Chapter 21: The Emblem Question
The day bled out of the building in slow motions—clerks sliding chairs into neat rows, the shuffle of files into cases, the low static hum of climate control still ringing in Chris's ears as he stepped through the glass doors of IP Oversight. Three days had passed since the Yang twins' session, and the weight of what he'd witnessed there still pressed against his thoughts like an unresolved equation.
Sector 8B in late afternoon had its own rhythm. The stone walkways still held the warmth of the sun, and the air carried the faint bitterness of boiled tea from a vendor's kettle on the corner. The façades here were older, built to endure—symmetrical blocks of muted stone and mirrored glass that revealed nothing of the work inside. Even the traffic seemed rehearsed: aides in pressed suits clutching tablets against their chests, couriers threading gaps with chained briefcases, a black convoy slipping down the avenue without a single raised voice.
It was a place that moved to its own internal metronome, where even the pauses carried weight.
Chris stopped on the steps, allowing the current of bodies to part around him. For a moment, he simply watched, the strange awareness settling again—he was inside the system now, yes, but not of it. His badge got him through the doors, but the mirrored towers did not see him as one of their own. The piggyback device had called him "Master," but the Republic still treated him like a foreign variable in its carefully balanced equations.
That was when he noticed her.
She stood by a marble planter, not leaning, not resting, but occupying the space with deliberate ease—as if she had placed herself there to be noticed when the right person finally looked. Her shirt was cream linen, sleeves rolled loosely; her dark hair was tied back without fuss; a leather satchel hung from her shoulder, worn soft at the edges. She wasn't staring into a device like everyone else. Her eyes tracked people—who stepped aside without thinking, who held their line, who glanced at the convoy that had just slowed at the curb.
When Chris's eyes found hers, she didn't look away. Instead, the faintest curve of a smile touched her lips, as though she had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Long day?" she asked, her accent soft, more felt in the vowels than the consonants—a Gaule Republic cadence that made the question sound less casual than it should have.
Chris studied her before replying, weighing the angle. Something about her stillness reminded him of the IP Oversight chambers—purposeful, controlled, designed to extract information. "Depends on who's asking."
"Camille Moreau," she said, as if the name itself carried weight. "Journalist, mostly. Sometimes I ask questions, sometimes I go looking for answers. You looked like someone who might do both."
"That sounds like a slow way to learn anything useful."
"It's the only way to see the parts that don't get written down in official reports."
A black sedan had stopped ahead, its door opening with mechanical precision. A man stepped out, his jacket cut too well for anything but clan tailoring. A gold emblem caught the sun on his lapel—stylized, unmistakable. At its base, a Roman numeral III glinted faintly in the afternoon light.
The change on the street was immediate, though no one spoke of it directly. Aides adjusted their steps to create more space. A vendor paused mid-sale, his eyes tracking the emblem with automatic deference. Security at the ministry gate nodded the man through without breaking stride, their recognition so smooth it seemed choreographed.
Chris felt it too—the automatic urge to shift his weight aside, to make room, even though he despised himself for the instinct. His hand unconsciously moved to his own chest, where no emblem rested, where no mark of belonging declared his place in the hierarchy.
"You see?" Camille asked quietly, her voice carrying the satisfaction of someone whose point had just been proven.
"I've seen them before," Chris said, his jaw tight. "Some kind of rank insignia."
"They are called emblems," she replied, settling into the role of explainer with practiced ease. "But don't mistake them for simple rank indicators or hereditary jewelry. They are earned through contribution and ranked by influence. Rank One is the visible face—enforcers, administrators, those who police the everyday functions. Rank Two belongs to creators whose work has been carved into the ledger of their House, whose innovations generate ongoing value."
She lowered her voice as the man with the III emblem disappeared into the ministry building. "Rank Three... is where the real gravity lies. If you meet one, tread carefully unless you must speak. They are dangerous, not because they are cruel, but because nothing they say or hear belongs only to them. Their words travel further than they do, and their attention can reshape careers—or end them."
Chris watched the space where the man had vanished, processing the casual display of power. "Sounds less like honor and more like a leash with extra privileges."
"It is both," Camille said, her tone carrying the weight of observation rather than judgment. "A leash and a passport. The higher you climb, the more doors open—services, housing, deference in lines, silence in rooms that were once loud. But each step costs you your privacy, your spontaneity, even the right to be ordinary. The system gives people everything they think they want, and in giving it, makes certain they never slip the harness."
