Chapter 10
RHYX
Custody is a room that pretends to be neutral while it quietly teaches you what helplessness feels like in measured doses.
The walls are matte composite in a shade of gray that absorbs light without warmth, and the ceiling panel hums with filtered air that tastes faintly of antiseptic and recycled metal.
There is a narrow sleeping platform bolted into one corner, a sanitation unit sealed behind privacy shielding that offers dignity only in the most technical sense, and a terminal recessed into the wall whose interface is restricted enough to feel like an insult.
The binders are gone now—stored, catalogued, replaced by proximity dampeners embedded in the room itself—but my wrists still remember the vibration, the low insistence that every motion belonged to someone else.
I roll my shoulders once, slowly, and the old scars along my upper back tighten under the movement, silver ridges pulling against scales that never fully healed smooth.
The air is cool against them, and for an irrational moment I miss the heat of the bridge, the smell of hot circuitry and sweat and the faint burnt tang of weapons discharge, because at least those scents meant I was doing something.
Here, the only odor is cleanliness.
I sit at the recessed terminal and activate the interface with a biometric scan.
Pale light blooms across the screen, sterile and polite, offering me exactly what the tribunal has decided I am allowed to see.
My own reflection ghosts across the display, pale gold eyes and shadowed scales fractured by the projection’s glow, and I look like a statue in a museum exhibit labeled War Criminal.
“Alright,” I mutter, my voice sounding too loud in the small space. “Let’s do the math again.”
No one answers, because no one is meant to.
I pull up the decision matrix I have rebuilt in my head so many times it feels like a second skeleton, the sequence of variables that converged in orbit over Kirell and forced my hand.
I do not have my internal fleet logs; those were confiscated under “joint reconciliation” and never returned.
Instead I work from what remains available—public timeline fragments, my memory of sensor returns, tactical projections stored in my mind like embedded shrapnel, and the municipal telemetry Selene referenced before she locked herself behind procedure again.
I lay it out in layers: defense satellite coverage. Artillery arc stability. Civilian bay density. Medical capacity. Relay integrity.
I mark the intensification at 13:52, the first targeted strikes against relay nodes.
I mark my evacuation order at 13:57, the moment I authorized movement because the alternative was death by suffocation and bombardment inside the bay.
I mark the comm blackout at 14:00, the sudden silence that dropped across my screens like a curtain.
Then I mark what I did not know then, but know now.
14:01.
The corridor shift.
The twelve-minute seam that the prosecution treats like a rounding error.
“Run projections,” I tell the terminal, because speaking to machines keeps me from speaking to ghosts.
“Scenario A: corridor remains aligned with initial safe-zone vector. Scenario B: corridor shifts to C-23 alignment under protected convoy vector proximity. Apply known artillery arc probabilities.”
The terminal is too limited for full simulation, so I do the work in my own head, adjusting variables manually, using the same brutal internal math that kept fleets alive when there was no time for elegance.
Scenario A: initial vector holds. Artillery exposure probability drops by thirty-eight percent.
Defense satellite coverage remains viable for seven minutes longer.
Civilian traffic passes through the hazard envelope before the next barrage cycle rotates.
Casualty projections shrink, not to nothing—war never gives you nothing—but to something survivable, something that doesn’t become a monument.
Scenario B: vector shifts inward. Exposure spikes. Civilian traffic collides with artillery arcs and loses the shielded margin the original path was designed to maintain. Casualty projections bloom like infection.
I stare at the numbers and feel the old anger rise, slow and thick, not the quick hot anger of a battle-ready commander but the deep, nauseating fury of someone who has realized the wound was preventable.
I push back from the terminal, claws scraping faintly against the built-in desk surface, and inhale through four lungs until my chest expands with the effort. The air tastes sterile, and I hate it for that.
“I made the right call,” I say softly, as if the room might argue. “At 13:57, I made the right call.”
The silence offers no comfort.
I look down at my hands, flexing them slowly.
They are large, scaled, scarred, hands that have given orders that moved ships and killed people and saved others, hands that have been turned into proof of guilt by cameras that prefer simple stories.
