They didn't lock me up. I want to be clear about that, because for the first hour after I left Cole's office, some paranoid part of my brain kept waiting for an armed escort to show up at my door and march me somewhere with bars on the windows. Nothing like that happened. What happened instead was quieter and, in its own way, worse — my access badge stopped working on the range door, my name disappeared off the next week's deployment roster, and a runner delivered a folded note informing me that Captain Marlowe of the Judge Advocate General's office would be seeing me at 0900 the following morning.
I spent the night doing the only thing that still made sense to me. I sat on the floor of my room and meditated, drawing mana in slow and steady, feeling my core turn it over the way it always did, patient and indifferent to whatever mess the rest of me had gotten into. Mana didn't care about inquiries. It didn't care about Major Voss's smile or Colonel Reyes's unreadable expression or the particular flavor of dread that came from realizing the people you'd bled for might be the same people who eventually decided you were a liability. I sat there long past when my core felt full, just for the quiet of it, until the light outside my window shifted from dark to grey to something almost like morning.
Captain Marlowe turned out to be a short, sharp-eyed woman who looked like she hadn't smiled in about three years and didn't intend to start now. She sat across from me in a cramped little office that smelled like old paper and stale coffee, a file with my name on it already thick enough to need a rubber band holding it shut, and a second, thinner folder beside it that she didn't open right away.
"I'm your defense counsel," she said, without preamble, pen already uncapped and hovering over a legal pad. "That means everything you tell me stays with me unless you tell me otherwise. I need you to understand that clearly before we go any further, because the next thing I'm going to ask you is going to matter a great deal, and I need an honest answer."
"Okay."
"Did you enter the restricted sub-level of the warehouse facility during the recovery operation three months ago?"
"Yes."
"Did you find something down there that you deliberately excluded from your after-action report?"
I thought about lying. I'd gotten good at lying, or at least at the specific, narrow kind of lying where you just left out the parts that mattered and let people assume the rest. But Marlowe's eyes were the kind that made lying feel like an insult to both of us, sharp and patient at once, like she'd catch it either way and simply wait to see if I'd have the sense to save us both the time.
"Yes," I said.
She didn't react, just made a small note in the margin of a page I couldn't see. "Was what you found a threat to national security? Enemy assets, sabotage materials, anything that would have required immediate escalation?"
"No. It was — " I hesitated, weighing exactly how much to say, how much detail turned a defensible judgment call into something that sounded like it needed defending in the first place. "A cache of crystal-augmented weapons. Prototype-grade, from what I could tell — better than anything standard-issue I'd seen up to that point. I judged that reporting its exact location and contents in an unsecured after-action document, on a base with over a thousand people passing through the lobby daily, was a security risk in itself. Anyone with access to that report would know exactly where to look."
Marlowe's pen paused, hovering above the page. "That's an interesting way to frame withholding classified information from your commanding officers."
"It's the truth."
"Is it the whole truth?"
I met her eyes and said nothing, and something in her expression told me she already knew the answer to that, and had decided — for now, at least — not to push. She set the pen down instead, folding her hands over the thick file between us.
"Here's where we stand," she said. "Major Voss has built his inquiry around the deleted access logs and the sub-level itself. He hasn't, as far as I can tell from what's been shared with defense counsel, found anything about your combat record or your affinity that he can formally attach to the inquiry. That's good. That's a narrow scope, and narrow scopes are easier to defend."
"For now."
"For now," she agreed, a thin, humorless edge to it. "Voss strikes me as a man who likes narrow scopes that widen conveniently once he's inside them. I'd advise you to be very careful in every conversation you have from this point forward, including with me, about anything outside what's directly relevant to the warehouse. Not because I don't want to know — because the less I formally know, the less I can be compelled to disclose if this ever escalates past a hearing board."
I nodded slowly, filing that away with the particular gratitude of someone who'd just been handed a rule that actually made his life easier. "What happens next?"
"A formal hearing, eventually. Between now and then, Voss's office will interview anyone connected to your service record. Expect that to include your original squadmates from your first posting." She flipped a page, scanning it. "Ivan and Daniel, is it?"
My stomach tightened at the thought of Voss's smile turned on Ivan, on Danny — two people who knew exactly how much I hadn't told the army, and who I trusted with my life but had never actually tested against a room built specifically to pull secrets out of people who thought they were solid.
"They won't tell him anything," I said.
