The room smells like polished metal and controlled narratives.
It’s too clean, too deliberate, the air filtered until it loses any trace of the world outside, and the lighting is bright in a way that exposes everything without warmth. The chamber stretches wide in front of me, tiered seating filled with IHC leadership, uniforms crisp, expressions tighter than they want to admit, and every set of eyes in the room locks onto me like I’m the problem they’re here to solve.
“Lieutenant Jolie Racine,” one of them says, his voice amplified just enough to carry authority without raising it. “You’ve made quite an entrance.”
“Yeah,” I reply, stepping forward into the center of the floor. “I’ve been told I do that.”
Hrask stands off to the side, not behind me, not in front, just there, close enough that I can feel the weight of him in the room without needing to look. The presence steadies something in me that I don’t acknowledge out loud.
“You were declared deceased,” another voice cuts in, sharper, colder. “Your reappearance raises significant concerns.”
“Good,” I say. “It should.”
A murmur ripples through the chamber, quickly suppressed.
“You’ve submitted evidence,” the first voice continues. “Highly irregular evidence.”
“I’d call it accurate,” I reply.
“Accuracy is not the issue,” he says. “Verification is.”
I let out a short breath, something close to a humorless laugh.
“You’ve had the data for six minutes,” I say. “If you haven’t verified it yet, that’s not my problem.”
His expression tightens slightly.
“Watch your tone,” he says.
“Or what?” I ask, tilting my head. “You’ll reassign me? Discredit me? Try to disappear me again?”
That lands.
Not loudly.
But enough.
“We are not your enemy,” another council member says, her voice measured.
“No,” I reply. “You’re worse if you ignore this.”
I reach into my jacket and pull the device free, holding it up just enough for them to see.
“You want verification?” I say. “Play it again.”
The recording projects into the center of the room, Driscoll’s voice cutting clean through the silence, controlled, precise, and then?—
The shot.
Dadams dropping.
The confession embedded in the context around it.
The room doesn’t move.
But it changes.
Subtly.
