The Unpunished

Maya watched as Rachel Chen's phone lit up across the plaza—the journalist had clearly just received Tremaine's memo—and she saw Rachel's face go through a rapid sequence of expressions that ended in something like vindication as she began typing with an urgency that suggested the article she'd filed an hour ago was about to get a major update, and Maya understood that by the time the operator arrived at 3:30 AM, they wouldn't just be walking past ninety-three witnesses but walking into a story that was already being rewritten in real time, a narrative where the system's own architect had publicly admitted that every confirmation in the Right's twenty-year history had been optional, that the operators who'd clicked through two hundred and thirty-seven names or five hundred or however many it took before they couldn't anymore had been doing so not because the protocol required it but because no one had ever told them they were allowed to stop, and as she checked the countdown—14:39:17, :16, :15—she felt something that had been clenched tight in her chest since 3:47 AM finally begin to loosen, not quite hope but something close to it, the recognition that whether or not her heart stopped in the morning, the machine would never again be able to claim that its killing was inevitable, because Tremaine's memo and Rachel's article and ninety-three witnesses sitting in the cold had just made inevitability into a lie that everyone could see, and lies that visible had a way of becoming impossible to sustain even when the people who'd built their lives around them desperately wanted to keep believing.