"If Soo-jin manufactures a crisis, and you're not there to prevent it, the principal becomes a pawn in someone else's power play." His voice was hard, like a diamond. "Stay close. Be visible. Make it harder for them to isolate him."
"And if that's exactly what they want? Me close enough to blame?"
"Then you make damn sure nothing happens while you're watching."
The call ended.
I stood at the window, phone in hand, watching Portland's lights blur slightly through the glass.
Soo-jin wasn't an external threat. He was the system itself, deciding that the cost of Rune's autonomy was too much to absorb.
I sat in the chair by the window. Rune had already given up a relationship once to survive the machine. Accepted erasure. Lived with the cost of that choice for eighteen months.
Now, someone was positioning him to force him to make that choice again.
It was an elegant and vicious plan.
Soo-jin didn't need to threaten Rune directly. He only needed to prove that being near me put the group at risk.
My jaw tightened.
They removed me from my last position because someone decided I was a liability. They knew that when I trusted my instincts, it complicated their narrative.
When they forced me to take the blame and fired me, the firm hadn't called it punishment. They'd called it restructuring. It was a professional realignment. The carefully chosen language made erasure sound reasonable.
I knew exactly what that felt like, and I refused to be part of doing that to someone else.
It wasn't about wanting Rune, though I did, with an intensity that made claims of professional detachment akin to self-deception. It was about moral clarity.
Caring wouldn't make me reckless. It made neutrality impossible.
The system wanted operators who wouldn't ask questions. It needed participants who followed protocols even when the protocols failed the principal. It wanted operators who chose institutional stability over individual safety because that's what kept the machine running.
Rune looked at me in the park and said,I want to stop pretending that compliance equals safety.
He made his choice. Now I had to make mine.
I pulled out my laptop and opened an encrypted document. I created a timeline with pattern documentation. Everything I'd observed that didn't quite constitute evidence but added up to a pattern with a darker interpretation.
San Francisco: Credential breach. Photographer in unauthorized position. Soo-jin reframes.
Vancouver: Hotel room access. Lighting malfunction. Soo-jin suggests reduced protocols.
Portland: Management pressure. Kang's pending decision.
I documented it all. Timestamps. Observations. It was a painstaking deconstruction of every moment since I arrived in San Francisco.
I worked through a room-service dinner. When I finished, it was past midnight. I saved the file. Backed it up. Sent a copy to my personal encrypted storage.
Five days until the decision point. Five days for Soo-jin to engineer something that looked like my failure.
I couldn't prevent him from trying, but I could make sure that when it happened, I would be there. Watching. Ready.
Sleep wasn't happening. At 1:53 AM, I gave up.
I pulled out my laptop and opened the security system access Kang had granted me. Standard protocol for visiting specialists. It was read-only access to the hotel CCTV.
I expected routine overnight footage. Quiet corridors. Occasional staff movement. That's not what I found.
