Page 78 of Guarded By The Alpha

Gideon sat at the evidence table with the records spread in front of him, his posture the composed readiness of a man who'd spent three years building toward this moment.

The lawyer opened with precision.

"The case put before this board rests mainly on a civilian witness's memory," he said, his voice carrying the measured cadence of someone who'd done this before. "That is not a documented source, and it requires independent backing before this board can rely on it."

I kept my hands flat on the table. Catalogued his rhythm. His pacing. The way he built an argument.

"Further," he went on, "the footage was gathered under disputed conditions. Its handling can't be confirmed without independent review."

He paused. Let the challenge land.

"And finally, the blood markers in the medical records need formal analysis before this board can treat them as evidence at all."

Standard challenges. Practiced, not invented. The same structure Gideon had warned me about—the framework this man had used to stall three earlier submissions.

I waited until he finished.

Then I opened with the footage from Drake's site.

"3:47 a.m., east corridor," I said, pulling up the first image. "This is roughly fourteen hours after they brought me in. Note the guard in the upper right—he passes this spot every forty-seven minutes, not the sixty the Council's own records claim is standard."

I moved through the footage with the same precision I bring to a scene. Time. Place. Cross-reference to Gideon's archive. The sequence that established where each piece came from before the lawyer could challenge it.

His expression didn't change, but I caught the slight tension in his jaw.

I shifted to what I'd seen during the six hours they held me.

"While they had me, I watched the following," I said. "The way the guards deferred to each other showed a three-tier order that doesn't match the Council's official chart. The supply deliveries pointed to outside support from at least two other sites. And the wards—" I paused, let it land "—had been changed within the last eighteen months, lining up exactly with the timeline of the program in the evidence before you."

I wasn't narrating. I was building a structure. The weight and order of the details doing the work that argument couldn't do as cleanly.

The lawyer challenged three pieces.

The first: whether my memory could be trusted given how heavily warded the site was.

I'd prepared for that.

"Exhibit 14-B includes the defector's testimony, formally witnessed and recorded in a form this board accepts," I said, keeping my voice even. "It backs up what I'm describing, and it was given before I ever left the facility."

I didn't produce it with triumph. I produced it with the flat competence of someone who'd seen the challenge coming and was ready.

His second challenge: how the footage had been handled.

I left the technical confirmation to Gideon, then matched two specific entries against my own crime scene photographs from the original warehouse.

"These were taken before I had any contact with the Pack Guard Agency," I said. "They predate the bond entirely, and they establish a baseline that confirms the same pattern I've been laying out all through this testimony."

He paused. I could see him recalculating.

His third challenge: that the blood markers proved my own inheritance, not any program.

I paused before answering. Not from doubt. From choosing the order of what came next.

"The markers aren't offered as proof of what I am," I said carefully. "They're offered as proof of what the Council has been doing—finding bloodlines and suppressing them, by a method. That's a different claim, with a different bar."

I pulled up Tara's records.

"The analysis shows the suppression markers in my blood match the same signature found in seven other documented cases the Council managed. The question before this board isn't what I am. It's what they've done."