31. Kalev
KALEV
The room they bring me to isn’t a cell.
It’s worse.
Neutral gray walls, smooth as skin stretched over bone.
No windows. No visible cameras, but the static buzz in my skull tells me there are eyes—somewhere.
The table in the middle is surgical-steel slick, bolted to the floor.
One chair on each side. Two glasses of water, untouched.
A pitcher beaded with condensation, like they want me to think I’m safe enough to drink it.
It’s the kind of room where people confess things they didn’t even know they were hiding.
I stay standing.
The door hisses behind me. Footsteps. Measured. Confident.
General Dowron enters, wearing that flawless Alliance-pressed uniform, the one that always makes me think of glass—shiny, hard, and impossible to hold without bleeding. His rank glints like teeth. He carries no weapon. He doesn’t need one.
His eyes do all the killing.
“Kalev,” he says like he’s greeting an old friend who never betrayed him. “Glad to see you on your feet.”
I don’t respond.
Dowron walks past me, takes his seat slowly. He doesn’t gesture for me to do the same.
That’s another test.
I sit anyway. Not because he told me. But because I didn’t flinch.
“Let’s not pretend we’re here for small talk,” I say.
He smiles, thin and sharp. “Good. I don’t enjoy wasting time.”
He taps a panel beneath the table. A quiet ping sounds, and a screen illuminates between us, invisible from outside the room.
On it: my file. The long one.
Battle records, prisoner logs, psych evaluations. There’s footage too—grainy black-and-whites of raids, of me dragging comrades out of burning compounds, of me covered in soot and blood and not flinching when someone screamed my name.
Dowron watches my reaction.
I give him nothing.
“You’ve endured,” he says, almost admiring. “No one expected you to come back whole.”
“I didn’t.”
He chuckles, just barely. “Well, you’re functional. That’s enough.”
He leans forward, steepling his fingers.
“The world changed while you were buried, Kalev. And not just politically. Strategically. The war’s been rebranded. Sold as a necessary but tragic chapter. The Alliance is cleaning house.”
I glance at the footage flickering beside us. “You mean erasing the evidence.”
“If you like,” he says lightly. “But we prefer ‘restructuring operational risk.’ It sounds nicer.”
I hate how calm he is. How clean.
Dowron never dirtied his hands. He just pulled the strings that moved the knives.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“Closure.”
That word again. Everyone’s so damn obsessed with it. Like it’s a currency they can trade for peace.
He swipes the screen. Another image appears.
Leah.
Not a mugshot. A surveillance capture—her tucking Clancy into bed, light spilling across her shoulder, hair pulled back. She looks older. Tired.
Alive.
I keep my face blank.
Dowron watches.
“She’s a variable,” he says, voice measured. “Untethered. No oversight. And with her background...”
He doesn’t need to say it.
“And what?” I ask flatly.
He sighs, like this is all so tedious. “She’s a liability. A risk. And with your... unique relationship, you’re the most logical containment solution.”
My hand tightens on my thigh. “Containment.”
“Permanent. Silent. Surgical.”
My breath stays steady. My heartbeat doesn’t stutter. But something inside me sharpens like a blade against whetstone.
“She’s not active,” I say, voice like ash. “She’s not hurting anyone.”
“Yet. And we can’t wait for yet, Kalev. Not in this climate.”
Dowron reaches for the water pitcher, pours himself a glass. He doesn’t drink it.
“You’ve done what most can’t. You survived isolation. Psychological pressure. Unbroken. That tells me two things.”
He leans in.
“One—you can still follow orders.”
“And two?”
“You understand sacrifice.”
There it is.
The final push.
He thinks I’ll nod. That I’ll say, “Yes, sir,” and become their sword again.
Instead, I look at him for a long moment.
“Operational autonomy,” I say.
He blinks.
“If you want it done right, I need space. No comms. No surveillance. No confirmation pings. She knows the grid. She’ll sense a tail. You want this clean, it has to be me, and it has to be quiet.”
Dowron studies me like I’m a maze he’s already solved.
Finally, he nods. “Granted.”
He reaches into a folder beside him, slides me a hard data crystal.
“This has her last known trajectory. Glimner. Civilian alias intact. Probably thinks she’s safe.”
I take the crystal. My fingers don’t shake.
He watches me pocket it.
“Don’t get sentimental, Kalev. She was always expendable.”
I stand.
So does he.
He offers his hand again.
I take it.
Firm. Steady. Professional.
Then I walk out of that room like a soldier carrying death.
Only this time?
I’m not carrying it for them.
They give me a pretty decent shuttle for the trip, at least. Civilian transponder, of course, but the superluminal drive is decent.
Inside, there’s just the smell of ozone. The jump ship is silent. I program the route myself—non-registry, untagged, borrowed from one of the Alliance’s many “black sites” that don’t technically exist.
I stare at the coordinates for Glimner a long time before I engage the drive.
She doesn’t know I’m coming.
She doesn’t know what they’ve turned me into.
Or maybe...
She always knew I was never really free.
Until now.
They think they sent me to end her.
But I’m going to end them.
And I’ll start with whoever so much as thinks about touching her.