“You alright?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “But I will be.”
He crouches next to me, eyes scanning mine like he’s still worried I might shatter.
“You didn’t have to do it that way.”
“Yeah, I did.”
His jaw ticks. “You laid yourself bare.”
“So did you. They just thought no one would care.”
He doesn’t respond right away.
Then, soft: “They were wrong.”
We spendthe next two days fielding requests. Everyone wants a statement. A follow-up. An exclusive.
I give none.
I let the files speak. I let the former Oversight agents who crawl out of their holes confirm the rest. One by one, they break ranks. Some out of guilt. Some out of spite. All of them terrified.
One memo becomes ten.
Ten becomes a hundred.
Then a thousand.
A goddamn flood.
Memos outlining the entire Reaper project lifecycle. Training manipulation tactics. Behavioral conditioning schedules. Even internal ethics objections buried so deep they never saw daylight—until now.
I walk into the Grill on day three and find Tur staring at a wall display, fists clenched. One of the whistleblowers is speaking—an older woman with shaking hands and sunken eyes.
“We were told they weren’t… whole,” she’s saying. “That they were constructs. That their emotional development was synthetic. We were told?—”
Tur slams the screen off.
I walk up behind him, touch his back gently.
He doesn’t flinch.
But he doesn’t speak either.
“I know,” I say softly.
“Do you?” he asks, voice low. “Because I still don’t.”
“They tried to turn you into a weapon.”
“Theydid.”
“Then you turned yourself into a man.”
He turns, eyes wet and furious. “You shouldn’t have had to burn for me.”
“I didn’t burn for you, Tur. I burned because that was the only way they’d see the smoke.”
