Drax’s fingers rest on the bench, and for a heartbeat she looks less like a statue and more like a woman carrying the weight of a collapsing narrative.
Thane watches her closely, waiting to see whether she will protect the institution or the record.
Selene stands at the side, hands clasped, face composed, eyes fixed on nothing in particular as if she is holding herself together by sheer refusal to fall apart on camera.
The entire chamber holds its breath.
And somewhere beyond these walls, senators and envoys are already drafting their statements, already sharpening their knives, already deciding whether truth is worth the risk of war.
I do not look away.
I let the petition sit between us like a challenge.
CHAPTER 15
SELENE
The archive chamber after hours is a different country than the archive chamber under tribunal daylight; the lights dim to a lower, more honest register, the ceiling panels shifting from crisp white to a cooler glow that leaves long, soft shadows in the seams of the walls, while the storage columns keep humming their steady, subterranean song as if they never learned the difference between day and night, between public righteousness and private rot. My boots sound louder in the emptiness, each step echoing against alloy and composite, and the air tastes faintly of chilled metal and dustless filtration, so clean it feels like the building is trying to scrub away whatever I’m about to do.
I’ve been here so long the console’s surface has warmed slightly under my palms, a small living heat against the lab’s cold, and my eyes ache from staring at lines of light that represent people who once had weight and breath and names spoken aloud by someone who loved them. The casualty overlays float above the central table in layered sheets—manifests, vectors, exposure models, artillery arcs—each one a translucent veil pulled over the last until the whole thing becomes a cathedral of math built over a grave.
“Okay,” I whisper, not because the room needs reassurance, but becauseIdo. “One more.”
The projection responds to my voice print, expanding outward as I pinch and drag the orbital grid wider, widening the slice of Kirell’s upper atmosphere until the corridor line becomes a thread stretched across a sea. The blast radius overlay blossoms into view like a bruise spreading under skin: concentric gradients of probability, the outer edge faint and uncertain, the inner core a dense red that leaves no room for optimism. I bring the twelve-minute seam into sharp focus again—13:57 through 14:09—then expand the blast radius at 14:06, 14:07, 14:08, watching the kill geometry tighten like a fist.
The model I built earlier—the one that shows forty-three percent increased exposure—updates as the grid expands, filling in the empty spaces with additional telemetry and corrected shield-buffer boundaries. When the convoy perimeter layer flickers at the edge of my interface, I keep it minimized, not because I’m ashamed of it, but because I’m tired of seeing that elegant gold line next to the blood-colored exposure zones; it feels obscene to let it glow.
I open the redirected corridor manifest and search the segment identifiers until my tongue goes numb from not speaking, and then there it is again, the same line I found in the vault the first day and kept trying to pretend I could handle without flinching.
Shuttle 447-A.
Corridor extension C-23.
Redirected segment: C-23-Delta.
My parents.
Tomas Ardent. Lysa Ardent.
Their names don’t appear with drama or flourish; they sit there in the manifest like any other entry, letters and numberspretending to be neutral. The cruelty of that neutrality makes my throat tighten.
“Hi,” I say softly, to nobody, to the projection, to the dead, to the part of me that still expects them to answer. “I found you again.”
I expand the projected blast radius one more increment and isolate C-23-Delta, highlighting the segment in pale violet while everything else dims, because if I don’t make the world smaller I’ll drown in it. The corridor line bends, and the artillery arcs intersect it exactly where the model says they do, and the exposure gradient around that segment blooms into a saturated red that makes my stomach roll hard enough I have to pause and breathe through it.
The nausea is sharper tonight than it has been, a sudden wave that rises from nowhere and makes the air taste wrong, metallic and sour, and I clamp down on it the way I clamp down on everything else, my hands gripping the console until the cold bites.
“Not now,” I mutter. “You do not get to knock me over right now.”
I focus on the visual, not the feeling, because visuals are controllable. I pull up the corrected path overlay and watch shuttle 447-A’s telemetry line shift at 14:01, the vector adjustment clean and coordinated, the vessel obeying its guidance update like a trusting animal following a leash, and then I watch it enter the hazard envelope it never should’ve touched.
My chest tightens, and for a moment I can almost hear my mother’s voice, gentle and annoyed, telling me to stop hunching over screens, telling me to eat something that isn’t ration gel, telling me the war doesn’t get to take my posture too. The memory is so vivid my eyes burn.
I blink hard, and the projection remains.
I’m still here.
They’re still dead.
