The first thing Lysa noticed was the absence of edges.
The room had walls. She could see them. Four planes of smooth white meeting at clean angles. But when she tried to focus on where wall became floor, or where ceiling met corner, the lines blurred, like a badly rendered image.
Her head hurt when she looked too long.
She closed her eyes.
That hurt too.
The memory of steam and the waste level slammed into her.
Heat.
Screams.
Mara's voice cutting through the chaos.
Then nothing.
She opened her eyes again.
The white had not changed.
There were no chains.
No collar.
No visible door.
Just a table that had not been there a moment before and a chair facing it.
Lysa let herself feel the spike of fear.
Then she put it aside.
"Interesting," she said aloud. "You upgraded."
Her voice sounded flat in the space.
No echo.
No texture.
A man appeared in the chair.
Not appeared, exactly. He was simply not there one breath, and there the next, as if she had blinked and reality had decided to include him.
He wore a suit that was almost offensively ordinary.
Mid‑forties, maybe.
Hair neat.
Face unremarkable in a way that took effort.
His eyes were wrong.
Too clear.
Too calm.
"Hello, Lysa," he said.
His voice had that same smooth nontexture as the room.
"Let me guess," she said. "You are here to tell me this is not a prison."
"That depends on how you look at it," he replied.
He folded his hands on the table.
"No restraints," he added. "No physical coercion. You have water."
A glass appeared by her elbow, beads of condensation running down it.
"You have a chair."
The chair behind her became undeniable, a gentle pressure of presence.
"You are free to speak or stay silent," he said. "Hardly a cage."
Lysa did not sit.
"What is your name," she asked.
"You can call me Vale," he said.
"That is not an answer," she said.
"It is the only one you will get," he replied.
She almost smiled.
"At least you are honest about that," she said.
She walked to the nearest wall and pressed her palm against it.
It felt cool.
Not cold.
Not warm.
Nothing to dig nails into.
Nothing to pick apart.
"Where am I," she asked.
"A secure facility," Vale said.
"How original," she said.
"A secure facility designed to address the shortcomings of Twelve‑North," he continued, as if she had not spoken. "No exposed infrastructure. No convenient pillars. No cameras for you to steal. No collars to shatter."
He tilted his head.
"Do you see the advantage," he asked.
"For you," she said.
"For everyone," he replied. "If this arrangement works, no one has to be strapped to chairs anymore. The Board is very interested in solutions that look humane."
Lysa turned back to him.
"Humane," she repeated.
"Yes," Vale said. "You are alive. You are not being physically harmed. Your rights, such as they are, are being respected. We simply want to talk."
"'Simply'," she said.
"I understand your skepticism," Vale said, and she wanted to knock his teeth out for how sincerely he sounded it. "The Board has realized that brutal methods produce more martyrs than results. We are trying something else."
"Conversation," she said.
"Connection," he said. "Context."
Lysa laughed.
The sound came out sharper than she intended.
"You watched the same footage as everyone else," she said. "You saw what your 'context' looks like. Now you want to rebrand."
Vale's expression did not change.
"That footage has caused unnecessary distress," he said. "Panic. Misinterpretation. We hope you can help us correct the narrative."
There it was.
The leak.
The panic.
The Board's reflex.
Rewrite.
"You want me to say it was fake," she said. "Or isolated. Or taken out of context."
"I want you to tell the truth," he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
"You would not know what to do with it," she said.
"Try me," he replied.
He gestured to the chair.
"Please," he said. "Sit. This will go easier if we are not pretending you can break the walls by glaring at them."
Lysa considered staying on her feet out of pure spite.
Then she sat.
Spite was useful.
So was conserving energy.
The chair was exactly comfortable enough.
No more.
Vale smiled faintly.
"Thank you," he said.
"You keep saying 'we'," Lysa said. "Which part of 'we' are you. Board. Internal. Some new branch with a reassuring name."
"I work for Orion," he said.
The name landed like a small weight.
Of course.
"Not in your day‑to‑day sense," he added. "Think of me as… a liaison. Between operational needs and strategic concerns."
