There’s a portable media rig waiting where the walk-in freezer used to be, still blinking red, hungry for content. I nod to the kid who set it up. He’s maybe fifteen, soot-smeared, wide-eyed, clutching a cracked datapad with both hands like it might run away.
“You good?” I ask.
He nods, voice cracking. “Live in five. Whole city’s watching.”
“Let ‘em.”
I step barefoot into the middle of what used to be the kitchen. There’s ash in my curls. In my mouth. In the cracks of my knuckles. I wipe blood off my palms—old, not mine—and stare straight into the lens.
“This place wasn’t stolen from me,” I say, low and clear. “It was weaponized. Like everything else. But I’m still here. And I’m not leaving.”
The kid flinches. The broadcast light goes solid green.
I keep talking.
“This was my mother’s floor. Right here. She used to do inventory barefoot while the grill popped grease two feet away. We survived on grit and garlic and ghost peppers. I watched her pour decades into this space just for someone to decide it made better leverage than legacy.”
I take a breath. My voice is steady. My bones are shaking.
“They turned our home into a pressure point. So I let it break.”
No applause. Just the hiss of static and the faint hum of machinery rebuilding itself behind the scenes.
I walk off-camera.
Behind me, something shifts.
Messages hit my comm within seconds—first a trickle, then a flood. Old kitchen staff asking if the pantry survived. Kids from District Four offering to shovel rubble in exchange for meals. Syndicate underlings leaking coordinates to abandoned caches. Civilians begging for routes out—or in.
The war isn’t over.
But the tide just turned.
Hours later, I’m back in the basement. The walls are slick with condensation again. Some kind of chemical bloom from all the detonations, maybe. It smells like scorched herbs and burnt-out memory drives. Mara’s leaned back against a beam, stim patch on her neck, rifle across her knees.
“You’re bleeding,” she says without looking up.
“Not my blood,” I mutter.
She squints. “That supposed to be comforting?”
“Only if you like my odds.”
She snorts, pushes up to sitting. “You know, I thought you were gonna cry.”
I blink. “What?”
“Earlier. With the camera. I thought you were gonna crack. Get all weepy. But nah. You went full revolutionary priestess.”
I shrug, crouching beside her. “Crying won’t rebuild Novaria.”
“No,” she says, “but it might’ve made people believe you’re still human.”
“People already believe in ghosts,” I reply. “They might as well believe in me.”
She passes me a canteen. The water’s warm and tastes faintly like copper and purification tablets, but I down half of it anyway.
“Tur check in?” she asks.
