Morning formation came and went in a blur of protocols that Valoris barely registered.

  She'd read until dawn, file after file, documentation that confirmed everything they'd suspected and revealed horrors they hadn't imagined. The words still burned behind her eyes, facts that rearranged her understanding of everything she'd been taught, everything she'd believed, everything she'd done in service to a system built on lies.

  Now she sat with her squad in the mess hall, pushing food around her plate, waiting for the right moment to tell them what she'd learned. What she'd done and what she was about to ask them to carry alongside her.

  Zee noticed first. She always did, her predatory awareness extending to reading the people around her. "You look like you haven't slept," Zee said quietly, leaning closer across the table. "What's wrong?"

  "Not here," Valoris murmured back. "We need to talk. Somewhere private."

  "Our quarters aren't private," Saren said, her voice low enough that only the squad could hear. "Thrace made that clear. We're monitored constantly."

  "I know." Valoris glanced at Milo, catching his eye across the table. "Milo. Can you do something about that?"

  He blinked, confusion evident behind his glasses. "About what?"

  She leaned closer, dropping her voice to barely above a breath. "The surveillance in our quarters. Can you and Buddy make it glitch? Not obviously disabled, just... noise. Static. Something that looks like equipment malfunction rather than deliberate interference."

  Milo's expression shifted as he processed the request. His eyes went slightly unfocused in the way that meant he was consulting with Buddy through their constant connection, running probabilities and scenarios through whatever hybrid consciousness they'd become.

  "Buddy says we can create interference patterns that read as atmospheric disturbance," he whispered back. "Dimensional residue from our last deployment. It would explain audio degradation and visual artifacts. Maintenance would log it as routine sensor decay rather than deliberate tampering."

  "How long can you maintain it?"

  "Thirty minutes, maybe forty. Longer than that and the patterns become too consistent. Someone might notice they're artificial."

  "That's enough." Valoris looked at each of her squadmates in turn, reading their expressions, their concern, their trust. "Finish eating. Then we need to talk. All of us. About something that happened last night."

  Their quarters felt different with the knowledge of what she was about to share.

  Milo moved to his corner and closed his eyes, his connection ports flickering with activity as he interfaced with Buddy at a level deeper than normal operation. The air in the room shifted subtly, a faint pressure change that Valoris felt in her sinuses, in the back of her throat, in the way sounds seemed to flatten and blur at the edges.

  "It's working," Milo said, his voice slightly distant. "Buddy's generating interference across the standard monitoring frequencies. Anyone watching will see and hear static interspersed with fragments of normal activity. Nothing that suggests deliberate blocking. Just equipment struggling with dimensional residue."

  "How long?" Valoris asked.

  "Clock's running. Say what you need to say."

  She looked at her squad. Zee perched on her bunk with that coiled readiness that never quite left her. Saren sitting rigidly on her own bed, tablet set aside, attention focused with rigid precision. Quinn flickering slightly at the edges, their dimensional stability wavering with stress they couldn't quite hide. Milo maintaining his connection to Buddy, eyes half-closed, consciousness split between the room and whatever space he shared with his bonded entity.

  Her family. Her people. The ones she'd lied to by omission, the ones she'd excluded from a decision that affected all of them.

  "Last night," Valoris began, "after we got back from Thrace's office, I received a message on my tablet. Anonymous. No sender identification. It promised answers about the barrier, about the war, about everything we've been trying to understand."

  She watched their expressions shift. Milo's eyes opening wider with surprise. Quinn going very still, their flickering pausing momentarily. Zee's posture tensing. Saren's jaw tightening.

  "The message asked me to meet someone. Alone. At 02:00, in a maintenance corridor on Sublevel 7."

  "And you went." Zee's voice was flat. Not a question.

  "I went."

  "Alone." Still flat. Still controlled. But something dangerous underneath it.

  "Alone."

  Zee was on her feet before Valoris could continue, crossing the small space between their bunks with predatory speed. "You snuck out in the middle of the night to meet an anonymous contact in an empty corridor, and you didn't think to wake me? To bring backup? To tell anyone where you were going?"

