Chapter 10 - THE FALSE TRIGGER
The rifle used my partial biometric profile.
It expected one final response:
Aggressive correction after public humiliation.
Hale assumed I would seize the weapon and fire at him.
That reaction would complete the model.
I did not touch the rifle.
Daniel rerouted the system into diagnostic mode.
Nguyen cut the external targeting feed.
The ferry passed safely.
Then Hale appeared on a monitor.
“You’ve become predictable by refusing.”
Daniel answered:
“No. You’ve become predictable by believing every choice is data you own.”
Hale triggered the ship’s self-destruct sequence.
The team evacuated prisoners.
Daniel stayed long enough to copy the archive.
I stayed because he could not carry the equipment alone.
Not romance.
Partnership.
We escaped before the lower deck burned.
Hale fled by helicopter.
The copied archive exposed hundreds of falsified shooting records.
Some soldiers imprisoned for shots they never fired.
Some praised for shots taken by others.
Honor and guilt had both been manufactured.
Then one record named Emily Reed as deceased.
Date: five years earlier.
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Another woman had served under my identity.
Read Chapter 11 to discover the second Emily.
