She turns to face me, arms crossed. “What?”
“You say that like it’s not three different kinds of suicide.”
“I said it fast so you wouldn’t have time to argue.”
That pulls a smile out of me—tight, unwilling, but real. “I’m not arguing. Just admiring your insanity.”
“You think I’m wrong?”
I shake my head. “No. I think you’re right. That’s the problem.”
She exhales like she’s been holding her breath since the signal went out. Her hands drop to her sides, fingers twitching with kinetic energy that has nowhere to go yet. Not until we move. Not until we strike.
I move to the edge of the projection chamber and tap into the sim control port—rerouting the feed that used to play birdsong and starfields into something more useful. Thestatic clears, replaced by a fractured schematic of the station’s broadcast infrastructure. Obol’s reach is wide, but its core is still centralized, like most ego-driven regimes. Power hoards itself.
“Outer colonies won’t take a random burst feed seriously,” I say. “They’re used to fakes. Coalition fear propaganda. Deserter manifestos.”
Mara steps in close, squinting at the schematics. “Then we don’t show them fear. We show them proof.”
“I can scramble their trace-back protocols, but only for five, maybe six seconds.”
“Then we make those seconds count.”
Her certainty is a living thing now. It radiates off her in waves, all that defiance coalescing into purpose. I’ve seen soldiers go into battle with less resolve.
I touch the schematic, zooming in on the subgrid broadcast loop tied to junction nine. It’s a relic. Hardwired through dozens of failovers, each more fragile than the last. But if we punch through the access point at the right moment, it’ll let us dump raw feed straight to public channels across half the colonized fringe.
“This isn’t a message,” I say. “This is exposure. Once we send this—Obol’s true face, the cloning, the behavioral synth coding—there’s no retraction. No walking it back.”
“I’m not looking to walk it back.”
Her voice doesn’t shake.
I look at her fully now, stepping in until we’re chest to chest. The air between us is electric. Not from the tech, not from tension—just from her. All of her. Every stubborn, brilliant, maddening part of her that refuses to be anything but real.
“If you speak,” I murmur, “they’ll listen.”
She arches a brow. “Because I’m the only idiot who’ll try?”
“No.” I shake my head slowly. “Because you remember what they tried to make you forget.”
She stares at me a long beat. Then something shifts in her posture—just a little. Like a thread unwinding, tension giving way to understanding.
“I’ll do it,” she says.
“I know.”
I turn back to the feed and start rerouting the nodes we’ll need to access—building a lattice of code across ghost IPs and ping dead zones, each step erasing our footprints before the next begins. It’s like constructing a bridge out of smoke and trusting your weight to hold. And it has to hold. There’s no second broadcast. No redo.
Mara settles beside me, eyes scanning the patterns, mind already ten moves ahead.
“Video or audio?” I ask.
“Both,” she replies without hesitation. “No masks. No edits. No deniability.”
“You want to show your face?”
“I want them to know it’s me.”
