Page 77 of Reaper Said Mine

“If revenge and policy overlap, every enemy action starts looking strategically useful because it feels emotionally satisfying. That makes you vulnerable. Theryki can use it. Gobold can provoke it. Zune can bait it. The Combine can set a trap shaped exactly like your grief and count on you walking into it because the blood on the floor looks familiar.”

Gnash goes very still.

I do not apologize. My heart is hammering, but I do not apologize, because the whole point of journalism is to ask the question everyone else is too invested, too frightened, or too compromised to ask.

At length, he says, “You think my grief makes me foolish.”

“No. I think grief makes everyone reachable by the wrong knife.”

His gaze drops from my face to my hands. I realize my fingers are curled tight against the compad, knuckles pale. When he looks back up, something in his expression has changed. The anger is still there, but it has moved aside enough to reveal recognition.

“Horus IV,” he says.

The name crosses the table like smoke.

I force myself to breathe evenly. “This interview is about you.”

“No,” he says. “This interview is about power, memory, and what the living do with their dead. You know this because you brought the blade to my throat and called it a question.”

I should object. Instead, I sit with the accuracy of it pressing against my ribs. Outside, a patrol craft glides past the viewport, its running lights flashing briefly across Gnash’s face. Red, gold, shadow.

“My mother died because two powers decided civilians were acceptable math,” I say. “For a long time, I thought truth would fix that.”

“And now?”

“Now I think truth is a weapon. Useful, necessary, and never enough by itself.”

His gaze holds mine. “You are lonelier than you pretend.”

A hard laugh escapes me. “That is wildly inappropriate interview conduct.”

“I am new to interviews.”

“You are not new to making people uncomfortable.”

“No,” he says. “I am very skilled at that.”

“I’m putting that in the profile.”

“Good. It is one of my better qualities.”

The tension loosens, not gone but changed into something breathable. I realize I am smiling at him, not my polite camera smile or the sharp little knife-smile I use when Dawson says something repulsive, but something warmer and less guarded. Gnash notices. Of course he does. He watches my face with the wary fascination of someone looking at a door he never expected to open.

I glance toward the weapons on the wall before my expression gives away too much. “Show me command.”

He rises at once. “You want the official tour?”

“I want the real one.”

“The real one includes bad smells, worse language, and at least three officers who will pretend not to stare at you.”

“I work in a newsroom. That barely qualifies as local color.”

His teeth flash. “Come, then.”

We leave his quarters through a private corridor narrower than the public passages, with blackened metal underfoot and old impact marks along the walls. The station breathes differently here. It groans around us, alive with pressure seals, distant engines, and the movement of thousands of people who have decided, for reasons not all of them can possibly explain, to live under the rule of Gnash. The air grows cooler as we descend, thickening with the smell of machine oil, hot dust, and something savory from a galley somewhere below.

Two Reaper guards fall in behind us at a respectful distance. Neither speaks. Both look at me. I keep my compad recording openly in one hand and my chin level, because confidence is sometimes a performance you give until your body forgets to be terrified.