“You,” he says, voice shaking just enough to be real. “You could’ve had everything.”
Kristi steps close. In her hand is the shard—a sliver of vengeance and proof, polished and humming with encrypted data. “No,” she says softly. “I could’ve helped you kill more quietly. That’s not the same thing.”
I tighten my grip on Dennis’s collar as he squirms. “Kristi…”
She looks at me, then nods.
I tilt his head. Expose the neural port just behind his right ear.
Dennis’s whole body tenses. “Don’t,” he hisses. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“On the contrary,” Kristi murmurs. “For once, I know exactly what I’m doing.”
She drives the shard into the slot with a sharp click.
His back arches, and for a heartbeat, the whole bay seems to hold its breath.
Then the scream hits.
It’s not human—not entirely. A raw, animal wail torn from somewhere too deep to name. His limbs seize, every muscle locking as the data override burns through his implant. All around us, the screens flash—every terminal, every holoprojector, even the security feeds.
One by one, they start to broadcast.
Footage. Audio. Transcripts.
Dennis authorizing “humane containment” in alien wards. Approving assassination orders. Pocketing bribes. Smiling during the Fratvoyan diplomat’s final moments. The nanovirus schematics. The Earth First recruitment blacklists. Every filthy thread in the tapestry he’s woven, unraveling in real-time.
Kristi stares at the screens. At the history she’s unmade.
Dennis collapses. Convulses once. Goes still.
She drops to her knees beside me, trembling.
“It’s done,” she says, voice barely more than breath.
Outside, the plaza is chaos. Not panic—something else. The crowd isn’t fleeing. They’re watching. Holopads lit. Projections dancing across tower walls. The truth is loose now. And it’s not coming back.
I wrap my arm around her, pulling her close. Her skin is cold and burning all at once.
“We have to go,” I say, even as I don’t want to move.
She doesn’t argue.
Because the war isn’t over. But the mask is off.
And the world just saw the monster beneath.
CHAPTER 29
KRISTI
The air in the hospital ward is too clean. Too still. It smells of antiseptic and plastic, a sterile hush that doesn’t match the storm ripping across the planet outside. The pale tubes, the soft whir of med-tech, the broken hum of my thoughts—all of it blends into a haze of victory and loss.
I’m sitting by Kenron’s bed, and he’s asleep—finally gone limp, his breathing even, the blaster graze at his side wrapped and dressed, machines beeping quietly near his head. He looks peaceful. He looks real. And a piece of me aches because the man behind that steel shell deserves more than a hospital cot and pain meds.
My chair is too small. My body still trembles from running through fire. I feel the weight of the shard in my belt, its presence heavy at my waist, a cold reminder of what we unleashed. I didn’t expect the truth to hit the world like a hammer. I only hoped.
But Novaria Prime felt it. The tremors started in the lower city—the protest shouts, the street broadcasts, alien communities pouring into digital squares in every language. The holonet exploded. Dennis Montana, arrested by planetary security, confronted his crimes live amid the flicker of monitors.Guards cuffed him in the loading bay, the evidence still streaming across every screen, still clicking in and out of the circuits by that shard we planted.