Those hands signed surrender papers because I believed the lie I accepted would keep more people alive than the truth I could not prove.
I believed silence could be a tourniquet.
Silence was a burial.
There is a difference, and it is not academic.
I close my eyes and see the war room again, the ceasefire table, diplomats with carefully controlled expressions, Coalition hawks leaning close behind them like wolves, League representatives smiling in ways that never quite met their eyes.
I remember the shape of their fear: not fear of truth, but fear of what truth would cost them.
When I chose silence, I chose to preserve diplomatic balance.
I also chose to erase civilian accountability so thoroughly that the dead became a statistic and the living became a story.
Now, that story is accelerating toward sentencing because Selene filed a memo about a corrupted file, because she dared to name sabotage where institutions prefer to call it malfunction. The tribunal is rushing to close its fist before the evidence can slip through its fingers.
And Selene—young, furious, too disciplined to collapse—keeps digging anyway.
I have seen her only in glimpses since the broadcast, but those glimpses have been enough.
In the chamber, she stands at the projection console with her shoulders squared, her voice clipped, her eyes bright with contained rage, and she refuses to become what the Senate wants her to be.
Outside the chamber, in the audit logs and the procedural memos and the whispered rumors that filter even into custody, her name keeps appearing alongside words like concern and integrity and irregularity, while the Holonet keeps trying to nail her to a headline.
Emotionally compromised.
Biased.
Neutrality risk.
She receives the same kind of institutional pressure that once pressed on me, but she does not have a fleet behind her, and she does not have a Coalition advocate assigned to her protection. She has only her clearance badge, her discipline, and a grief the Senate wants to weaponize.
She is risking career and safety without institutional cover, and the tribunal is letting her do it because if she breaks, they can call it proof that she never belonged.
I run my claws along the edge of the terminal’s housing, feeling the minute vibrations of the device. It is warm from use, the only warmth in this room besides my body, and the sensation is strangely grounding.
“Dammit,” I whisper, because there is no other word for the moment when you realize your martyrdom has become someone else’s target.
Pellorin’s voice echoes in memory—You cannot carry all of this alone—and I realize I have been using that line as a justification to do exactly the opposite. I carried it alone because carrying it alone meant no one else had to bleed for it.
Except they already are bleeding for it.
Selene is.
And if I keep sitting in custody performing noble silence while she gets crushed under the tribunal’s accelerated machinery, then my original bargain becomes the worst kind of cowardice: not sacrifice, but convenience dressed in virtue.
I activate the terminal’s communication interface. It is limited, heavily monitored, and designed to discourage anything outside procedural necessity. The categories are polite, the options narrow, the language prim.
I search until I find the channel I need: diplomatic counsel relay—Coalition liaison office, restricted use.
A warning blooms across the screen:
All outgoing communications are subject to tribunal monitoring. Unauthorized disclosures may result in additional charges.
I stare at the warning and feel something inside me harden.
“Add it to the pile,” I mutter.
I open a message and begin composing, my claws moving carefully across the projected keys.
To: Coalition Liaison Office — Diplomatic Counsel Channel
From: Rhyx Varos — In Custody, League Tribunal
Subject: Authorization Request — Limited Release of Withheld Fleet Communication Fragments (Kirell Window 13:50–14:10)
My fingers pause.
This is the line. Once crossed, it cannot be uncrossed.
The Coalition has held fragments of fleet communications under classified seals, partly to protect operational methods, partly to preserve the ceasefire narrative, partly because everyone in power agrees that the safest truth is the one that stays buried.
Releasing anything will be interpreted as escalation.
But not releasing it will be interpreted as consent to the lie.
I keep typing.
Request: I formally authorize the Coalition to release limited, non-tactical fragments of fleet communication logs relevant to the Kirell evacuation corridor sequence, specifically relay integrity reports, blackout onset markers, and pre-blackout corridor vector confirmations.
These fragments are to be released to tribunal evidentiary review under secure transmission protocols.
I stop, then add the line that makes my stomach tighten.