Chương 32: Hope

The nanomachines in a creature's body compare its prowess against humans on its native planet, assigning it the grade and tier of a typical human who could take it down in a fair fight. There are complications - creatures that live in groups are graded based on the danger of the group as a whole, not the individual. The system is imperfect. It is also the best we have. - Rutherford Pokerman, Lead Researcher under the Fifth Head of the First Brain's Faction Kara was not entirely sure how he had ended up on a roof.

He had followed Moghli out of the cafeteria and through the residential section of the University - past students in various states of semester-break celebration, past one professor who regarded the whole scene like a man personally wronged by the concept of leisure - up some stairs, down some other stairs, through a door that required Moghli's interface to open, and out onto a roof that did not appear on the campus map when Kara checked.

It was a flat expanse of coral, clean and bare, positioned near the edge of the bubble. There were just a few dozen feet between the roof's perimeter and the curved wall of the dome, close enough that the outside was present and visible. Shapes moved in the dark water beyond the glass. A fish of considerable size drifted past leisurely at an angle, gave the two of them a mild look that suggested it had seen stranger things, and continued on.

The space sat apart from the rest of the world, a pocket of stillness held inside the constant hum of the city. Moghli caught his breath. He had moved quickly.

"First," he said, holding up a finger, "the lecture." It was a thorough lecture. He covered how unwise it was to reveal sensitive information in public spaces regardless of the nominal privacy guarantees of private booths, the possibility of individuals with hearing-related skills in the vicinity, the general principle that information shared in the wrong context tended to travel in directions you had not intended.

He delivered all of this with the measured precision of a senior who had thought about these things and wanted to make sure the thinking was transferred. Kara stood and took it with the look of a man who had made a mistake and understood exactly how big it was. Because he had, and he did.

"That said." Moghli's voice shifted. He put a hand on Kara's shoulder, and the grip was firm in a way that was less corrective and more steadying.

"I don't know how you've held yourself together for this long. Whatever you've been carrying, well, that takes something. I'm sorry I wasn't reachable sooner." He paused, wording the next sentence carefully.

"I can't promise I'll be on your side. But I can promise that what you tell me will not reach the wrong ears." The grip on his shoulder grounded him somehow. He had not expected that. He told Moghli what he knew. The merfolk's warning, the underwater city, what he had learned about the charges. He left out the three years on the island, said instead that he had been in isolated training, which was close enough to true to feel defensible, and he felt Moghli note it without pressing.

"So you had no contact with Ghilim or your parents for three years," Moghli said, when he had finished.

"And when you came back, you found they were caught up in something serious, and gone." Put like that, it sounded ridiculous.

"If it weren't for one of my skills and your clear lack of skill in the art of dishonesty, I would never have believed you. Phinx and I have been wondering about your composure," Moghli continued, a wry shift in his voice as he moved from the serious to the adjacent.

"I'm still fairly convinced there's a high rarity skill involved. But circumstances clearly played a role too." He looked at Kara.

"And no, whatever the three years involved, I don't need to hear about it tonight. I have limits." Kara was quiet. The box was opening. He could feel it. Not all at once, just the edges, the contents pressing outward now that the situation around him finally let them. He had been holding it in for months. He sat down on the coral floor. Moghli produced a bottle from somewhere, having clearly arranged for it in advance, and handed it down.

"Saturn. Moderate alcohol, and a few other properties. You'll want it." Kara accepted it, looked at it, and took a sip. He did want it. It was deeply sour. He managed not to spit it out, but it was a near thing. Then a warmth spread from his chest outward, something other than the alcohol, arriving in the exact spot where the tightness had been sitting for however many months, and loosening it a little. Stolen story; please report. He kept drinking.

Moghli sat beside him and talked for a while - about Narak, about the politics, about what had been happening at the University while Kara was elsewhere. He mentioned that Narak had been openly against the movement against Ghilim, which Kara registered but could not fully process while he was occupied with the box and its contents. At some point Moghli seemed to understand this and simply sat beside him. The shapes outside the bubble continued their slow passage. The University hummed to its own rhythm.

