Chapter 2: What Reyes Knows

The interrogation room was white—the specific, engineered white of Dominion secure detention, every surface the same flat shade so that depth became uncertain and time lost its texture against the walls. The ceiling was four meters up and felt closer. The air circulated through industrial scrubbers that removed particulate and odor, leaving something like atmosphere but quieter: a medium for sound rather than a context for living. Kael had studied the psychology of rooms like this one in her second year at the academy, the field manual theory of environmental neutrality as pressure, the mind deprived of external reference points and forced to generate its own contents. She had overseen more than two hundred interrogations in her career. She had not expected to find herself affected by the room.

Tomas Reyes sat across the single restraint table with his wrists secured at the anchor points and his spine straight. He had been in custody for six hours following the engagement. His uniform was damaged—a tear across the left shoulder from something ballistic, contact burns on his forearms—and he had declined medical attention when it was offered. He looked at her with the eyes of someone who had come to this room with something specific to say and was prepared to wait until it was said.

"The Consolidation never happened," Tomas Reyes said. "The official history of the first 50 years of the Dominion, the foundational narrative that justifies everything that came after—it's fiction."

Kael stood without moving, her face showing no reaction. She'd been in interrogations before. She knew the scripts, the techniques. She knew that prisoners lied, that they created narratives designed to destabilize, that Fracture indoctrination deliberately constructed false histories to justify defection. This was textbook destabilization doctrine.

She also noticed that she was still standing in the room.

"The Sovari were a spacefaring civilization," Reyes continued. He was calm, which was unusual. Terrified people fidgeted. Reyes sat still. "They had interstellar travel, settlement networks across three systems, a scientific culture. They didn't have military doctrine. They had libraries and observatories. When the first human colonial fleets arrived, they offered trade."

"This is Fracture propaganda," Kael said flatly. "I'm not interested in revolutionary mythology."

"Then why are you still standing here?" Reyes asked. "You could have your people execute the standard interrogation protocol. You could waterboard the location of the next Fracture supply cache out of me. You could datamine my neural patterns. Instead you're listening, which means some part of you already suspects this isn't propaganda."

He was right. She should have left. The interrogation was already being recorded; a junior officer could have continued it. Instead she was here, in the white room, standing in front of a prisoner who was speaking with the tone of someone delivering information rather than attempting escape.

She understood, at a professional level, why she was still here. She had been in enough interrogation rooms to know what strategic fabrication looked like. It was energetic—it had shape and direction and the particular forward lean of someone constructing something in real time. Reyes had none of that. He was reporting. The difference was visible if you knew how to read it, and she knew how to read it.