hale’s face drains slightly. “They corrupted a file?”
“They flagged it as corrupted after an unlogged maintenance override,” I reply. “And then closed the investigation.”
Hale swears under his breath, sharp and bitter. “That’s… that’s insane.”
“Welcome to the tribunal,” I mutter.
He leans forward, elbows on the table, and for a moment his composure slips enough to reveal raw fear. “If Admiral Vol is involved—if his restructuring command is what brought me here—then they’re not looking for truth. They’re looking for damage control.”
“Yes,” I say simply.
