Chapter Ten The Signature Line
Chapter Ten: The Signature Line
The floor is cold through the thin soles of my prison shoes.
I know this because my feet are dragging across it, each scrape a small reminder that I am still, technically, alive. The guards on either side of me aren't walking fast.
There's no need. I'm not going anywhere under my own power tonight.
The fever broke some point around midnight and then came back worse. I can feel my pulse in my temples, thick and insistent.
The old injury from the crash has been quietly poisoning the new wounds from these days, and the combination is doing something interesting to the edges of my vision.
I let my head fall forward. My shoe catches a seam in the stone and drags.
What is it tonight?
The thought moves through the heat in my skull like smoke.
I already told them everything on day one. I didn't leave anything worth asking about.
The room they bring me to is wrong.
The interrogation rooms I've seen over the past two days are all the same — low ceilings, drain channels in the floor, a smell like iron and old damp.
This room has overhead lights. Bright ones. There's a table with a chair on one side and nothing on the other, and the chair they shove me into has a high back, like something from a council chamber.
Like this is supposed to feel official.
A file lands on the table in front of me. Thick. Bound with a red cord already untied, like someone has read it recently. I force my eyes open wide enough to focus on the top page.
It takes me three passes to understand what I'm reading.
The document is a confession. The name isn't on it yet. There's a blank line at the bottom, waiting. But Lilian's name is on every other page.
Position titles I didn't know she held. Project codes I never found. Access levels in my father's lab that would have required years of trust-building, years of deliberate, chosen involvement.
My people spent eight months trying to map that operation. They never got this deep.
She wasn't just aware of it. The thought settles without drama, the way a stone settles to the bottom of still water. She was running part of it.
I look at the signature line.
I look back at the top of the document, where Lilian's name is printed in clean block letters next to a title that carries a mandatory banishment sentence on its own, before you even reach the rest of the charges.
The best outcome, if I sign this, is exile. Permanent. No appeal.
My mouth pulls to one side. There's something almost funny about it.
I think about my mother for exactly one moment. Her face, the morning I left, the particular way she holds her teacup in both hands even when it's not hot.
Nessa will be there. Nessa is sharper than all of them combined, and she knows enough now to keep Mother out of whatever comes next.
I look at the document.
If I sign, there is a chance. Small, maybe, but a chance. If I don't, there will be more sessions in that room, and I already know my body's answer to that. I won't last another week.
This is not a difficult calculation.
I reach for the pen.
My hand is shaking from the fever, not the fear, and the pen rolls slightly before my fingers close around it. I get the cap off. I position the tip above the signature line.
The pen is cheap. The kind that skips on the first stroke.
"Raise your head."
The voice comes from the far end of the room, from the high-backed chair at the head of the table.
I don't raise my head. Not yet. My grip on the pen tightens, and I stay very still, because I know that voice.
I know it the way you know a scar. Not by looking at it, but by the way the skin feels different there, years later, when the weather changes.
The man standing up from the chair is tall. He always was.
He moves the same way he always did, unhurried and certain, like the room is already accounted for before he steps into it.
The uniform is new — the deep grey of a Chief Adjudicator, silver rank markings at the collar — but the way he wears it isn't. Like the authority was already his and the clothes are just catching up.
Cassian.
The pen slides out of my fingers.
It hits the table with a sound so small it shouldn't register. I hear it anyway.
He crosses the room without looking at the guards. They go still the way prey animals go still, that instinctive, full-body freeze.
He stops in front of me, and the overhead light hits the angle of his jaw, and I think, with the detached clarity that high fever sometimes produces: of course. Of course it's him.
He looks at me for a long moment.
At my face, at the prison shirt soaked through with sweat, at my hands where they're resting flat on the table, knuckles torn and badly scabbed.
Then he bends down.
His gloved hand moves to my face. The leather is cool. He gathers the hair stuck to my cheek and tucks it back behind my ear, slowly, with the kind of careful attention you'd give something breakable.
"I always said your taste in men was terrible." His voice is low, right at my ear, the words unhurried and precise. "This is who you chose? This is the man who put you here?"
I keep my eyes on the wall behind him. My lips stay closed. The fever is making the lights pulse, and I focus on that instead, on the slow bright throb of the overhead fixture, and I don't give him a single word.
He stays bent at my level for one more breath.
"If I had known it was you." His voice comes out low, almost too low. "I would have come sooner. I would have come the first day."
Then he closes his eyes. When he opens them, something in his face has gone flat and still, the way water goes still right before it freezes over.
He straightens. His gaze goes to the guards on my left, then my right, without lingering on either of them. Two men who suddenly look like they'd rather be anywhere else on earth.
"Take her to the water dungeon." His voice has no edge in it now. That's worse. "I'll interrogate her personally. Alone."
The guards move. My chair scrapes back.
I don't look at him again. But as they get me upright, I catch the red-corded file still open on the table, the blank signature line still waiting, and the pen lying exactly where I dropped it.
He stopped me before the pen touched the paper.
Maybe he needs me worse than this before I sign the name.