Chapter 101: Trial of Glass
"Do you even know" he called, turning so the white of the uniforms became his backdrop, "who stands among you? You lifted up an outsider without a name and a soldier with blood under her nails!"
Feris didn’t breathe for a beat. The kind of stillness that starts as discipline and slides into panic when it runs out of air. Raizen felt it beside him like a drop in pressure.
"An unregistered prototype" Marcus went on, voice smooth as a new floor. "A pattern of night movements. A Warden attacked in the Underworks and two cadets fleeing the scene. Traitors to oath. Traitors to city."
Esen swore under his breath. Keahi shifted like a door about to close on someone’s hand. Raizen’s heart struck once, hard, then learned something.
Neoshima’s Hall of Deliberation was not a dark chamber with secrecy carved into the walls. It was glass and light. A dome next to the Spire’s shoulder, clear enough to make the sky part of the ceiling and the city part of the floor.
Tiered galleries wrapped the bowl - officials in one ring, captains and out-city delegations in another, citizens filling the upper seats like a soft storm. In the center, Solomon sat, hands folded, unreadable. The Council flanked him like parentheses.
Wardens lined the inner rail. The eight stood on a low platform where the floor array painted circles you could step into if you wished to be heard. Raizen and Feris were in the full light - the others a row of white behind them.
Marcus Valerius owned the room the way some men own silence. Black suit. Black pin. A stack of slim slates (Yes, a stack of them) on the podium that seemed to replenish when he set one down. He did not open with law. He opened with tone.
"Order" he said, without holding the right to ask for it. The room obliged him anyway.
Solomon’s gaze flicked once to Kori. A sign that meant "Not now... Wait." Kori obeyed, which meant holding her breath in a way that would hurt later.
Marcus’s smile arrived half a second before his voice. "Neoshima is generous" he began. "We welcome those without names. We turn children into defenders. But generosity without vigilance is just... appetite. So let’s feed you truth."
A ripple moved through the galleries - approval from the ring that liked sentences that sounded like virtues. Marcus set a pad on the podium and let it project a sheet of words into the air. The font had been chosen to look honest.
"First charge: assault on an officer of the Warden Corps, Lower East Underworks, alleyway off Vent D-12, late evening, twelve days ago." The report glowed and rotated. "Aggressive posture." "Obstructed justice." "Struck a uniformed officer in the course of duty." "Armed". Severe injuries registered.
Feris’s breath returned too fast. Her hands twitched and then locked behind her back. "What!? That’s -"
Raizen moved a half-step closer to the line of light on the floor. "Clarification" he said, and the floor caught his voice and warmed it for the room.
Marcus tilted his head as if indulging a child. "Go on, boy!"
"The officer’s badge ID?" Raizen asked gently. "And duty assignment that evening. Was he on Underworks collection? Or patrol? Or detainment?"
Murmurs rode the tiers. Marcus smiled wider. "Obstruct a tax retrieval. Call it what you want."
"Tax retrieval does not sit in the list with a Warden’s duties. Badge ID" Raizen repeated. "If this is a formal charge, you’ll have it."
Marcus’s jaw moved once. One of his pads whispered to life. "Warden Rhys Sato. Patrol scheduling... reassigned to Underworks collection that night."
Raizen nodded. "Sato." He took the name like a piece of glass and turned it in his palm. "Then there will be a discharge log for his taser. Did he file one?"
"Why would that matter?" Marcus asked without really wanting to ask.
"Because" Raizen said, still soft, "the taser hit me. If he filed the log, then we’ll at least agree about electricity. Force, or "defensive measures", call it as you like, should appear in this case, no?"
Marcus placed his palm flat on a pad. "The log was... delayed" he said. "Filed this week."
"In response to...?" Raizen went on.
"To the growing pattern of your movements" Marcus said. "We investigated."
"A safe answer" Raizen said. "But the discharge happened twelve days ago. A delayed log means the device sat without report. Either your Warden ignored protocol or your log was written to fit the story after the story began. Which truth do you prefer?"
A visible pause took the room. Feris’s shoulders loosened a fraction. Kori blinked once, the internal kind.
Marcus did not look at Solomon. He did not look at anyone. "Moving on. Second charge" he said, and threw a new projection into the air.
"Oh? Already giving up on the first? Anyways, go on."
