The Unpunished

Maya felt her phone buzz with an incoming call and saw it was Rachel Chen, the journalist answering before Maya could even say hello with a voice that carried the electric urgency of someone who'd just broken a major story: "The Tribune's editor just told me we're running a special morning edition with Tremaine's memo and the suspension notice and your vigil on the front page, print and digital, it'll hit doorsteps and feeds across the city at 6 AM, which means that when the Deputy Director concludes their review at 0600 hours they'll be doing it while half the city is reading about how the Right's own architect resigned rather than keep pretending confirmation was mandatory, and Maya, I need you to understand what this means—every operator in the city will wake up to a headline that says the system lied to them about having to click confirm, every person who's ever used their Right or lost someone to it will see a photo of ninety-three people who spent a freezing night proving that witness can stop a confirmation, and the Deputy Director will have to make their decision knowing that whatever they choose will be the first test of whether the machine can survive this level of visibility, whether they can find an operator willing to become the face of the Right's insistence that killing you is still necessary even after the whole city has seen exactly what that necessity requires." Maya felt the fourteen hours and twenty-six minutes remaining compress into the six hours until dawn, until Rachel's article would transform the vigil from a local gathering into a citywide reckoning, and she understood that the suspension had just become the system's last chance to kill her before the story got too big to contain, before every operator who might be willing to confirm her death would have to do it knowing they'd be choosing to become the person who clicked through ninety-three witnesses and Tremaine's resignation and a front-page article that had already told the entire city that confirmation was optional, and as she thanked Rachel and ended the call, she looked around at the faces illuminated by phone screens and streetlights and the distant promise of dawn, and realized that whether her heart stopped in the morning or kept beating past it, the next six hours would determine not just whether she survived but whether the Right could survive having its violence made this visible, this documented, this impossible to perform without everyone watching understanding that the operator's hand moving toward that button was making a choice that would define them for the rest of their lives, and that maybe, just maybe, that choice had finally become too heavy for anyone to make while ninety-three strangers and a city full of newspaper readers waited to see what kind of person they'd decide to be.