  "I thought–"

  "You thought what? That you could handle whatever trap they'd set by yourself? That protecting us meant excluding us?" Zee's voice rose despite the need for quiet. "We're a squad, Val. We watch each other's backs. That's the whole point. And you just decided to go off alone into potential danger without telling any of us?"

  "She's right." Saren's voice cut through Zee's anger, cold and precise. "But not for the reason she's giving." She stood as well, facing Valoris with an expression that mixed fury with something that looked almost like betrayal. "You made a decision that affected all of us without consulting any of us. You decided the risk was worth taking, decided to pursue information that could destroy our careers and our lives. You went to meet someone who could have been Command setting a trap. And you made that choice alone."

  "I was trying to protect you," Valoris said. "If it was a trap, if I got caught–"

  "Then we'd have found out when security came to arrest us anyway," Saren interrupted. "Because whatever you do reflects on all of us. Whatever consequences you face, we face. That's what squad means. That's what Thrace told us explicitly. So you don't get to make unilateral decisions about risks that affect everyone and claim you were being protective."

  "Saren–"

  "No." Saren's voice was sharp enough to cut. "You're squad leader. That means you coordinate, you consult, you bring us into decisions. It doesn't mean you get to decide what we're allowed to know, what risks we're allowed to take, what dangers we're allowed to face. That's not leadership. That's control. And I won't accept it."

  Valoris felt the truth in that, felt the weight of her own justifications crumbling under Saren's precise dismantling.

  "You're right," she said quietly. "I should have told you. I should have brought you into the decision. I convinced myself I was protecting you, but I was also afraid you'd talk me out of going, or insist on coming with me, and I wanted the answers badly enough that I didn't want to risk either of those outcomes."

  She met Saren's eyes directly.

  "I'm sorry. It won't happen again. From now on, we decide together. Whatever we learn, whatever we choose to do with it, we choose as a squad. I swear it."

  Saren held her gaze for a long moment, weighing the apology, assessing its sincerity. Finally, she gave a small nod. Not forgiveness, exactly. Acknowledgment. Acceptance of the promise, with clear expectation that it would be kept.

  "So who did you meet?" Milo asked, his voice strained with the effort of maintaining Buddy's interference patterns. "What did they want?"

  Valoris took a breath.

  "She called herself Wraith. Former pilot, graduated six years ago. She's been hiding with other defectors in corruption zone peripheries, places where surveillance equipment glitches and anyone without a mech can't follow without risking decoherence."

  "Defectors," Quinn said, their flat voice carrying something that might have been interest. "Organized resistance?"

  "Something like it. But they’re dying slowly from corruption because the zones they're using for cover are killing them faster than piloting would have." Valoris remembered Wraith's silvered eyes, her withered hand, the scarring that mapped her body like a record of everything she'd sacrificed. "But they're watching. Monitoring academy systems. Looking for pilots who are starting to ask questions."

  "They found us through the disciplinary logs," Zee said, understanding dawning. "Thrace's report. Probation. Psychological evaluations. All of it documented in systems they're monitoring."

  "Yes. Wraith said our file read like conscience developing at an inconvenient time."

  Saren's expression flickered. "And she gave you something. Information. Evidence. That's why you needed Milo to jam the surveillance."

  Valoris pulled the device from her pocket. Small, metallic, and heavy with everything it contained.

  "She gave me this. Files from sources she couldn't reveal. Documentation that was supposed to be destroyed decades ago. She said it would answer every question we've been asking, and some we hadn't thought to ask yet."

  She looked at each of them.

  "I read it last night. All of it. And now I need to share it with you. But first, we need to make sure we're not being monitored through our tablets. If Command detects us accessing this..."

  They moved without needing further instruction. Zee powered down her tablet and shoved it under her mattress. Saren disabled hers with methodical precision, removing the battery for good measure. Quinn's tablet flickered and went dark, their dimensional instability apparently extending to the device's electronics. Milo's was already offline, his attention focused entirely on maintaining Buddy's interference.