The image was some grainy footage of two figures in the wrong light moving in a narrow corridor. "Unauthorized night transit. Unregistered prototype components leaving the Academy perimeter. Cadet Raizen seen with unlicensed equipment."
Raizen looked up at himself becoming a shadow. The camera had loved the wire that sloped over his shoulder. The rest was suggestion.
"Two things" he said politely. "One, the Academy perimeter scan line sits inside the actual wall on the south side by seven meters. It saves the Academy from paperwork. Two, the prototype is not an exoskeleton. It’s a harness. It only becomes a weapon if you throw me. Which you don’t have enough space to do."
He couldn’t say that the project was authorized by Solomon, the Ruler himself. But that didn’t really matter.
A few laughs fell out of the upper ring before anyone could stop them. Marcus let them die.
"Why were you out at night?" he asked. "Curfew exists for a reason."
"To return a bandana" Raizen said simply.
Marcus’s eyebrows flickered. "A what?"
"A square of cloth someone loaned me so I could keep my face, which turned out to be a medium value asset, and the city’s future, which turned out to have a price, from becoming a public museum before it was ready."
Marcus set down a pad. There, an image of the bandana in question - dark cloth, nothing on it but a shape that could have been a stain or a story. "To whom did you return it?"
"I don’t give names without purpose" Raizen continued. "We agree on that at least."
A murmur rolled the upper gallery. People liked it when the accused sounded smarter than the accuser. It made theater feel like it had teeth.
Marcus’s smile returned by habit, not joy. "Third charge: aggression toward lawful authority. Intent. I don’t need to prove you succeeded. I need to prove you intended to interfere."
"Interesting" Raizen said. "So not the act. The thought."
"Pattern matters" Marcus said. "A pattern of secrecy. An origin you can’t name. A habit of finding the wrong places."
"Origin" Raizen repeated, tasting the shape of it against his teeth. "Yes. We’re back to that."
He stepped fully onto the circle of the speaker’s light. It found him from above and below, glass holding the sky and the city. He looked like he belonged there, which was an offense all its own.
"It’s true" he said to the room, not to Marcus. "I may not have the right papers. Not the kind you can laminate and show at a gate. A lot of us don’t. Some of us were born under the wrong roofs. Some of us were born in the wrong stories. If the charge is that I arrived without a last name Neoshima recognizes, I can plead guilty and we can all go home."
A few heads bowed. A few chins lifted. That wasn’t the cut they came for.
"But if you want to talk about patterns" Raizen went on, "we can talk about timing. Report filed twelve days late, after a ceremony made me inconvenient. A Warden whose log appears only after a narrative needs it. Footage of "two figures" submitted without the angle that shows the woman I stood in front of so she wouldn’t lose her face to a uniform that had forgotten what it was for."
Feris sucked in air like it was medicine.
Marcus’s pinperfect smile flattened. "Careful."
"I am careful" Raizen said. "That is the complaint, isn’t it?"
He turned his head slightly toward Solomon without actually looking away from Marcus. "May I ask the chair one procedural question."
Solomon’s hands moved for the first time. "You may."
"Chain of custody" Raizen said. "For each piece of evidence." He lifted his chin toward the images. "The footage. The taser log. The witness statements. The city deserves to know whose hands held these items and when."
"You are not an advocate" Marcus said before Solomon could speak. "This is not your stage."
"You made it mine" Raizen said, but there was no triumph in it, only acknowledgment. "You put me here. I’m standing correctly."
Solomon leaned back as if to give the moment more room to breathe. "Counsel Valerius" he said mildly. "Our trial charter supports the request. Provide the chain."
Marcus’s pads were very busy for a few seconds. A map of names appeared and connected itself with lines that tried to look like the truth looks when it taps a wall three times just to see if it’s hollow.
The footage: submitted by an unregistered camera upkeep contractor, forwarded through a Warden office, tagged as "urgent" yesterday morning. The witness statements: collected by Warden Hevran, Hevran currently on leave for family reasons, unreachable.
"Thank you" Raizen said. "A question for the crowd."
The crowd, which wasn’t supposed to answer questions, leaned forward.
"If a thing is true" Raizen asked, "why does it need to arrive from five different directions at the exact minute the city’s attention is easiest to borrow?"
He didn’t look at Feris because that would have broken the spell. He didn’t look at Kori because that would have broken him. He kept his eyes on Marcus because that was the work.