"Translation," she said. "You are here so the Board does not have to get its hands dirty talking to me."
"The Board prefers distance," he said. "That is not always an asset. They built Twelve‑North from thirty floors up. We are trying something closer to ground level."
He leaned forward slightly.
"Lysa," he said. "You are in a unique position. You know the Network's structure better than anyone still breathing. You understand Order protocols. You have lived long enough in the shadows to see their weaknesses. You also just helped orchestrate a raid that killed innocent people."
"Innocent is doing a lot of work in that sentence," she said.
"Techs with no clearance beyond their consoles," Vale said. "Cleaning staff. Junior guards on rotation. People who did not design the system. People who did not sign off on the labs. People whose families are watching the same footage and failing to recognize the screaming silhouettes as their own because we have not told them yet."
Lysa's jaw tightened.
She had counted them.
She had not named them.
"You want to make me feel guilty," she said.
"I want you to acknowledge reality," he said. "You are very good at pointing out the Order's sins. Less so with your own."
She met his gaze.
"That is the thing about cages," she said. "Everyone inside thinks the other side holds the key."
Vale's eyes sharpened.
"Nicely phrased," he said. "May I use it in a report."
"Bill me," she said.
He laughed.
It was short and genuine.
The sound made her skin crawl.
He tapped the table once.
The surface rippled.
Lines of text appeared, hovering slightly above it like projected documents with nowhere to be projected from.
She recognized headers.
INCIDENT REPORT: TWELVE‑NORTH.
Casualty lists.
System failure analyses.
"You have seen these," Vale said. "Or something like them, through your ally in Orion."
"Rian," she said.
"A useful crack in the wall," Vale said. "You are not the only one who looks for those."
He flicked his fingers.
Another set of files surfaced.
NETWORK ACTIVITY LOGS.
INTERCEPTED COMMUNICATIONS.
REDLINE DEVIANT PROFILES.
She saw her own name.
She saw Kael's code.
She saw Aiden circled in red so many times the digital ink looked angry.
"We know more than you think," Vale said. "We are not here to ask you to draw us a map. We can build our own."
"Then why am I here," she asked.
He smiled.
"Because maps are not everything," he said. "You understand motives. Fractures. Where the Network will not bend. Where it might. We need that insight."
"So you can kill us more efficiently," she said.
"So we can avoid killing more than we have to," he said.
She laughed again.
"You want me to help you do less damage," she said. "That is adorable."
"I want you to help avoid open war," Vale said. "Because that is where this goes if both sides keep escalating without listening."
"Open war already exists," she said. "You just hid it underground."
He tilted his head.
"You are stubborn," he said.
"You are persistent," she replied.
They regarded each other.
"Here is what I think," Vale said finally. "I think you do not want the city to burn. Not really. I think you want it scared enough to change, but not so scared it tears itself apart."
"You think you know what I want," she said.
"I think you want leverage more than you want bodies," he said. "Twelve‑North gave you that. The leak forced everyone to see what you have been shouting about for years. Congratulations. You won that round."
He let the words sit.
"But you are here," he added. "Which suggests your position is not as strong as you would like."
Lysa laced her fingers together on the table.
"What do you want," she asked. "A deal. A truce. A speech where I tell everyone to calm down and trust the nice people in uniforms."
"We want time," Vale said. "The Board needs to restructure containment. Publicly. With oversight. That will not happen if every step is met with sabotage and fresh leaks. People cling to what they know when frightened. They will choose collars over chaos if you force them."
"And you think I can stop the Network," she said.
"You can influence it," he said. "Your absence has already destabilized things. We are seeing more noise from smaller cells. Less coordination. If you speak, they will listen, even if they pretend not to."
"Speak and say what," she asked.
"Tell them to hold," he said. "To stop targeting infrastructure while the Board implements reforms. To give this city a chance to move without a gun to its head."
Lysa stared at him.
Then she shook her head.
"You are asking me to trust the same people who built the chairs," she said.