  Valoris disconnected her own tablet from all networks, disabled every wireless protocol she could find, then connected Wraith's device to the isolated system.

  Files populated the screen. Dozens of them. Categories that promised answers to questions that had been eating at her for months.

  "Gather around," Valoris said. "This is going to take a while. And once you see it, you can't unsee it."

  The files told a story that Command had spent decades trying to bury.

  Valoris narrated as she scrolled, pointing out key passages, highlighting the evidence that built case after damning case against everything they'd been taught. Her squad pressed close around the small screen, reading over her shoulders, their breathing changing as the magnitude of what they were seeing became clear.

  The barrier hadn't collapsed naturally. The documentation proved it with meticulous bureaucratic detail: weapons testing in a remote dimensional research facility, experiments designed to weaponize reality itself. Scientists who didn't understand what they were doing, pushing boundaries that shouldn't have been pushed, cracking open a hole in the fabric between dimensions that refused to close afterward.

  Project designations. Budget allocations. Personnel assignments. The kind of mundane administrative records that made atrocity feel routine, that transformed catastrophe into line items and requisition forms.

  But it was the context that made Valoris's stomach turn. The why behind the experiments. The purpose that had driven someone to tear holes in reality without understanding what might be on the other side.

  Project Threshold: Dimensional bypass research for rapid military deployment. Objective: develop transportation network capable of moving military assets to colonial territories without conventional transit delays. Strategic priority: maintaining governmental authority over separatist movements in outer colonies.

  "The colonial wars," Saren said, her voice flat. "They were trying to build dimensional shortcuts so they could move troops faster. So they could crush rebellions before they could organize."

  "The uprisings," Quinn added. "The colonial independence movements. History says they collapsed due to internal instability and needing to unify against the dimensional threat. But if the government had been developing weapons specifically to suppress them..."

  Stolen story; please report.

  "They didn't collapse," Valoris said. "They were crushed. And the dimensional breach that was supposed to help do the crushing went wrong. Created a permanent crisis instead of a military advantage."

  "They broke it," Milo breathed, his voice cracking. "We didn't. Humanity. We broke their dimension. We caused this."

  "Keep reading," Valoris said.

  There was more. Worse. Documentation that showed the cover-up went beyond hiding a mistake. It was about exploiting one.

  Strategic Assessment 7-Alpha-3: Entity emergence provides opportunity for societal restructuring. Recommendations: (1) Classify true origin of dimensional breach. (2) Reframe entity presence as external invasion rather than consequence of domestic weapons program. (3) Implement permanent military emergency protocols. (4) Centralize governmental authority under defense coordination framework.

  "They did it on purpose," Zee said, and her voice carried horror that went beyond anything the earlier files had produced. "Not the breach. But everything after. They saw the crisis they'd created and decided to use it. Decided a scared population under permanent military emergency was easier to control than admitting what they'd done.”

  Assessment continues: Perpetual external threat justifies: expanded surveillance authority, restricted civilian movement, mandatory service programs, centralized resource allocation. Entity crisis provides indefinite justification for measures that would otherwise face democratic opposition. Recommend maintaining crisis status rather than pursuing resolution.

  "Maintaining crisis status," Saren repeated, her voice hollow. "They're not trying to end the war. They never were. The war is the point. The war is what lets them control everything."

  "The pilot program," Milo said, scrolling to another file with hands that shook. "Look at this."

  Pilot Program Assessment: Acceptable attrition rates for strategic benefit. Annual recruitment of 200-300 candidates provides: (1) Effective entity suppression capability. (2) Visible demonstration of threat severity to general population. (3) Outlet for societal resources toward approved military objectives. (4) Renewable resource given adolescent neural plasticity advantages. Projected long-term sustainability: indefinite with current recruitment and corruption management protocols.

