“For anyone else thinking they can behave like you,” he says softly. “This is what happens when civilians weaponize truth. Fear will do what institutions won’t.”
I feel the ship hum under my spine. I smell antiseptic and stale air. I taste metal and anger.
And I know, with sudden brutal clarity: he doesn’t just want me dead. He wants the story of my death to be the weapon.
I swallow. “You really believe this stops collapse.”
Morazin’s expression turns almost serene. “It delays it. It manages it. It channels it.”
“You’re insane,” I whisper.
Morazin shrugs. “Call it insanity if that helps you hate me. Hate is a tidy emotion.”
He stands—at least in the holo he shifts as if he’s rising. “I’ll see you when the cameras go live.”
The holo flickers.
Before it cuts, he adds, almost conversational: “Oh—and don’t bother trying your dead-man release. We already found the obvious triggers.”
Then the holo disappears.
The air feels heavier.
Nineteen minutes.
I stare at my dead compad.
Obvious triggers.
Good. Because I wasn’t planning to use obvious.
I pull the compad closer with bound hands and press my thumb against the casing seam again, feeling the subtle warmth.
Sandboxed.
They’ve disabled the comm module output. Probably locked the OS into a safe mode with a supervised kernel. Maybe even mirrored my interface so anything I type gets logged.
Fine.
I don’t need the comm module.
I need the diagnostic subroutines.
I need a maintenance handshake—the kind of low-level ping that isn’t technically “communication,” just a system checking a satellite grid for calibration data. The kind of thing corporate infrastructure runs constantly without anyone looking twice.
My mind snaps back to Yatori’s bones—the way prison-company networks like to phone home through their ownsatellite grid so they can bill for “service quality.” Morazin said it himself: he owns paperwork that tells systems who to trust.
Which means he’s routing his execution broadcast through that same infrastructure to mask it.
To make the signal look like corporate traffic.
To bury murder inside a spreadsheet.
I lower my gaze, pretending to fiddle aimlessly, and begin the real work.
Step one: test power draw.
I press and hold the wake button, then the diagnostic touch point near the lower edge—hidden feature most users never learn. The screen flickers once—tiny, almost imperceptible—then stays dark.
