My compad’s hologram floats above the tabletop, layered windows stacked like a frantic thought spiral: Morazin’s relay chain, Nine-coded transaction routes, the Alliance node cluster, and Clint’s secure channel blinking impatiently in the corner.
I rub my eyes with the heel of my hand. My fingertips smell faintly of solder and lemon cleanser and—underneath—stress sweat.
“Okay,” I mutter. “Let’s do paperwork that could get me executed. Fun.”
I accept Clint’s call.
His face pops up, tight-jawed, eyes bloodshot. He looks like he’s been sleeping in a chair and losing.
“Jordan,” he says, no greeting. “Talk fast.”
“Love you too,” I say automatically, then wince because the humor comes out brittle.
He doesn’t smile. “We have a narrow window.”
My spine straightens. “Define narrow.”
“Two hours,” he says. “Maybe less. There’s a scheduled custody ‘transfer review’ in the system—routine bureaucratic garbage. If I can slip a transfer order inside that noise, I can move Morazin off-book.”
Off-book. My stomach clenches.
“That’s… insane,” I say, though my brain is already running ahead, mapping pathways. “How do you even?—”
“By writing it like the kind of thing nobody reads,” Clint says. “But I can’t just yank him. I need a credible legal justification that survives the first ten minutes of scrutiny.”
I exhale slowly. The air smells faintly like expensive wood polish. It makes me want to gag.
“You want me to give you an excuse,” I say.
“I want you to give me aweapon,” Clint corrects. “Something that forces both IHC and Alliance to keep him alive long enough to talk.”
My jaw tightens. “They don’t want him talking.”
“I know,” Clint says, and his voice drops. “Which is why we have to make it impossible for them to kill him without admitting they did.”
I swallow. My mouth tastes like dry metal.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Give me your constraints.”
Clint flicks his eyes downward like he’s reading a list. “It has to be jurisdictional. It has to justify a cross-agency hold. And it has to be something that makes Morazin a live intelligence asset, not just a prisoner.”
I stare at the floating evidence map above my table. Morazin’s chain glows, a web of transactions and relays, each link a quiet crime.
Then my brain clicks into that old, familiar gear—the one that doesn’t panic, just builds.
“He’s not a murderer,” I say slowly. “Not in the legal framing. He’s a systems-level actor.”
Clint frowns. “Go on.”
“He used Alliance-controlled infrastructure,” I say, voice sharpening. “That means cross-jurisdiction access. He ran biometric forgery and financial triggers through shells tied to intergovernmental markets. That’s not just war provocation—it’s cyberterrorism.”
Clint’s eyebrows lift. “Cyberterrorism.”
“Systems-level,” I say, more certain now. “He didn’t just kill people, he attacked institutional stability. He weaponized the holonet’s trust layer, jammed comms, forged biometrics. Then he used staged spectacle to trigger political destabilization and market volatility.”
I pull up a specific relay header and flick it toward Clint’s holo feed.
“Look,” I say. “This relay hop goes through Alliance node infrastructure. That’s not supposed to be touchable by him. Which means either someone inside is complicit, or the network’s compromised. Either way, he becomes a live intelligence asset because he’s the only bridge between funding, access, and authorization.”