  "Renewable resource," Quinn said, and even their flat affect couldn't hide the disgust underneath. "They're talking about us. About children. We're a renewable resource for maintaining a war they're deliberately not trying to win."

  "Because winning would end the crisis," Valoris said. "And ending the crisis would end their control. They need us to keep fighting. They need the entities to keep coming. They need the population scared and compliant and grateful for military protection from a threat that only exists because the military created it."

  "The corruption timelines," Saren said, and her voice had gone flat in ways that suggested she was processing rather than reacting. "Eight to twelve years average before symptoms become unmanageable. They've been recruiting children, bonding them to mechs, sending them to kill, knowing from the start exactly how long we'd last before they'd have to dispose of us. And they consider it acceptable. Acceptable attrition for strategic benefit."

  "Child soldiers," Quinn said. "By design. Not only because young minds bond better, but also because children are easier to indoctrinate. Because by the time we're old enough to question, we're already too corrupted to matter. And because we're renewable. There's always another generation of children to recruit."

  The communication research files were worse in some ways. Seven years of documented attempts to establish contact with entities. Progress reports showing increasing success. Evidence that entities could understand human communication, could respond with meaningful patterns, could be negotiated with rather than simply killed.

  Pattern recognition consistent with sapient awareness, one report read. Subject demonstrates capacity for symbolic communication. Recommend expanded contact protocols.

  Contact Event 7-Delta: Subject responded to mathematical sequences with complementary patterns. Subject demonstrated understanding of basic geometric concepts. Subject attempted to communicate spatial relationships that researchers are still analyzing. Preliminary assessment: intelligence comparable to or exceeding human baseline.

  "They knew," Zee said, her voice rough. "Seven years of research proving entities could think, could communicate, could be reasoned with. And then they just... stopped."

  "Not only stopped," Valoris corrected. "Buried. Because entities you can talk to are harder to justify killing. And they decided they needed us to keep killing so that the war could continue. They needed the crisis to remain permanent."

  The termination orders followed. Executive decisions shutting down programs that threatened the narrative. Researchers reassigned, transferred to classified facilities, disappeared into bureaucratic language that meant they'd been silenced one way or another.

  Communication research program discontinued per Executive Order 7-Alpha-12. All personnel reassigned. Documentation classified level five. Entity contact attempts terminated effective immediately.

  Addendum: Research findings incompatible with current strategic framework. Entity sapience, if publicly acknowledged, would undermine justification for elimination protocols. Recommend permanent suppression of communication research data.

  "Strategic framework," Milo said, and his voice cracked on the words. "They're talking about genocide like it's a policy decision. Like killing sapient beings is just part of maintaining their control structure."

  "It is," Saren said. "To them. That's exactly what it is. A policy decision. A strategic framework. An acceptable tradeoff for the power the crisis gives them."

  "Executive order," Quinn observed, their flat voice carrying something that might have been recognition. "Government level decision. Someone at the highest authority stopped the communication research. Not because it failed. Because it succeeded. Because success threatened the war they needed to maintain."

  "Because communication changes the narrative," Milo said. His voice was quiet but certain. "Entities you can talk to are harder to justify killing. People you can negotiate with are harder to frame as existential threats. And without the existential threat, without the permanent crisis, without the scared population under military control..."

  "They lose everything," Zee finished. "Their power. Their authority. Their justification for everything they've built on top of this lie."

  More files. More evidence. Personnel transfer records showing where the researchers had gone after the program ended. Most marked as "transferred to classified assignment" or "retired from service." Administrative euphemisms that could mean anything.

  The pilot retirement files confirmed everything Thrace had told them, but with clinical detail that made it worse. Corruption timelines documenting exactly how long pilots remained useful before dimensional contamination made them liabilities. Containment protocols describing how to manage pilots who'd become "dimensionally unstable." Research programs that used terminal pilots as test subjects because they were already dying, already contaminated, already convenient sources of data.

  Subject 7-Gamma-12 demonstrated advanced phase-shifting consistent with terminal corruption. Consciousness appeared to exist partially in dimensional space. Subject was utilized for research into dimensional interface mechanics before termination.

