Chapter 19
KRISTI
Kenron is still asleep on the couch, boots off, one arm flung over his eyes like it’s the only thing holding his skull together. He didn’t sleep much. I’m not sure I did either. Not really.
I’m at the counter, compad in hand, fingers trembling over the contact field. My tea’s gone cold. Has been for an hour. I’m staring at her name on the screen like it might bite me.
Margo Delane.
Senior Archivist. Historian. My mentor. My friend.
She taught me how to read between the footnotes.
How to question records, not just record them.
Margo never took sides—not publicly, anyway.
She’s the kind of woman who believes that history doesn’t care about bias, just truth.
It’s part of why I loved her. Part of why I’m scared shitless to call her.
Because if I’m wrong—if she shuts this down—then I’ve already burned the only bridge left between me and the systems that might stop Dennis.
I take a breath. Tap the contact key.
The line buzzes. Once. Twice. Static hums. Then her voice, low and dry like paper turned to ash.
“Kristi?”
I close my eyes. That sound. It drags me back to the archive’s cool, dust-scented silence, to long hours hunched over glowing slates, Margo’s quiet corrections in the background like a second heartbeat.
“Hey,” I say, voice rough. “You got a minute?”
“For you? Always.”
That hurts. She doesn’t know what I’ve done yet.
“I need to show you something,” I say. “And it can’t wait.”
There’s a pause. Then the soft rustle of her turning in her chair, likely shooing someone away. “Is this… archive business?”
“No,” I say. “It’s life or death.”
She doesn’t ask more. Doesn’t stall. A moment later, my screen flickers, and her face appears. Margo looks the same—silver coils piled on top of her head like a crown, deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, dark skin lit by the soft glow of interface light.
Her expression shifts the second she sees mine.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
I upload the first file. The requisition logs. The false timestamps. The cargo manifests for the nanovirus shipment buried inside festival imports.
Margo reads fast. Faster than I remember. Her eyes narrow. Her lips press into a line so tight it could slice metal. When she speaks again, her voice is quiet. Controlled.
“Where did you get this?”
“My uncle’s secondary server,” I say. “Encrypted but… not well enough.”
Her brow furrows. “Dennis?”
I nod.
Her gaze lifts from the screen and meets mine. “You know what this is, Kristi.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“This is genocide.”
The word sits between us like a knife.
She doesn’t need me to explain. Doesn’t need a follow-up. She dives back into the files—batch labels, chemical strain descriptors, flagged molecular signatures. She sees it. All of it. The elegance of the virus. The horror in its design.
“You’ve only shown me the logistics,” she says finally. “Do you have origin metadata? Manufacturing sources?”
I swipe another packet into the transfer field. “Three labs. Two offworld. One underground here in Novaria Prime.”
Margo exhales through her nose. “The underground one—it’s hidden inside a compounding facility under the Old District, isn’t it?”
My stomach flips. “You knew?”
“I suspected. That area’s been flagged in blacksite rumors for a decade.”
She leans forward, fingers flying across her pad, calling up overlays and secure reference pings. I wait while she works, nerves sizzling under my skin.
Then she looks up again.
“I can’t go through official channels, Kristi. You know that.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“What are you asking me?”
I hesitate.
“I need a secure whistleblower line. One that leads somewhere that can actually use this. Somewhere that still gives a damn.”
Her face darkens. She glances around her study, then speaks quieter.
“There’s a node buried in the Citadel grid. Not official. But real. It belongs to an old colleague of mine—former senator turned mole. She runs a whisper network. Pro-integration. Old guard. They still believe in diplomacy over war. But they don’t mind lighting fires if they have to.”
She types for a long moment. Then an address appears in my queue.
I recognize the domain. But only barely. It’s old. Civilian-sector archive, disguised as a religious records vault. No traffic in years.
“Once you upload this,” Margo says softly, “you’ll be marked. There’s no ‘go back to normal’ after this. Dennis won’t just lose his reputation. He’ll come for you. Personally.”
I nod. “I know.”
“You could run. Disappear. Let someone else handle it.”
I glance toward the couch. Kenron’s still asleep, but his arm’s twitching now. Probably dreaming about trenches again.
“No,” I say. “I can’t.”
Margo studies me for a long beat. Then her face softens.
“I’m proud of you,” she whispers. “You’re doing what historians are supposed to do. You’re preserving truth.”
I blink hard. That hits deeper than it should.
I turn back to the screen. Tap the file stack. My finger hovers over the upload key.
For a second—just a second—I freeze. Because once I do this, everything changes. I won’t be Kristi Montana, the archivist. I won’t be Dennis’s niece. I won’t even be human first anymore.
I’ll be a traitor. A target.
But I’ll also be free.
I press send.
The screen flickers. The files vanish into the secure conduit. A progress bar ticks upward. One percent. Fifteen. Fifty-seven. Ninety-nine.
Upload complete.
There’s no confetti. No dramatic music. Just a line of text that reads:
Thank you for your truth.
