Chapter 102 | The Hearing I

Chapter 102: Chapter 102 | The Hearing I

The hero authority building was exactly what it had always been.

Grey stone. Wide entrance. The association seal above the doors in brushed steel. The kind of building that had been designed to communicate permanence and had spent sixty years succeeding.

Kai had been in it before. Licensing. Filing. Three separate petition submissions.

He had never been in it with both wives.

====

The cab let them out at eight-fifteen.

Shira looked at the entrance.

She looked at it the way she had looked at the form on the first day Kai had watched her run it — not hesitating, just locating exactly what she was dealing with before she dealt with it.

Mira had the RF-7 case and the board. She stood with the cane and looked at the wall beside the entrance.

A woman in a dark coat walked past them into the building without looking. Two heroes in licensing gear came out without looking.

Nobody stopped.

Nobody stared.

The investigation had been public for two weeks. Both names had been in the news cycle. And still nobody stopped, because people who came to the hero authority building came with their own business and kept their eyes forward.

Kai thought that was probably the best possible version of this moment.

"Ready," he said.

Shira moved forward.

Mira followed.

They went in.

====

Denko was in the lobby.

He had the documentation case and the expression of a man who had been awake since four and considered this acceptable.

He looked at both wives.

He said: "The committee room is on the third floor. Accessible lift is to the left. The clerk has confirmed the board testimony protocol. The Renmei legal team is already upstairs." He paused. "Three counsel. No patriarch."

"I said he wouldn’t come," Shira said.

"His absence has been noted in the pre-session record," Denko said.

Shira looked at the lift.

"Carson Webb," she said.

"Already in the room," Denko said. "Witness liaison seated at the committee table. Left side."

Mira’s board appeared.

Left side meaning same side as us or opposite.

"Same side," Denko said.

She lowered the board.

They went to the lift.

====

Third floor.

The committee room had the particular quality of a space designed to make everyone in it feel slightly smaller than they were. High ceiling. Long table. Five committee members across the center. Clerk to the right with the recording equipment. Carson Webb at the left end of the committee table, civilian clothes, hands flat.

He caught Kai’s eye when they came in.

He looked at Shira.

He looked away.

The Renmei legal team was on the right side. Three counsel. The kind of lawyers who had been doing this long enough to have perfectly neutral faces regardless of what they were thinking.

The patriarch’s chair was empty.

Kai looked at it once and looked away.

They sat.

====

The committee chair opened the session at nine exactly.

She read the filing number. The prosecution scope. The corrected canyon dungeon classification. The names of all ten expedition members. She read each name without pause, without inflection, like she understood that the way she said them mattered.

When she reached Shira Voss the room was completely quiet.

When she reached Mira Elys it stayed completely quiet.

When she reached Joel Marsh it stayed the same.

She finished the roster.

She set the papers down.

She said: "Testimony will proceed in the order filed. Shira Voss, then Mira Elys, then supporting documentation. The committee will hear testimony without interruption. Objections will be addressed after each witness completes."

She looked at the Renmei legal team.

"That includes procedural objections," she said.

One of the three counsel opened his mouth.

The chair looked at him.

He closed it.

Shira almost smiled.

=====

Shira’s testimony took twenty-two minutes.

She spoke in the voice she used when there was no armor in it and no soft version either. The clear one. She described the expedition briefing. The classification documentation she had been given. The canyon conditions. The signal crossing the cutoff.

She said forty-one minutes.

Out loud. On the record. In front of the committee and the clerk and the recording equipment and the empty patriarch’s chair.

She said it once, at the point in the testimony where it was accurate to say it, and then continued without pausing.

Kai sat in the witness section and did not move.

Carson Webb sat at the left end of the committee table with his hands flat and looked at a point six inches above the table.

When Shira finished the chair said: "Thank you. The committee notes the testimony." She looked at the Renmei legal team. "Objections."

One counsel stood. "The committee should note that the classification documentation presented—"

"The committee has read the classification documentation," the chair said. "It is in the record. If you have a specific procedural challenge to the testimony just given, state it now."

A pause.

"No specific challenge," the counsel said.

"Sit down," the chair said.

He sat.

=====

Mira’s testimony took sixteen minutes.

The clerk read each line of the board into the official record verbatim. Slowly. Clearly. Every word Mira wrote became the clerk’s voice in the room.

The Resonance node at eight-forty hertz. The pre-expedition briefing. What she had felt in the canyon. What Joel Marsh had told her before the expedition — that the frequency matched, that she would feel it before anyone else, that they probably hadn’t told her.

They probably hadn’t told her.

The clerk read that line into the room.

Nobody moved.

Mira was looking at the wall to the left of the committee table. She wrote the next line. The clerk read it.

The expedition node discovery. The signal she had tracked before the classification incident. What she had documented in her Gift assessment log. Where that log now sat in the prosecution evidence file.

She wrote the final line.

The clerk read it.

Joel Marsh’s frequency request was not a preference. It was a warning. He knew what was in that dungeon. He told me. He went in anyway.