Surit stood as the commander left the speaker’s platform. As the commander passed him, he gave Surit a complacent nod. He’d painted Surit as incompetent but not entirely criminal. The message was clear: if Surit swallowed his pride and backed up the commander’s version of events, they might all come out of this battered but unchanged.

Tennal sat forward expectantly. Beside him, Istara whispered something to Basavi.

Surit walked onto the marble slab of the speaker’s platform. It was exposed: spectators on all four sides. This didn’t seem to disturb him. He saluted the division commanders sitting on the side. He stood at ease. Then he turned to the Resolution’s eyes. “That isn’t true,” Surit said, in the clear, clipped tone of a soldier making a report.

“Told you,” Istara muttered, as the room started shifting and a murmur rose from the benches.

Surit seemed to take a perverse strength from that, like someone setting his face against the wind. “Oma had multiple remnants that weren’t surrendered to the Resolution. She took them from an abandoned facility in chaotic space, and she used them to brainwash people. Tennalhin and I—she fought us. We were synced. She was a merge of hundreds. If you want to know how she did it, maybe the remnants will help you. I don’t want anyone to have that kind of power again.”

“I see,” the Resolution staffer said. Tennal squinted at their tiny image on the screen. The swirling eye-shield the Resolution staff wore made it difficult to get a read on them. “We will investigate. Do you know where the remnants are?”

“I don’t,” Surit said, staring expressionlessly ahead of him. He must have noticed the death glares coming his way from the line of division commanders. In fact he did, because he turned to them and said, “One more thing. Sirs. I would like to take this opportunity to resign my post. I request a discharge without honors.”

“Wait,” Istara said beside Tennal. “What?”

Resign? Tennal stared at Surit. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all. Tennal was leaving the army, and Surit would stay in it and become a general or whatever. Surit was their model soldier. What about Surit’s years of officer academy? What about his parent’s pension?