Kara sat on the roof and let what he had been carrying sit beside him for a while rather than inside him, and the difference was significant. He did not cry. He held himself together in the way he had learned to, which was not the same as not feeling it. It was feeling it at a pace he could manage, rather than all at once. After a while, half an hour maybe, he came back to himself enough to ask the thing he had come here to ask.

"Did he do it?" Moghli had been somewhere in his interface. Something running quietly in the background, one of the several threads busy people always seemed to keep going. He closed whatever it was and gave Kara his full attention.

"Let me tell you what I know. My senior - Monk - was on the dive." He paused, organising the account.

"He wasn't present when the incident happened, but he arrived in the immediate aftermath. He found the teammate mauled by a beast. Lucianne was in pursuit of Ghilim, who had apparently led the beast away while defending it. Monk went to the teammate rather than following since he was badly injured but by the time he was brought to the exit, he was gone. Monk then followed the blood trail and found Lucianne unconscious. Slightly injured, nothing severe. She recovered fully within a couple of days."

Kara listened without moving.

"At the hearing, this is what Lucianne said. She and the teammate had engaged the beast - standard for a dungeon dive. They had injured it. Just before they could finish it, Ghilim arrived and distracted them. The beast took the opportunity and mauled her teammate. When she gave chase, Ghilim defended the beast and ultimately knocked her unconscious using his illusions." He paused, thinking about how to frame the next part.

"She stated that after rendering her unconscious, he violated her sexually. That the illusions confused and disoriented her in a way she couldn't resist. Later examination found injuries that supported the claim." Silence.

"Monk's account did not confirm or refute the violation. He stated that he found her with fewer clothes than would be standard for beast hunting. He could not speak to what had happened before he arrived." Kara sat with all of this. He had known the broad shape of it from the receptionist, from Narak's careful half-revelations. Hearing it laid out completely was different. It was the difference between knowing the shape of a room and standing in it. He did not believe it. Not the violation.

He knew his brother, and what he knew of his brother did not contain the incident being described. But not believing it and having a counter-argument were different things, and he had no counter-argument. Only what he knew of a person, which was not evidence. He looked down at the bottle in his hands.

"I don't - " he started, and stopped. He tried again.

"I'm not trying to accuse anyone. But is there any chance - even a small one - that Monk - ""That Monk found her unconscious and was the one who violated her," Moghli said, completing it without judgment.

"That the account he gave protected himself rather than described what happened." Kara looked at the floor. The discomfort of having asked it sat in him like something he could not put back but was not sure what to do with.

"I won't tell you the thought is unreasonable," Moghli said.

"You're protecting your brother. You should ask hard questions." He was quiet for a moment.

"What I will tell you is that I believe Monk. I have interacted with him for a year. I know what it looks like when he's telling the truth, and what it looks like when he isn't. I am not infallible. But I believe him." Kara absorbed this. Moghli's read of people was not incidental, it was his professional instrument. If he said he believed Monk, that was not the same as casual reassurance.

"What I think," Moghli continued, more slowly, "is that Lucianne may not have been telling the truth. That is the gap in this account. Monk's version is consistent and I believe it. Lucianne's version adds something that Monk did not witness and that only she can account for." He paused.

"Whether that addition was true or not is the question nobody has been able to answer, partly because the person most capable of addressing it could not defend himself at the hearing." Because of the speech. Because of the writing, which was too slow to defend in a live court session with the odds stacked against you. Because of his lack of any influential connections. The entire architecture of Ghilim's disadvantage had been built into the situation from the start.

Kara looked out at the bubble, at the dark water beyond it, at the shapes moving at their own pace. Moghli got to his feet and stretched, done giving what he had to give and ready to move.

"Your secret stays in safe hands. I hope this helped - even a little." Kara stood.

"More than a little. I don't know how to - ""You don't have to." Moghli picked up the empty bottle.

"Come on. In your current state I don't trust you to find your own room." They walked back through the University, through the party noise and the quiet sections between it. He had a direction now. He had more of the shape. That would have to be enough.