"Wait," I grabbed his arm. My grip was weak. "Look at her."
Rowan hadn't moved.
She was staring at the blank screen where her digital doppelganger had just confessed to a biological fraud. Her face was unreadable. She didn't look shocked. She didn't look devastated.
She looked... disappointed.
Slowly, deliberately, Rowan opened her folder.
She didn't look at King. She looked at the camera. The red light. The unblinking eye broadcasting this moment to millions of people who were currently deciding if she was a hero or a fraud.
She picked up a document. It wasn't the Anchor Protocol. It was a thick, bound file with a government seal.
"That video," Rowan said. Her voice didn't tremble. It was colder than the air conditioning. "Is a remarkable piece ofengineering. The voice synthesis is nearly perfect. They even got the asymmetry of my left eyebrow correct."
She tabled the document.
"This is my original designation certificate," she said. "Registered in Surrey. Designation: Beta."
She tabled a second document.
"This is a biometric verification, timestamped, Geneva Standard compliant, certified by a third-party medical examiner. Designation: Beta."
The audience murmured. King shifted in his seat, his smile faltering.
"And this," Rowan said, pulling out a sheaf of papers covered in complex code strings, the data Juno had intercepted, the receipts Stephen had compiled. "Is the forensic analysis of that video file."
She slid it across the desk. It hit King’s water glass with atink.
"My team intercepted the render packet fromMeridian Creativeseventeen hours ago," she said, her eyes drilling into King. "We traced the upload signature. It routes directly to a media holding company retained by Julian Vance for 'reputation management.'"
She leaned forward.
"He didn't just try to destroy my reputation, Mitchell. He committed fraud. On live television. Using a generated image to impersonate a private citizen."
A beat. She let the weight of it settle.
"I’m Beta," she said clearly. "I have always been Beta. I'm not hiding anything I simply don't have a heat cycle. What I do have is paperwork."
She looked straight down the barrel of the camera.
"And if Julian Vance needed to fabricate my designation to defeat my argument... if he had to invent a biology for mebecause he couldn't attack my logic... then my argument has already won."
The studio erupted.
Not in boos. In chaos. Voices escalated, people stood up, phones flashed. King was shouting at his producer in his earpiece, actively ignoring the woman who had just dismantled his ambush.
It was a victory. A total, absolute victory.
But backstage, I couldn't breathe.
I was frozen, staring at the monitor. The image of the fake Rowan, the Omega Rowan, was burned into my retinas.
I lied on the medical forms. If they knew I was passing... I'd lose everything.
Those weren't her words. They were mine. They were the words I whispered to myself every time I signed a contract, every time I took a suppressant, every time I walked into a room and manipulated the energy.
Vance had tried to destroy her by accusing her of beingme.
