KELSEA
The moment my fingers hit the keys, the room shifts. Like the walls know what we’re doing. Like the floor itself might rat us out.
Ceera’s system is a cobbled mess of parts from at least three decades, all buzzing like hornets drunk on battery acid. The terminal’s screen flickers with every pulse of the rig’s overheating coil. My mouth’s dry. My heart hammers like a stim spike gone sideways. I glance up and catch Roja watching me—his eyes burning red, calm like a storm’s eye.
“You got this?” Ceera asks around a half-smoked stim. She’s lounging like it’s nothing, but I see the tightness in her jaw, the way she taps her thigh too fast.
“No. But I’m doing it anyway.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel.
The files are ready. Thousands of lines of data—transaction logs, falsified records, forged identity backdoors, communication threads laced with Coalition clearance codes. Evidence of the bribe, the cover-up, the cleric’s Alliance whispers. My name, tied to it all like a noose.
I drag the packet into the broadcast queue. “We sure it hits everything?”
Ceera leans over my shoulder, taps a line of code. “Darknet nodes, embassy slush lines, even some dead AI archives that auto-dump into local feeds. This hits clean, dirty, and everything in between.”
Roja shifts behind me. “Do it.”
I pressSEND.
The screen stalls—one frozen breath—and then lights erupt like fireworks across a void. Node after node unlocks. Transmission pathways light up. One feed, then ten, then fifty, then two hundred. My heart lurches.
Ceera lets out a slow whistle. “And boom goes the truth.”
Onscreen, info scrolls faster than I can track. Bribery trails tying the Coalition cleric to a hidden Alliance account. Message fragments showing my name flagged for ‘removal.’ Secret tribunal logs that never should’ve been recorded. Ceera’s rig pings with mirror uploads from other terminals. People are already sharing it.
Roja comes up beside me, arms crossed, gaze locked on the cascade of data. “It’s done.”
I laugh—a raw, broken thing. “No. It’s just started.”
Ceera jerks her head toward her compad, which is vibrating like it’s gonna shake off the table. “Shit. That’s the node echo. We’re trending across twelve major sectors already. Somebody’s already slicing it into digestible soundbites. Look.”
She flips the screen—there it is. A holo of the Coalition cleric, frozen mid-smile, while text scrolls below him:‘Jark Cleric Tied to Alliance Black Fund’.
I’m shaking. Every part of me is heat and adrenaline and cold, raw fear. “It’s working.”
Roja grunts. “It’ll make them desperate.”
“Let them come,” I snap. “They’ve already tried to destroy me once.”
I turn to Ceera. “Do we have eyes outside?”
She hits another key. A grainy security feed pops up. Outside, the front alley’s full—reporters, protestors, two Coalition guards standing there like their boots are glued to the concrete. They’re frozen, reading something on their units. A drone buzzes overhead.
“Looks like the world just woke up,” Ceera says.
I can’t feel my legs. I sit, hard, on the edge of the rig’s crate bench. My hands curl into fists in my lap. “I thought I’d be more scared.”
Roja places a hand on my shoulder. Heavy. Warm. Anchoring. “You did the right thing.”
I blink up at him. “Even if it gets me killed?”
He leans in, low voice rumbling near my ear. “Not on my watch.”
My throat tightens. I nod, once. He means it. Gods help anyone who tries me now.
Ceera throws up her hands. “Alright, lovebirds, before this turns into a touching death pact, we need to prep for backlash. You lit up half the sector. That means friends and enemies.”
“What do we do?” I ask, already pushing down panic.
