The officers at the door clear their throats softly, a reminder that time exists, that supervision exists, that the world outside this chamber is still hungry.
I don’t move away immediately. I let myself take one more breath, deep and slow, tasting cold metal and faint ozone and the warmth of him, letting my body register that I am not alone in this moment, that my defiance has a witness who is also defiant.
Then I straighten, hands still on his chest, and I look past him at the projection, at the corridor segment, at the red bloom of death.
“Alright,” I say, voice steady now, the softness gone, replaced by a hard clarity. “Now we go back to war—with paperwork.”
Rhyx’s low chuckle is brief, rough, and then his expression sharpens again into resolve. “And with proof.”
“With proof,” I echo.
Because whatever we just chose, whatever it becomes, it isn’t a surrender to chaos. It’s a declaration that we will not be moved like pieces anymore—neither of us, not my child, not the dead, not the living.
They can accelerate sentencing, close breach investigations, and offer protection in exchange for silence.
But they can’t unmake what we’ve decided.
Not now.
CHAPTER 16
RHYX
The walk back to custody after the archive chamber does not feel like an escort so much as a corridor of consequences unspooling beneath my feet, each step measured by the soft hum of restraints and the quieter hum of decisions that can no longer be undone. The tribunal complex at night has a different smell than it does under broadcast glare—less perfume, less marble-polish pomp, more ozone from security fields and the faint mineral tang of chilled alloy—yet even stripped of its audience it remains what it has always been: a machine that expects you to fit its shapes, and punishes you when you don’t.
The officers keep their distance in the particular way people do when they have been told to treat you as dangerous but can’t quite decide whether you are a threat or a spectacle, and as we pass through a seam between two privacy fields I catch the faintest flicker of a drone’s lens reorienting in a wall recess, as if the building itself is curious whether the accused will limp, whether the monster will soften, whether there will be a moment worth clipping. I give it nothing, because I have learned that institutions feed on everything, even tenderness, and I will not let them turn what Selene and I chose into another lever.
In the custody antechamber, the door seals behind me with the quiet finality of a tomb, and the air becomes sterilized again, thin and metallic, a taste that sits on the tongue like a reprimand. The terminal embedded in the wall waits with the same restrained offer of agency it always provides, its interface polite, its warnings constant, and I stand before it for a moment longer than necessary, gathering myself not because I doubt what I must do, but because doing it will move pieces on a board that has always been too large for one person to control.
Selene is pregnant.
The fact lands again, not as shock now, but as gravity; it changes the weight distribution of everything around us, and if the tribunal is a machine then the Senate is a furnace, and furnaces devour weakness with cheerful efficiency. Vol’s offer of “protection” in exchange for silence is the kind of bargain that looks like mercy to naive eyes and like a leash to anyone who has watched power at work. I have worn leashes. I know the feel of them; they don’t bite until you try to run.
I activate the secure channel layer and draw up the Vakutan cipher handshake again, the old pattern that tastes like home and war and regret, and I request Draev Korr, not as an informal contact this time, but as a sworn witness, because rumor is what they will call anything that cannot be stapled to a document and filed.
The holo flickers, then stabilizes into Draev’s face once more, older and harder than memory yet still bearing that same stubborn fire behind the eyes. He squints at the interface overhead, then at me.
“You look like you got hit,” he says.
“I got informed,” I reply, and the faint attempt at humor fails to lift the weight in my chest.
Draev’s nostrils flare subtly. “That bad.”
“Worse,” I say, then force myself into procedural clarity because emotion, unstructured, is exactly what they will use to discredit us. “Draev, I need you to submit a sworn affidavit. Not a conversation. Not a ‘he said.’ A formal statement confirming you detected an external override signal during the blackout window and that its relay handshake pattern matched League strategic clearance protocols.”
Draev stares at me for a long moment, then lets out a slow breath. “So we’re doing this.”
“We’re doing this,” I confirm. “If the tribunal refuses testimony, they can refuse it on record.”
Draev’s mouth tightens. “They’ll say it’s out of scope.”
“I know.”
“They’ll call you destabilizing.”
“I know.”
“They’ll threaten me.”
