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But in that echo?

I hear something more powerful:

A reckoning waiting to burn.

Not with fire.

But with truth.

And I will make sure it pays attention.

My instincts rage at me. There are direct, if messy ways to do this. I want to kill him.

Not the vague, growling kind of want.

Not the fiery, outraged, battlefield instinct.

The calm kind.

The kind that makes the blood in my veins slow down, like I’m thinking in acid clarity.

The thought of taking Tidball’s life — clean, decisive, permanent — doesn’t make heat flare in my chest. It makes somethingcolder, like mathematical precision settling into a bone.

Cold, efficient, inevitable.

But I don’t do it.

Not yet.

Because Yara wouldn’t forgive it.

Not in a million damn lifetimes.

No matter how justified it would be.

So instead, I do what I do best:

I gather proof.

Proof clean enough that even the Combine can’t drown it in bureaucracy.

Proof so undeniable that even the severed heads of bureaucrats and sponsored PR disclaimers can’t erase it.

But first…

I have to breathe.

Because here, in the hideout — dim light, wool rugs, the smell of machine oil and old ozone — I can feel the weight of what Imightdo pressing down on me like a force field built for war.

I sit at a holo-console, fingers tracing patterns over starmapped data threads. Screens ripple with information being pulled from the underbelly of the Combine — illegal servers, black-market brokers, smuggled cache dumps. Everything that moves behind the sanctioned networks.

And every once in a while, a name blinks into focus.

Tidball.

The man’s been playing chess with a live grenade and I’ve watched him set traps for years.

I used to think corporations were just bigger versions of syndicates — legal names, softer lighting, worse reputations.