“Order,” she says again, though the chamber is already quieter, not because people are calm but because they are calculating.
Outside, the protest feed surges across another wall monitor someone forgot to mute in time. A sea of bodies outside Senate chambers, signs lifted overhead, faces flushed with anger, the headlines already distilled into chantable language:
NO ACCEPTABLE DEAD
WHO CLEARED THE CORRIDOR?
KIRELL WAS NOT A MISTAKE
The sight of it sends a tremor through the room. Senators notice. Security notices. Even Thane notices, and the realization that the outrage is no longer confined to the chamber makes his mouth flatten into something harsher than professionalism.
My compad vibrates again.
I don’t open the second message.
I don’t need to. The first one was enough.
I stand there between security and projection light, my nausea a low sour pulse, my pulse itself too fast, my hands colder than the room, and I realize in a strange, clear way that the line has already been crossed. There is no version of this now where I retreat into ordinary life and let the tribunal clean up around me. Vol made sure of that when he offered protection. Thane made sure of that when he called truth overreach. The threat message makes sure of it every time I read the wordsremember who dies.
Well.
I remember.
That’s the whole damn problem.
Drax consults quickly with a clerk, then lifts her head. “This tribunal will enter controlled evidentiary review with expanded oversight. Security inquiry into the leak proceeds separately. All parties are reminded that public commentary outside tribunal procedure may have diplomatic consequences.”
No one misses the warning.
The chamber begins to move again, slower now, less chaotic, because once an institution names a process it regains some of its confidence, even if the process is just a prettier way of sayingwe need time to control the damage.
The security officers step back fully from my shoulders, though they remain close enough to remind me I am one inconvenient order away from suspension.
As the session shifts toward recess logistics, Rhyx remains beside my bench until his escort nudges him back into proper alignment. He doesn’t resist, but he lets the cameras see the hesitation, lets the chamber see that his movement away from me is enforced rather than chosen.
I keep my face neutral.
Inside, everything is louder than the room—my heartbeat, the remembered line of the threat message, the faint, stubborn awareness of the life inside me, the image of my parents’ shuttle line obeying a corridor update into a red bloom of “acceptable” loss.
When the gavel finally falls and the recess is called, I don’t move right away. Neither does anyone else. We all stand there for a fraction of a second in the aftermath of a thing that cannot be unsaid, projected, or unseen.
Then the chamber breaks into motion again.
Staff rush. Senators cluster. Security expands. The Oversight Board huddles like newly minted revolutionaries who still can’t believe they got the microphone. The protests outside continue to swell on the feed. Somewhere in the building, someone is probably already drafting suspension paperwork for me.
Let them.
I gather my compad from the console, lock the threat message behind encryption, and straighten my spine as the room buzzes around me.
Rhyx glances at me once as they begin to move him. It isn’t a soft look. It isn’t even a reassuring one. It’s the look of someone acknowledging a battlefield shift in real time and deciding, silently, that retreat is no longer an available tactic.
I return the look.
Then I turn back to the projection, where the doctrine header still glows for another second before the system finally dims it, too late to save anyone’s narrative.
And in that fading light, with chants swelling outside Senate walls and the taste of fear still metallic on my tongue, I know the tribunal has lost the one thing it needed most to preserve itself.
Not control.