They moved together toward the tram stop, the conversation flowing with the kind of ease that felt both natural and calculated. A woman in a blue suit joined the line ahead of them, her emblem catching the light as she moved. Without glance or gesture, the queue shifted, space opening for her to step forward. No resentment showed on the faces around her, no muttered complaints or rolled eyes. A boy near the end of the line looked to his father; the man placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and gave the slightest shake of the head.
Lesson learned in silence.
"You are seeing the polite version," Camille murmured, noting Chris's attention to the subtle choreography. "There are others."
Chris narrowed his eyes, recognizing the setup for a deeper revelation. "Such as?"
She didn't answer immediately. Her gaze lingered on the tramlines, then returned to him with the careful timing of someone who understood the value of information. "A week or so ago, there was a pod shop on the east fringe. Wall Pod. Harmless enough, until it wasn't. A Sky enforcement team arrived with backup, shut it down before the owner understood what he had done wrong. One of the pods was dismantled on the floor while customers still watched through the windows."
Chris felt his chest tighten, but kept his expression neutral. The memory of that day was still sharp—Jamie's desperation, the sudden arrival of enforcers, the way everything he'd known had collapsed in a matter of hours.
"The whispers say it wasn't hardware failure," Camille continued, watching his face carefully. "The session records showed the pod behaving like classified training gear—military-grade neural feedback in civilian hardware. That's not something you stumble across by accident."
"Equipment malfunctions happen," Chris said carefully, testing how much she actually knew.
"Perhaps. But then there were the Yang twins, with their semi-VR demonstration in the plaza. Another harmless project, until it wasn't. A child left that simulation shaking, people swore it felt more real than any civilian system should allow. Then it was gone, stripped away and rewritten, re-emerging as ECSE-v2—a properly registered medical engine filed through your building."
Her eyes held his now, the casual pretense dropping away. "And you work in IP Oversight. If ECSE-v2 exists as they say, it passed across a desk near you. Perhaps even yours. So—have you seen anything unusual?"
Chris let the pause grow, recognizing the journalist's technique even as he calculated his response. The connection she was drawing was accurate but dangerous. Too much detail in his denial would sound rehearsed; too little would sound evasive.
"You ask a lot for someone I met five minutes ago," he said finally, allowing a tight smile that suggested he was ending the game rather than playing it. "Who exactly are you, Camille?"
She didn't bristle at the deflection. If anything, she seemed pleased by his wariness. "My father works with the House of the Thunder. Not one of the pillars, but steady enough in its domain. There's a partnership developing between Thunder and Gaule for a new cultural venture program."
Chris raised an eyebrow. "Cultural ventures?"
"Cuisine, specifically. Not just pastries and wine, but something more comprehensive. Market-building through taste—grafting flavors until what is foreign feels as though it has always belonged." Her smile carried a hint of conspiracy. "Food is power because it doesn't look like power. You put it on the table and people take it willingly. Memory wraps itself around taste. Soon it feels wrong to eat without it. That's how you carve a place in a nation without ever planting a flag."
The tram chimed its arrival, the sound cutting through their conversation like a timer expiring. She turned back toward the avenue as Chris stepped aboard, but not before catching his eyes one final time.
"If you ever see anything unusual in those IP files," she said, her voice pitched just loud enough to carry over the tram's electrical hum, "remember that some stories deserve to be told. And some journalists know how to protect their sources."
Chris caught one last glimpse of her through the tram's window—still watching the crowd with that same calculating ease, eyes marking patterns others ignored. As the tram pulled away, he wondered whether she had found him by chance or design, whether her questions were driven by journalistic curiosity or something more purposeful.
For the first time since arriving in the Republic, he felt like someone was tracking his movements not for punishment but for opportunity. Whether that made Camille Moreau an ally or a threat remained to be seen.
But as the city slid past the tram windows, Chris couldn't shake the feeling that his careful anonymity was beginning to crack. The piggyback device had recognized him as "Master." Now a journalist was asking pointed questions about the exact incidents he'd been involved in.
The walls of invisibility he'd built around himself were becoming transparent, and he wasn't sure whether what lay on the other side was salvation or exposure.
The tram carried him deeper into the Republic's ordered streets, but Chris felt increasingly like he was traveling toward something that would demand he choose sides in conflicts he didn't yet understand. The conversation with Camille had been a test of some kind, though he wasn't certain whether he had passed or failed.
What he did know was that neutrality was becoming harder to maintain, and soon he would have to decide whether his loyalties lay with the system that employed him or the forces working to expose its hidden operations.
The city's lights began to flicker on as evening approached, each one marking another secret, another choice deferred, another day survived in the space between belonging and exile.
But the space was shrinking, and Chris suspected that very soon, he would be forced to step definitively to one side or the other.