"I am asking you to accept they are not a monolith," he said. "Some of them are terrified. Some are ashamed. Some just realized the system they served is indefensible and are flailing for a way to fix it without admitting that out loud."
His gaze did not waver.
"You pushed them to that point," he said. "If you keep pushing, they will snap back. Hard."
She thought of Mara in the waste level, eyes bloodshot, voice raw.
She thought of Rian walking into a room he should never have stepped into.
She thought of Kael and Aiden, faces lit by the sliver's glow.
"If I refuse," she asked.
"We continue as planned," Vale said. "Tighter controls. Expanded surveillance. Quiet replacements of the worst facilities with ones you cannot find so easily. You remain here as a detained extremist. Your friends become targets on every patrol briefing. The Board consolidates around fear instead of doubt."
"And if I cooperate," she said.
"You talk," he said. "To us. To them. We use your knowledge to dismantle the most egregious abuses before they cause a full fracture. You remain alive. Possibly even on record, later, as someone who helped avert catastrophe instead of trigger it."
He spread his hands.
"It is not a clean choice," he said. "There is no clean version of this anymore."
Lysa sat very still.
The white room hummed faintly.
She could not tell if it was her own blood or some buried machine.
"You are very good," she said at last.
"Thank you," he said.
"That was not a compliment," she said.
He smiled.
"I know," he said.
She leaned back.
"You have made one mistake," she said.
"Only one," he asked.
"For now," she said. "You think fear pushes us the same way it pushes you. It does not. You are afraid of losing control. We are afraid of going back."
Her voice sharpened.
"You cannot threaten me with more of what you already did," she said. "You cannot say 'help us or we will build new cages' when I have seen the old ones. The only thing your offer changes is who gets to feel better when the next person screams."
Vale watched her for a long moment.
Then he nodded.
"Fair enough," he said. "Consider this, then. If you refuse, they will find someone else. Another liaison. Another rebel who wants the same things you do but is willing to work within our terms. Maybe someone younger. Less tired. Less haunted."
He let that sink in.
"You do not get to decide whether the Board tries to co‑opt the narrative," he said. "You only get to decide whether you are the one in the room when they do."
That landed closer than she liked.
Lysa looked at the wall again.
The edges still would not focus.
"How long do I have," she asked.
"To decide," he said.
He glanced at something only he could see.
"Not long," he said. "The city is already moving. Panic cycles, outrage spikes. If you are going to help shape that, it has to be soon."
He stood.
The chair made no sound against the floor.
"I will leave you to think," he said.
"About how to help you," she said.
"About how to help everyone," he replied.
He vanished.
Not in a flash.
He was simply not there anymore.
The table remained.
The water glass did, too.
Lysa picked it up.
The condensation felt real.
The cold felt real.
She tipped it out onto the floor.
The water hit and spread in a thin sheet.
After a second, it evaporated.
No mark.
No stain.
She laughed once, quietly.
"A cage for minds," she said.
She lay back on the cold not‑quite‑floor and closed her eyes.
She let herself picture Kael.
Stubborn.
Half broken.
Still standing.
She pictured Aiden, holding the sliver like it weighed more than he did.
She pictured Mara, stuck between a Board that wanted obedience and a conscience that would not entirely shut up.
She pictured the city.
Children watching screens.
Parents reaching for the remote.
Guards in barracks whispering when lights went out.
Vale had been right about one thing.
She did not want the city to burn.
She wanted it to look at the fire and understand who lit it.
She opened her eyes again.
No door had appeared.
That was all right.
She had never needed doors.
She had needed leverage.
And whether Vale understood it or not, putting her in a room built out of lies and calling it humane was leverage.
On them.
On her.
On everyone.
"Fine," she said to the empty air. "Let us talk."
Her voice did not echo.
Somewhere behind the walls, a sensor noted the words and flagged them.
In an office far above ground, Vale saw the notification blink.
He allowed himself a very small smile.
In a depot under a broken overpass, Kael jolted awake from a half sleep with the unshakable feeling that someone had just made a decision that would drag all of them somewhere they did not yet have a name for.