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“What about the kids born here?”

“Can we use their own techniques against them?”

Maven stepped in, organizing the flood. “Slow down. Let her answer.”

I wiped my forehead, which had gone clammy. “There’s a node—a signal relay, somewhere near the main Authority complex. If it goes down, the memory protocols break. But so does the security grid. It’ll be chaos. Maybe a way out. Maybe just more blood.”

The room filled with static. People muttered, argued, theorized.

No one looked at Kang. No one cared what he thought.

But I did. I glanced at him. He looked worse than before—tense, eyes sunken, mouth drawn in a line that said he’d rather be anywhere but here. I wondered how much of what I’d said had already been true for him. How many days he’d spent not knowing which thoughts were his, which were Authority’s.

My own memory echoed back: Almost done, Dee.

I had a theory about the node. About the person behind the glass in my flash. But I kept it to myself.

For now.

The council called a recess. Maven signaled me to stay put, then ushered the rest out with a voice that brooked no argument.

I sat at the table, sweat cooling on my skin, feeling the eyes that were no longer on me.

The council reconvened with none of the earlier chaos, but all of the suspicion. This time, the benches were half-empty; the rest had filtered out into the catacombs to gossip, plot, or just breathe air untainted by Authority ghosts. Maven called Kang forward with a tilt of the chin, then leaned back and watched the ripple it sent through the room.

He stood, slow, hands clasped behind his back. In the red light, his Authority blue looked black. Nobody said a word, but I could feel the questions crowding the air.

The woman with the piercings picked up where she’d left off. “We’ve heard from your… advocate.” She shot Maven a look. “Now you. Why should any of us believe you’re not just here to finish what Petrov started?”

Kang didn’t answer at first. His lips pressed together so tightly I thought they’d fuse. Then, voice low but steady, he said: “I believed in the Authority. For a long time, it was the only thing that made sense. But I saw what it did to people. What it did to me.”

He paused, flexed his fingers behind his back. “We were told the Zone was a threat, that memory loss was infection, that the only way to hold the line was to cull the weak. But the culling never stopped. It just changed targets.”

He looked straight at the councilwoman. “We killed people for forgetting. But we forgot ourselves, every day. I saw squads disappear, records vanish, entire blocks reclassified as ‘experimental error.’ When they sent me after Diana, I knew what that meant.”

He glanced at me, then away. “I couldn’t do it. Not again.”

The woman’s face didn’t change, but she sat back, arms folded. “You were Authority for years. What makes you think a few days of guilt gets you a free pass?”

Kang let out a slow breath. “It doesn’t. You don’t owe me anything.”

He started to sit, then stopped. The hand at his side shook, just a hair. He clenched it into a fist.

I didn’t think. I just reached out, slid my hand into his. Our fingers touched, cold and rough. The tremor stopped.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then Maven spoke up, voice echoing off the bare walls. “We judge by what you do next, not what you were before. That’s how Sanctuary survives.”

The man with the melted ear grunted, but didn’t argue.

The meeting dissolved after that. Councilors drifted out, some nodding to Kang, some ignoring him. Maven waited until the benches were empty, then turned to us.

“You’re both exhausted,” they said. “There’s a med bay three tunnels down. Doc will be there in an hour.”

Kang nodded, but I barely heard. My head pounded with a steady, dull pressure. The cold concrete underfoot had started to tilt and sway.

Maven caught my elbow, not unkindly. “You need rest. The beds here aren’t much, but better than the cells.”