"Everyone thinks that about the people they trust," Marlowe said, not unkindly, closing the file with a soft, final sound. "It's rarely true in the way they expect. Not because people are weak, Corporal — because Voss is good at finding the version of a question that makes an honest answer sound damning even when it isn't. Go rest, Corporal. You're going to need it."
"One more question," I said, before she could stand. "Is there anything I can do? Actively, I mean. Not just sit here and wait for Voss to build his case."
Something in her expression shifted, a flicker of what might have been approval. "Not yet. Building your own case before you know what he actually has is how people end up handing him more than he started with. Patience is the whole job right now, Corporal. I know it's not the answer you wanted."
"How does this usually go? Cases like mine."
Marlowe considered the question longer than I expected, tapping her pen once against the closed file. "Honestly? I haven't had one quite like yours. Most disciplinary cases I run are straightforward — insubordination, an unauthorized engagement, theft of supplies, that sort of thing. Cut and dried, a known quantity on both sides. Yours is complicated by two things working against each other. One, you're genuinely one of the most valuable field assets this command has, and command knows it, which buys you goodwill most defendants don't get. Two, nobody fully understands what your affinity actually does, which means nobody can rule out that you're hiding something worse than an undocumented weapons cache. That uncertainty cuts both ways, Corporal — it's the reason Voss can't easily prove anything, and it's the reason he won't stop looking."
"That's not exactly comforting."
"I didn't say it to comfort you. I said it because you should understand exactly what you're dealing with before you walk out that door." She finally stood, sliding the file into a drawer and locking it with a small brass key she kept on a chain under her collar. "Get some rest, Corporal. I mean that."
I left her office feeling like the walls of the base had gotten about six inches closer together since I'd walked in, that particular claustrophobia of a place I'd fought to belong in suddenly feeling like it might spit me back out at any moment.
Vanguard found me in the mess hall an hour later, all four of them descending on my table at once like they'd coordinated it, which, knowing Ian, they probably had.
"So," Alex said, dropping into the seat across from me with none of his usual theatrics, "you want to explain the part where you've apparently been sitting on a secret weapons cache for three months?"
"Alex," Ian said warningly.
"No, it's a fair question." I pushed my tray away, appetite gone. "I found it during the warehouse mission. I didn't report it because I didn't trust what would happen if the whole army knew exactly where it was and what was in it."
"You didn't trust us either," Ralph said quietly. It wasn't an accusation, exactly. Worse — it sounded hurt, in the specific way that meant he'd already decided not to be angry about it and was still working through the disappointment underneath.
"I didn't know you yet," I said. "I've known you three weeks. I'm not going to pretend that's the same as trusting someone with something this heavy — something that could get all of us pulled into whatever's about to happen to me."
Dustin, who'd said the least of any of them since I'd known him, finally spoke, elbows on the table, watching me with the same quiet attentiveness he brought to reading a battlefield. "Do you trust us now?"
The question hung there a second too long before I answered it, and I hated myself a little for the hesitation, because I did trust them — as much as I trusted anyone who wasn't Ivan, Danny, Emma, or Ash — but three years of learning the hard way that trust was a resource you spent carefully had made hesitation into a reflex I couldn't just switch off because I wanted to.
"Yeah," I said finally. "I do."
Ian studied me for a long moment, then nodded, apparently satisfied with whatever he saw. "Then we've got your back. Whatever this turns into."
"You're benched," Alex pointed out. "There's not much backing up to do from a mess hall table."
"There's plenty," Ian said. "We're deploying tomorrow without him. Command wants a follow-up sweep on the coordinated pack sighting from the forest. Someone's going to have to keep his seat warm and make sure the rest of us come back to fill him in properly."
"Great," I muttered. "Something new to worry about."
"Don't worry about us," Ralph said, forcing a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes. "We survived plenty before you showed up to make us all look slow by comparison."
"That thing knows your rank," I said, quieter, the joke not quite landing the way he wanted it to. "It's going to notice I'm not there."
"Then we make it think you're just running late," Alex said, with more confidence than any of us actually felt.
They left not long after, and I spent the rest of that evening alone in my room, listening to the base settle into its nighttime quiet, wondering how many more secrets I was going to have to carry before one of them finally broke me instead of the other way around. I thought about calling Emma, decided against it the same way I had the last time, and instead sat on the floor and let the mana do what it always did — fill in slow, patient, indifferent to Marlowe's careful patience or Voss's careful smile, the one part of my life that had never once asked me to be anyone other than exactly who I was — patient, quiet, and completely uninterested in whatever the rest of the base decided to think of me tomorrow.