I sit back. Exhale. The compad hums in my lap, warm from the transfer. My hands shake.
Margo’s still there, silent.
“I don’t know what happens now,” I say.
“Neither do I,” she replies. “But I do know you’re not alone.”
I nod. My throat’s tight. “Thank you.”
“Be safe.”
The call ends.
I sit in the quiet for a long time, the sound of Kenron’s soft, rhythmic breathing grounding me.
Then I stand, walk over, and kneel beside him.
He stirs, eyes cracking open, drowsy but alert.
“It’s done,” I whisper.
He blinks. “You sent it?”
I nod.
He sits up slowly, rubbing a hand over his face. “Then we move.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We burn the system down.”
We don’t have to wait long for results. I barely make it halfway through my caf before the net detonates.
The holoscreen flashes to life with a screech of overlapping alerts—newsfeeds scrambling to keep pace with the leak, anchor avatars glitching under the weight of fresh uploads. First it's just chatter. Then it turns to smoke.
“Unconfirmed reports of chemical payload manifests discovered in Novaria’s diplomatic trade stream—”
“...grainy surveillance footage allegedly showing a member of the Montana family—”
“—images retrieved from a catering manifest filed under alias ‘Ken Lorran,’ linked to known ex-military combat chef Kenron—”
And then I see it.
My own damn face, blown up across a dozen screens.
Hair pulled back tight, eyes fierce and focused, flanked by Kenron in full war leathers, his jaw set like he’s already walking into battle.
I remember that moment. The alley behind Tarell’s supply outpost. We were just talking, but the image—the image looks like revolution.
“Kristi Montana, niece of Novaria’s own Dennis Montana, seen here possibly consorting with known insurgents—”
Consorting. Like I’m a mistress, not a soldier.
The spin’s faster than I expected. Cleaner, too. They had this ready. Probably for months. Just waiting for me to slip.
I pace. The floorboards creak under my boots. I haven’t changed out of yesterday’s clothes. I can’t. My skin feels stretched too tight, nerves like live wires sparking beneath it. I half-expect the door to explode inward any second.
Instead, my compad chirps.
A private frequency.
I don’t recognize the code. But I recognize the rhythm. The sharp stutter of a security trace trying to stabilize a secure visual connection.
Only one person still calls me on that cadence.
I answer.
Dennis appears.
Of course he does.
His face is a masterclass in synthetic calm—one of those perfectly symmetrical visages that was always better suited to campaign posters than family photos. His silvered hair’s slicked back, not a strand out of place. His suit is flawless. His voice, when it comes, is warm.
Like syrup on a scalpel.
“Kristi,” he says, tilting his head. “You’ve caused quite a stir.”
I don’t respond.
He smiles. “You’ve made yourself a symbol.”
I clench my jaw. My pulse ticks in my throat, loud enough to drown out logic.
He continues. “Symbols, my dear, tend to burn fast.”
My mouth’s dry. My palms, slick. But I speak.
“Then let me burn.”
His face twitches. Just a flicker. Like a mask slipping, then snapping back into place.
“You think this will change anything?” he asks. “You think the truth matters?”
“It matters enough to scare you.”
He leans forward, voice lowering. “What you’ve done—it’s reckless. Childish. You’ve aligned yourself with insurgents. With aliens. With dangerous ideologues who will tear this quadrant apart given the chance.”
“Better torn than poisoned quietly.”
“There will be consequences.”
“There already were.”
He’s silent a beat too long.
Then he says, almost gently, “I tried to protect you.”
“No,” I whisper. “You tried to own me. There’s a difference.”
He sighs. The weary, world-on-my-shoulders sigh of a man too used to getting away with everything.
“Goodbye, Kristi,” he says, and kills the call.
The screen goes black.
I stare at my reflection in the holoscreen.
I don’t recognize the woman looking back.
She’s bruised, shadow-eyed, hair tangled, mouth a grim slash across a too-pale face.
She looks exactly like what she is.
Someone with nothing left to lose.
The sky’s gone violet-gray outside. Kenron’s gone—left an hour ago to meet with Tarell and a few ex-squadmates who still owe him favors. Said he’d be back before midnight.
He better be.
Because the next ping on my pad isn’t from a secure line.
It’s a wide-open comm drop. Unencrypted. Obvious.
Too obvious.
Still, I open it.
No message. Just a single line of text.
“Your apartment has been marked.”
I stare at it. I read it twice. Three times.
Then I delete it.
Not because I don’t believe it.
But because I do.
I don’t go back.
I don’t even think about going back.
Everything I am—all the evidence, the contacts, the plan—it’s all in here now, in this tiny safehouse of Kenron’s, stitched together from scraps and whispers.
The apartment? That place was never home.
Home was a lie I told myself so I could keep pretending I belonged in his world.
Not anymore.
I shove the datapad into my satchel, run a hand through my tangled hair, and grab the field pistol Kenron stashed under the sink.
When he gets back, he’ll ask what I’m doing with it.
And I’ll tell him the truth.
I’m ready.