It’s been altered.
Which means…
She closes her eyes, loosing an exhale of pure, unadulterated fear. Because she realizes: people aren’t temporarily sedated.They are chemically occupied.
This is not threvenar.
This is occupation.
And someone designed it that way.
No one designs permanence by accident.
She looks at the powder. Not a sedative. Not a treatment.A claim.Something placed inside the body and taught never to leave. And if it cannot be removed…
Then memory itself no longer belongs to the person who lived it.
Her pulse pounds.
Engineered. Locked. Permanent.
Not a mistake.
A system.
Someone has turned memory into territory, and claimed it.
Her throat tightens.
This is not healing gone wrong.
This is rule.
This is power.
This is someone deciding what the world is allowed to remember.
Her hands steady.
Fine.
Then she will be the one who breaks it.
Because she could not save Tali.
She could not save Nalya.
But maybe she can still stop this from swallowing everyone else whole.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A promise kept can light the way
A promise worshipped makes a cage
Teddy Ashborne sits alonein the quiet that comes after strategy has run out.
His quarters are orderly in the way battlefields never are—everything placed with intent, nothing left to chance. Weapons maintained. Armor cleaned. Maps rolled and stacked along the far wall in precise alignment. A chair positioned beside the narrow window, angled for visibility of both the courtyard below and the corridor beyond his door.
