She had told him I was pulling records.

She was the one. Not Garrett, who only knew what he was told. Pike had seen my queries building for eighteen days, had understood exactly what I was circling, and had told Hale, and Hale had sent the hands.

She put her own hands up slowly.

On the feed, I saw her face do the calculation. The same calculation Garrett had done on the floor. The same one Rebecca Vale had done at a graveside, though I didn’t know about that one. The one everyone does when the board collapses: who knows, what they know, how to get out.

And then I saw her give up on it. Faster than Garrett had. She was smarter than Garrett. She understood, looking at six agents and the lit-up room, that there was no out. That the window had never been real. That she’d been walked into it.

-Who sent you here, Commander Pike?

Reyes’s voice, through my headset, calm and clear.

Pike didn’t answer.

-You’re logged in under a service account created by Captain Hale fourteen months ago. You came here to destroy evidence under preservation order in a federal theft and assault case. You did it during a window that was fabricated specifically to see who would come. There’s no version of the next ten years where you spend them anywhere but a cell. The only thing you get to decide is how big the cell is, and whether the man who sent you is in the one next to yours.

Silence on the feed.

Then Pike said one word.

-Lawyer.

Smart. To the end, smarter than the rest of them. A lawyer was the right call for her. But it didn’t matter, and she knew it didn’t matter, because the service account and the creation record and the fabricated window and her own presence in that chair had already said everything a lawyer could try to unsay.

They arrested her. I watched them do it on the tablet, from the van, with my useless legs stretched out in front of me and the harbor wind coming through the door Reyes had left cracked.

Hale was arrested four hours later, at his home, at dawn. By then Pike’s lawyer had already begun the negotiation, because her lawyer was good and understood that the first one to the table gets the only chair. She gave them Hale. The structure, the shells, the buyers, the full architecture of the thing he’d built. Fourteen months of my commanding officer using me as a painted screen in front of a door I was never supposed to notice.

Reyes came to the van afterward. She opened the back and climbed in and sat on the wheel well across from me. She looked tired and satisfied in equal measure, the specific exhaustion of someone who has finished a thing they weren’t sure they could finish.

-It’s done. Pike’s talking. Hale’s in custody. The buyers are next.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I watched the sun come up over the harbor through the open door. Gray water going gold at the edges.

-Rebecca.

-I heard you.

-You okay?

I thought about it. I try to answer that question honestly when someone earns an honest answer, and Reyes had.

-He used me because I was honest. That’s the part that sits wrong. Not the legs. The legs heal. He looked at the most honest officer he could find and saw a tool. He saw my integrity as a thing he could hide behind.

Reyes was quiet.

-And the thing is, he was almost right. It worked for fourteen months. The only reason it didn’t work forever is that being honest also meant I actually did the inspection. He wanted the reputation without the behavior. But you don’t get one without the other. The reputation is just the behavior, seen from outside.

-That’s going to be in a lot of training materials someday.

-Don’t you dare.

She laughed.

The trials took over a year.

Garrett Voss was convicted on every count. The aggravated assault, the conspiracy, the obstruction, the witness retaliation, the theft. The military judge, at sentencing, noted that Voss had continued the assault after being informed that his victim had already reported the underlying crime, which the judge characterized as the act of a man more interested in cruelty than self-preservation. Garrett got the longest sentence of anyone in the case. He never looked at me in the courtroom. By then I could walk in on my own, with a cane, and I made sure to walk past his table on my way to the stand so that he’d have to watch me do it. He studied the floor.

Marcus Kane and Cole Barrett took deals. Kane cried on the stand describing the sound my leg made. Barrett, who had hesitated twice, got a shorter sentence than the other two, which was correct, because hesitation is not the same as refusal but it is not the same as enthusiasm either, and the law, when it’s working, can tell the difference.