  "We're not soldiers," Milo said. His voice was barely audible. "We're resources. Weapons while we're useful. Research materials when we're not. And they don't tell us until it's too late to matter. Because we're renewable. Because there's always more children to replace us."

  "How do we know any of this is real?" Saren asked. The question came out sharp, challenging, but Valoris could hear something underneath it: desperation for the answer to be that it wasn't. "These files could be fabricated. Wraith could be working for command, feeding us false information to justify charges they already want to bring. We can't verify any of this independently."

  "You can verify some of it," Valoris said. "The communication research termination matches the gap we found in the database. The executive order number is consistent with the classified references we couldn't access. The names of researchers appear in other documentation we've already seen."

  "That could all be fabricated too. Consistent lies are still lies."

  "Then think about this." Valoris pulled up a file she'd saved specifically for this moment. "The barrier breach footage. The official recording that every pilot trainee sees in first-year orientation. The one that shows the moment the barrier collapsed and entities first emerged into our dimension."

  They'd all seen it. Everyone had. Shaky camera work capturing impossible geometries tearing through reality, the first entities emerging confused and desperate, the chaos of the initial breach before humanity understood what they were facing.

  "I've seen it a hundred times," Zee said. "What about it?"

  "Think about where it was recorded." Valoris's voice was quiet, but something in her tone made them all focus. "The official story says that no one could have predicted it, that the breach was a sudden catastrophe that caught everyone by surprise."

  She paused, letting them work through the implication themselves.

  "But there was a camera," she continued. "Already recording. Positioned to capture exactly what happened. During an event that officially couldn't have been predicted."

  Silence. Heavy. Suffocating.

  "That's..." Zee started, then stopped. Started again. "That's impossible. If the breach was unexpected, if no one knew it was coming, there wouldn't be cameras ready to document it. There wouldn't be footage at all."

  "Unless someone was expecting something," Valoris said. "Unless someone had cameras running because they were conducting an experiment. Because they wanted to record whatever happened when they tested weapons that could tear holes in reality."

  "We've watched that footage since we were children," Milo said slowly, his voice hollow. "First year of academy. Before that, even, in the preparatory programs. It's in every documentary, every training module, every piece of official history about the dimensional war. The foundation of everything we've been told about why we fight."

  "And none of us ever asked how it existed," Saren said. Her voice had changed, the challenging skepticism replaced by something that sounded like dawning horror. "None of us ever wondered why there was a recording of an event that supposedly couldn't have been predicted, captured by cameras that had no reason to be running."

  "Because we weren't supposed to ask," Quinn observed, their flat voice carrying an edge that hadn't been there before. "The question was hidden in plain sight. The impossibility of the footage existing was obvious if you thought about it for more than a few seconds. But no one thinks about things they've seen a hundred times. Familiarity breeds acceptance. They showed us the footage so often that it became wallpaper. Background. Truth we never examined because it was always there."

  "It's insidious, actually," Saren said, and there was something bitter in her admiration. "Hide the evidence of your crime inside the propaganda you use to justify the cover-up. Make the proof of what you did so ubiquitous that no one ever looks at it closely enough to see what it proves."

  "The files are real," Valoris said. "The evidence is consistent. And the barrier breach footage proves that whoever made these documents knew details that only someone present at the original event could have known. This isn't fabricated. This is the truth they've been hiding."

  The silence stretched longer this time.

  Milo was crying openly now, tears tracking down his cheeks, glasses fogging with the moisture of grief too large to contain. His connection to Buddy wavered, the interference patterns flickering as his concentration broke, but it didn't matter anymore. They'd seen enough. They knew enough. Whatever monitoring might resume, the damage was done.

  Zee's expression had hardened into something that looked like rage barely contained. Her hands were clenched at her sides, the predatory energy that usually found outlet in combat turned inward, seeking something to fight and finding nothing but abstract injustice that couldn't be attacked directly.

