Drax looks as though she is holding the room together by will alone, and perhaps she is, because she knows the moment she loses control, the Senate will tear the tribunal apart for sport.
“The tribunal will recess for procedural review,” she announces sharply, and the gavel tone in her voice is unmistakable. “All parties will refrain from public commentary pending deliberation.”
Public commentary.
As if that ship hasn’t already sailed, caught fire, and started shooting.
As officers escort me away, I catch a glimpse of Selene at the edge of the chamber, posture composed, face pale underharsh lights, eyes bright with a stubbornness that looks like a blade kept hidden under silk. She does not look at me, not directly, yet I feel her presence anyway, a steady heat beneath the institution’s coldness, and I remember her voice in the archive chamber—You do not get to decide that for me—and I understand, with a clarity that is almost painful, that I am no longer fighting merely for my own sentence.
I am fighting because a system that murders civilians and then offers “protection” for silence will keep doing it until someone breaks the pattern, and the pattern has already taken too much from her, from me, from everyone whose names scroll past as if they were just data.
Back in custody, the terminal pings with new statements, new outrage, new neatly phrased warnings of destabilization, and somewhere beyond, fleets will shift and senators will posture and diplomats will hiss into private channels, yet beneath all that noise a simple thing has happened: the lie has been forced into daylight, where it must either withstand scrutiny or be seen as what it is.
And I am done helping it hide.
CHAPTER 17
SELENE
The strategic classification vault doesn’t announce itself with ominous music or dramatic doors; it hides behind three innocuous directory names and a compliance banner that smiles like it’s doing you a favor. The corridor outside is narrow and overlit, the kind of tribunal architecture that makes every person look slightly guilty under its pallid wash, and the air carries that dry, filtered chill that always smells faintly of stone dust no matter how many sterilizers they run. A security drone idles near the ceiling, lens drifting in slow arcs, and its soft stabilizer-whisper sounds like a bored insect deciding whether I’m worth eating.
I keep my face neutral as I pass the drone, because neutrality is a costume I can still wear even when my stomach rolls like a storm-tossed shuttle. I’ve learned the rhythm of my body’s new rebellion: the sudden nausea, the small dizziness, the way my pulse spikes when I stand too fast. I hate it for being inconvenient, and I hate myself for even thinking that, because inconvenient is a luxury complaint when forty-seven thousand people died and the Senate is calling it “postwar unity.”
My compad is warm against my palm, the casing slick under my thumb, and I let that warmth ground me as I step into thearchive lab and seal the door behind me. The lab lights dim to after-hours mode with a soft shift, cooler and less theatrical, and the storage columns continue their low hum, steady as a heartbeat that refuses to panic. The projection table sits in the center like an altar waiting for sacrifice, and for a moment the word sacrifice makes my mouth taste wrong.
“No,” I mutter, and the sound is small in the empty room. “Not poetic. Not tonight. Just data.”
I activate my console and don’t bother pulling up the prosecution summaries, because those briefs are propaganda with footnotes, built to guide the tribunal toward a neat ending. Instead I open raw classification layers, the ones I’ve been warned away from, the ones Thane calls overreach and Drax calls risk, because risk is now the only honest language left in this building.
I input Admiral Caedrin Vol’s clearance code.
A prompt blossoms in the air, polite and predatory at once.
NOTICE: ACCESS BEYOND ACTIVE CASE SCOPE.
CITE STATUTORY AUTHORITY.
ALL ACTIONS LOGGED.
I cite the reconstruction statute again, fingers steady, voice calm as if I’m requesting a weather report instead of reaching into the League’s throat.
The system pauses, and I feel my pulse beat once, hard.
Then the prompt shifts.
CLEARANCE ACCEPTED: FLAG-LEVEL OVERSIGHT — CONDITIONAL VIEW.
WARNING: STRATEGIC DOCTRINE MATERIAL.
The lab seems colder in the second after the warning appears, as if the building itself knows what I’m about to touch.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “I know.”
A directory tree unfurls, and it’s massive, layered, intentionally labyrinthine, like someone designed it to exhaustthe curious. My eyes flick across file sets labeled with terms that sound harmless if you don’t know how strategy people talk:Cohesion Protocols.Continuity Modeling.Risk Containment Doctrine.Convoy Shield Optimization.
Under that, a subfolder glows faintly.
SACRIFICIAL STABILIZATION DOCTRINE.