Marcus spread his hands as if to say, look how open my palms are. "Rhetoric" he said. "You see? Charming boy. Unanchored facts. He speaks in pictures so you won’t notice the blank spaces. Let me fill them."
He gestured, and the door behind the podium opened to admit a Warden with a bandaged jaw. He wasn’t the one from the alley. The city didn’t know that. The city saw a bandage, a uniform and an oath. The city made quick math.
"State your name" Marcus said.
"Rhys Sato" the man said, which most probably wasn’t his name. The lie came out of his mouth wearing the right boots.
"Tell the court what you told me" Marcus instigated.
The man cleared his throat in a way that suggested practice. "Underworks, Vent D-12. Collection visit. Subject became uncooperative. The two subjects - male and female late teens - assaulted me. Loss of consciousness. Injury documented."
"Questions" Marcus asked politely, a mockery of process.
Raizen did not look at Feris. He did not say the thing his spit wanted to say. He stepped into the circle again, which was beginning to feel like a habit.
"Warden Sato" Raizen said. "Which hand do you use to draw your taser."
The man blinked. "Right."
Raizen nodded as if that were the answer he wanted. "You admit you used a tazer then. And you didn’t document it. And which side of your belt does your department require you to holster it on?"
Another blink. "Right."
Raizen’s face made almost a smile. "That would be... a problem."
"What problem" Marcus said. Fast. Not enough.
"The taser hit me in the left hand" Raizen said calmly. He touched the spot as if the electricity had only then thought of returning. "If you were face-to-face and you draw right-hand to right hip, hitting my left means crossing my body while I was... what? Standing still? Waiting politely? I move quickly. You brag about it when it suits you. So we have two choices. You either deployed at impossibly close range while I stood and watched you write my pain with your hand, or you were not in front of me at all."
A hush pooled. The Warden’s eyes slipped for a frame toward the exit door without asking permission. It was enough. Kori inhaled through her nose, slow, like a person smelling rain they could not yet see.
Marcus slapped a pad down like it was a fly. "This is theatrics" he said, and the room believed him a little because they wanted to.
"This boy thinks angles make him a lawyer."
"No" Raizen said. "Angles make me a map. So I can find my way back to the part where your story stops fitting."
He let the next blow land without moving to meet it. Marcus had more. He brought them out like knives - unregistered tool usage from the lab, a curfew broken here, a door opened there. More than half of them were lies. That was what made them useful.
"Pattern" Marcus said again. "Intent. He is not one of us. He moves like a ghost. And she -" a flick of his hand toward Feris "- cannot control herself long enough to respect law."
Feris’s composure cracked at the edges. "Respect law?" she asked, voice moving too fast for air. "I watched a Warden raise a baton over a woman who had less than nothing! And I- "
The room surged on the sound. Marcus turned, slow, delighted. "There" he said softly. "The temper of guilt."
Esen moved like he was about to do something stupid. Ichiro shut a hand around his wrist and made stillness a physical fact. Arashi had gone quiet enough to be a different person. Hikari had been whispering the same word under her breath for a long time. It sounded like "breathe".
Raizen put nothing into his face. That was the act. He asked, almost lazily, "Counsel Valerius, forgive me. Where did you say your witness works when he’s not pretending to collect taxes in a dead corridor?"
Marcus’s head snapped. "Order."
Solomon lifted his hand at last.
"Enough" he said, and the bridge of the room learned a new kind of silence. It wasn’t the quiet of shock. It was the quiet of rules being reminded they existed.
Marcus opened his mouth and then shut it again because power knows when to pretend to be patient.
The pause lasted one breath.
Suddenly, the front door unlatched with the loud, expensive sound of engineering working perfectly. The Wardens at that corner looked at each other, meaning to move and not moving. Every head turned. Even the drones drifted a fraction, as if magnetized.
Footsteps entered, unhurried, carrying weight without asking the floor for consent. Two figures entered, outlined by the Spire’s light turned into a vertical blade by the door.
Kori exhaled once, through her teeth. Not relief. Not fear. A sound with both in it. "Oh no. Ohh, no no no." she whispered, no volume at all.
Marcus’s expression shifted a millimeter. For him, that counted as panic.
"Who" Marcus asked, the first time today his voice missed its mark, "allowed you in here!?"
The figures stepped forward just enough for shapes to become people, for rumor to become breath.
The hall leaned.
And the door swung shut behind them like a promise.