  Quinn had gone very still, their flickering stabilized into unnatural motionlessness that suggested they were processing at levels beyond normal human cognition, their partially dimensional consciousness working through implications that baseline minds couldn't fully grasp.

  Saren stared at the screen with an expression that shifted between horror and calculation, her logical mind warring with her moral convictions, the framework she'd built her life around crumbling under evidence she couldn't dismiss.

  "So everything we've done," Milo said finally, his voice breaking on every word. "Every entity we've killed. Every deployment. Every mission where we thought we were protecting humanity from monsters. We weren't defenders. We were executioners. We were killing refugees from a disaster we caused, and the people who sent us knew exactly what they were doing."

  "Yes," Valoris said. There was no softening it. No comfort to offer. Just truth, brutal and complete.

  "And command knows," Zee said. "Has always known. From the very beginning, from before any of us were born, they've known they broke the barrier, they've known entities are sapient, they've known they could communicate with them instead of killing them. They chose genocide anyway. They chose to build a military machine fueled by child soldiers and powered by processed corpses, and they chose to hide the truth so no one could stop them."

  "Yes."

  "All this time." Zee's voice cracked. "Decades of killing refugees. Millions of them, maybe. Billions. An entire civilization being driven to extinction because someone decided it was easier than admitting what they'd done. And we've been part of it. We've been their weapons. Their executioners. Their obedient little soldiers following orders we never thought to question."

  "We didn't know," Milo said, but the words sounded hollow even as he spoke them. "We couldn't have known. They hid it from us."

  "Does that matter?" Saren asked. Her voice was quiet. Controlled. But something underneath it was breaking, the foundations of everything she'd believed shifting beneath her. "We killed them. Whether we knew or not, we killed them. Our ignorance doesn't make them less dead. Our good intentions don't undo what we've done."

  "And now we know," Quinn said. "We can't unknow it. Can't pretend we didn't see this."

  "No," Valoris agreed. "We can't."

  Milo made a sound that might have been a sob. "I've been building weapons from their bodies. The mechs, the substrates, all of it harvested from entities we've killed. I've been helping process refugees into war machines and I didn't even know. I thought I was helping. I thought I was contributing to humanity's survival. And instead I was just..."

  He couldn't finish the sentence.

  "What do we do?" Zee asked, and the question held the weight of everything they'd learned. "Now that we know. Now that we understand. What do we do?"

  Valoris looked at her squad. At the people she'd led here, the family she'd built, the fractured pieces that had learned to function together through four years of transformation.

  She'd promised Saren they would decide together. That whatever came next, they would choose as a squad. And now the moment had arrived, and she had no idea what the right answer was.

  "We can't," Zee said. Her voice was certain. Absolute. "We can't keep doing this. Not knowing what we know."

  "We can't stop either," Quinn countered. Their flat affect made the words sound clinical, detached, but Valoris could see something breaking behind their eyes. "We're bonded. We're pilots. We're weapons by biological design. Refusing orders means execution or recycling."

  "So we're trapped," Milo said. "Damned if we serve. Dead if we don't."

  "There has to be another way," Zee insisted. "There has to be something we can do that isn't just compliance or suicide. Some alternative we haven't thought of."

  "Name one," Saren said, and her voice carried the cold precision of someone who'd already run the calculations and found no acceptable answers. "Name one option that doesn't end with us dead or complicit. Because I've been trying to find one since we started reading those files and I can't."

  The argument was building. Valoris could feel it, the pressure of incompatible positions colliding, of people who agreed on the problem but disagreed fundamentally on what to do about it.

  Zee wanted to refuse. To stop killing, consequences be damned.

  Saren saw no alternative to service, no path that didn't end in destruction.

  Milo was drowning in guilt that couldn't be absolved.

  Quinn was calculating survival odds with the detachment of someone who'd already accepted there were no good options.

  And Valoris was supposed to lead them, find a path through impossible terrain, a solution that honored everyone's perspective, a choice that didn't destroy them.

  She didn't have one.