Page 199 of Reaper Said Mine

“You’re wrong.”

Dawson scoffs.

“Am I?”

“Yes,” I say. “Because some people did change. Some people saw it and stopped pretending collateral damage was just another line item. Some people joined relief corps, filed lawsuits, leaked military logs, quit campaigns, raised hell, and refused to let generals narrate dead children into acceptable losses. You wouldn’t know that because change doesn’t always show up in your viewer retention metrics.”

His expression tightens.

I step back toward the door.

“You can suspend me from live filing, Dawson. You can lock me out of network channels. You can threaten me with every lawyer you keep fed on fear and bad caf. But the evidence is mine in every way that matters, and I am going to put it in front of people who still remember what journalism is for.”

Bellamy grabs my smaller case before I can reach for it.

Dawson points at us.

“If you walk out with those files, you are done here.”

I look around his office one last time, at the screens, the headlines, the clean furniture, the machinery of a network that knows how to make truth profitable but not how to love it.

“Finally,” I say. “A decent offer.”

Then I walk out.

CHAPTER 26

GNASH

The war map fills the command center with red light until every face around me looks carved from blood.

Guyver Station’s armored spine trembles beneath my feet as another patrol wing launches from the outer ring, and the vibration rolls through the deck plates with the deep, familiar anger of machinery pushed beyond sense. Around the tactical pit, my officers speak in clipped voices while data streams crawl across suspended holo-displays, each report another bruise spreading across the territory I claimed and swore to hold.

The Badlands burn in fractured color. Violet nebula clouds twist around fields of broken rock and old wreckage, beautiful enough to shame poets and deadly enough to make liars of them. Somewhere inside that beauty, Combine ships advance behind hired guns, false transponders, deniable mercenaries, and the sort of corporate courage that arrives only after someone else has been paid to die first.

A casualty list rotates beside my left hand.

I have stopped asking officers to read the names aloud.

I read them myself.

Kharrek fuel tender, twelve dead. Ash-Maw picket, one critical now confirmed dead. Salvage Hold Veyr, six missing after decompression. Refugee escort Hallow-Black, three pilots lost delaying a mine sweep. Outer hydro station Brindlehook, seventeen workers injured, four children dead when a guidance system failed during evacuation.

Children.

My claws curl against the table, and metal gives beneath them with a soft, ugly whine.

No one looks at my hand.

Skahar stands beside me with both palms resting on the head of his cane. Age has not softened him. It has concentrated him. The old Reaper watches the map with one cloudy eye and one whirring implant, his expression hard enough to make younger warriors stand straighter by instinct.

“Read the next one,” he says.

I turn my head slightly. “You have become fond of pain?”

“I have become fond of truth. Pain is merely its loudest messenger.”

Krell stands at the lower tier, his young face drawn tight by exhaustion and the effort of pretending not to be exhausted. “Report from Harrow-Third,” he says. “Combine-aligned cutters crossed the Grey Teeth boundary under private salvage registry and opened fire on two Reaper cargo haulers. Harrow-Third intercepted. The cutters withdrew after Coalition fighter support arrived.”