The Jailers' Balance

The leaf slides without a scrape.

I cross the threshold. The deliberation room is drowned in shadow, lit by the beams of a tactical terminal. Five silhouettes in robes lean over it. The former masters of the registries. Those who signed the erasures behind my back, while I dutifully filed my records.

They turn around.

The countdown hammers at my left temple. My breach demands its tribute, a mass of data equivalent to the erasure of three hundred wards, isolated for now behind my own firewalls. The pressure threatens to shatter my vision. My nose is still bleeding.

"Vassili," I whisper.

"Twenty seconds before the purgers blow the airlock behind you, Marga. Drop the charge."

One of the administrators makes a move toward the alarm console. I need no weapon to stop him. The white and gold armor of LEX.STATUA deploys over my shoulders, bracing my posture. My hand slices the air.

CASSATIO.

The injunction does not target their bodies. It targets their contract lines. The system requires a debt to balance the forced lock. I redirect the payment request, detaching the cost from the three hundred children to anchor it directly onto the registry files of the five men present.

An arithmetic transfer. Cold.

The administrator near the screen collapses. Not a single visible wound. The machine has just extracted the penalty from his legal existence, siphoning his identity down to the last decimal to settle my passage. The other four follow, struck down by the weight of an accelerated Dissolution they thought reserved for dissidents.

Their husks slump onto the marble. Shells emptied of their names.

The buzzing in my skull ceases at once. The balance is settled.

Behind me, the outer door explodes under the purgers' charges. I do not look back. I step over the five anonymous bodies, my eyes fixed on the entrance to the great dome.