“I know,” she whispers into my hair. “I know.”
The files keep scrolling.
The truth keeps spilling.
And the Alliance just lost control of the monster they thought they owned.
CHAPTER 37
KIMBERLY
Idon’t sleep.
Not after what I saw. Not after what they tried to do to him. My eyes are swollen, burning, the skin beneath them dark like bruises blooming across old wounds. I don’t hide them. Let them see it. Let the whole godsdamn galaxy know what grief looks like when it hasn’t had time to rot into silence.
We go live at 07:00 local.
No makeup. No lighting crew. Just me and a mic and the truth sitting heavy in my chest like an old knife I finally learned how to twist the right direction.
The files are queued behind me, hovering in projection like silent witnesses—memos stamped with OFFICIAL USE ONLY, strings of genome code annotated by clinical hands, case notes from psychologists who never met the man they dissected. I start reading. No flair. No righteous fury. Just facts. Let them choke on the quiet violence of it.
“Subject T-UR-019 was designed to exhibit emotional volatility under attachment strain,” I read aloud. “Failure to destabilize within predicted timeframe resulted in contingency escalation. Subject assigned to Surveillance Zone Gamma-Four under false integration parameters.”
I pause. Look directly into the lens.
“And I was listed as acceptable collateral.”
I don’t cry. Not on air. That part’s done. My throat burns, sure, but I swallow it like ash. Rage is steadier than grief. More useful. More dangerous.
Next file.
“Subject exhibits atypical resistance to emotional triggers despite engineered design. Recommended observation extension with adjusted environmental stressors.”
They wanted to break him. With me as the lever.
I read every word.
I explain every phrase in plain language—translating bureaucratic cruelty into truths that land like body blows. I trace the threads from genetic manipulation to psychological pressure to the surveillance protocols that followed us like ghosts.
I narrate it like a war story.
Because it was.
The outcry starts before I finish the third document.
Comments flood the live feed. Journalists latch on. Hackers scrape the data. Families of other Reaper variants start posting their own fragments—snippets of withheld medical records, odd disappearances, unexplained behavioral conditioning. It doesn’t take long before core-world media outlets pick it up.
By noon, dockworker unions have declared a global strike.
By sundown, protests erupt in three major urban zones.
And the Alliance?
They stay silent.
That silence is louder than denial.
Later,I sit in the back hallway of the Grill, legs stretched out, back against the wall, datapad in hand. My voice is raw fromhours of speaking, my fingers numb from the pace of it all. Tur walks in, slow and wary.
