Page 72 of Pocket Wife

My voice steadies as I speak.

“Helix says we performed our history last night. They are right about one thing. History is something a community performs every day. We performed it when we shared water during drought. When we buried people with their chosen names. When we sent children between settlements during flood season. When Celia’s grandmother hid a key in an ugly tile because she knew powerful people overlook what ordinary people love.”

Celia covers her mouth.

I don’t stop.

“Helix altered records because official silence helped them. But we were never silent. We were baking, planting, repairing, teaching, burying, trading, remembering. If that is not legal enough for them, then maybe the law has been listening to the wrong things.”

The chamber gives me no applause.

Good.

Applause would have made it smaller.

Adjudicator Salo watches me a long beat. “Submit resident continuity exhibits.”

Jessa sends them.

The display fills with records: birth ledgers, clinic logs, burial sketches, water exchange agreements, school rotations, harvest contracts, old songs transcribed and witnessed, Celia’s bakery accounts, Darin Om’s burial testimony, Maev Orlan’s coercion statement, Westline scans, First Hall entry footage.

The evidence no longer looks scattered.

It looks alive.

Advocate Sen waits until the last file loads.

Then she says, “Helix submits rebuttal exhibit twelve.”

Corvek’s image sharpens.

A document appears above the table. Old. Formal. Sealed.

I feel Rethan go still.

Sen’s voice cuts cleanly through the room. “A resident consent transfer, signed thirty-one years ago by a registered Hartwell guardian, authorizing commercial mineral review of Solaris Valley common lands.”

Samuel makes a sound behind me.

The signature enlarges.

Eleanor Hartwell.

For one moment, I can’t move.

Rethan’s voice enters the room before the silence can become surrender. “A single guardian signature would not satisfy the unanimous consent clause.”

“No,” Sen replies smoothly. “But it establishes resident knowledge of mineral review and directly contradicts the claim that Helix entered this matter through concealment.”

I stare at my mother’s name, and the whole hearing seems to move farther away.

One signature cannot give Helix the valley.

But it can wound the people trying to defend it.

And judging by Corvek’s calm smile, that is exactly what it was brought to do.

CHAPTER 28