THE ASTRONAUT'S FORBIDDEN GIRL
Chapter Seven: Vouch
The press conference was Kai's idea, which Wren found out only when she arrived at the Institute's main atrium to find cameras already set up and Kai standing at a podium that had clearly not been arranged through any official Institute channel.
"Tell me you cleared this with someone," Wren said, catching him by the arm before he stepped up.
"I cleared it with myself. That's usually enough." He glanced at her, something steady and slightly nervous underneath the composure. "You don't have to stand up here. I can do this alone."
"Absolutely not. If you're about to torch your own family's reputation on live broadcast, I'm not letting you do it without backup."
That was six minutes before the conference started. This part of the story actually goes back a full day earlier, to the moment Doyle had walked into Wren's guest quarters holding a folder thick enough to double as a doorstop.
"I called in every favor I have left," Doyle had said, dropping the folder on the table. "Which, after fifteen years of quietly asking questions nobody wanted answered, turns out to still be a fair number. This is the disposal manifest I flagged back then. This is the internal Osei Dynetics decommissioning report attached to it, which I was never supposed to see a second time. And this," he tapped the last page, "is a maintenance access log from the Institute's containment facility, cross-referenced against every date one of the four sabotaged Frames failed."
Wren scanned it, and felt the same cold settle in her stomach that she'd felt looking at the EMBER scan for the first time. "Someone accessed the containment facility each time. Someone with clearance."
"Someone with clearance who used a junior technician's credentials to do it," Doyle said. "Priya's credentials, specifically. She didn't do this. I'd stake what's left of my career on that. But someone used her access badge, four separate times, at hours when she was documented elsewhere."
"Who has access to steal a junior tech's credentials without her noticing?"
"Someone senior enough that nobody questions them walking through a restricted area," Doyle said. "Someone with a personal reason to make sure this investigation lands on you instead of on whoever actually built Project EMBER fifteen years ago and buried it somewhere it was supposed to stay buried."
Kai had gone quiet at that, working through something with the particular stillness Wren now recognized as him arriving at a conclusion he didn't want. "Selene's family sponsor liaison has containment-level clearance," he said finally. "Vantage-Hale funds a significant portion of Institute security infrastructure. It's part of their sponsorship package. If someone inside that liaison's office wanted access to Priya's credentials, it wouldn't be difficult."
"You think Selene is behind this."
"I think Selene has spent every match since your qualifying race publicly panicking about being replaced by you," Kai said. "I don't think Selene has the technical knowledge to fake a fabrication signature or plant sabotage in someone else's Frame. I think someone close to her, someone with both the access and a much older reason to care about EMBER staying buried, might be using her fear as cover."
That had been the moment the plan for the press conference was born, over the folder, over a long and uncomfortable night of deciding exactly how much of the truth could be said publicly without getting all three of them buried right alongside Project EMBER.
Now, in the atrium, cameras rolling, Kai stepped up to the podium with Wren beside him, and began speaking before anyone from Institute press relations could stop him.
"Fifteen years ago, my family's company ran a classified research program called Project EMBER," Kai said, his voice carrying clean and level across the room. "I have documentation showing that program was never properly decommissioned. Instead, its central component was disposed of through a Lower Ring scrap contract, deliberately routed somewhere it would never be found by anyone with the resources to understand what they were looking at."
A ripple went through the assembled press. Kai didn't pause for it.
"That component ended up, by pure chance, in the hands of a sixteen year old engineer who built her own Frame from spare parts because no one gave her any other option to compete in this arena. She did not build the technology currently under investigation. She inherited a piece of my family's negligence and has spent the last three weeks being treated like a suspect for surviving it."
"Mister Osei," a reporter called out, "are you accusing your own family's corporation of criminal disposal of hazardous experimental technology?"
"I'm telling you what the documentation shows," Kai said. "I've submitted copies to Trials Compliance and to the Combine oversight board this morning. I'd rather my family answer for what they actually did than let an innocent competitor take the fall for it."
Wren stepped forward before she'd fully decided to. "I want to add one thing," she said, and the room's attention swung to her, sharp and sudden. "The sabotage pattern that got me suspended used a stolen technician's credentials to access secure containment four separate times. I have reason to believe someone connected to a rival sponsorship office is responsible, using another pilot's public rivalry with me as cover for something with much older, much uglier roots. That pilot is not the one who did this. I want to be very clear about that, on the record, before anyone decides to make her the next scapegoat the way they tried to make me one."
Across the room, near the back of the assembled press, Wren caught sight of Selene, standing very still, her expression unreadable in a way that had nothing performative left in it at all.
The questions came fast after that, a wall of noise Wren barely tracked, until Director Achebe pushed through the crowd looking like a woman whose entire week had just gotten immeasurably worse.
"This conference is concluded," Achebe said, loud enough to cut through the noise, and then, quieter, to Kai and Wren alone. "My office. Both of you. Now."
They followed her out, past the cameras, past the reporters still shouting questions, and Wren felt Kai's hand find hers for exactly one second in the crush of the crowd, brief and warm and gone before anyone could see it, a small, private acknowledgment of everything neither of them had said out loud yet.
In Achebe's office, the director closed the door, sat down heavily, and looked at both of them for a long moment before speaking.
"I've had Vantage-Hale's chief security liaison on my comm for the last four minutes, demanding I retract your statement before it airs," Achebe said. "I did not retract it. I am currently reviewing containment access logs from the last two weeks, cross-referenced against every staff member with clearance, and I expect to have a name within the hour."
"You believe us," Wren said.
"I believe your documentation, which is considerably harder to argue with than either of your reputations," Achebe said, dry. "Your suspension is lifted, effective immediately, pending the outcome of this new investigation. Your Frame remains in containment until we understand what EMBER actually is, which is a separate problem from whether you personally sabotaged anything. I don't think you did."
Relief hit Wren harder than she expected, enough that she had to steady herself against the edge of the desk. Beside her, Kai let out a breath he'd clearly been holding since the podium, and for a moment the two of them just stood there, side by side, absorbing the fact that the last three weeks had not, in fact, ended in the disaster either of them had quietly braced for.
"You could have just given the documentation to Achebe privately," Wren said, once the director had stepped out to make a call. "You didn't have to say all of that in front of every camera in the Combine."
"I considered it. Privately, my family's lawyers would have had four days to bury it before anyone outside a Council subcommittee ever saw a page." Kai leaned back against the wall, looking, for the first time since she'd met him, genuinely uncertain rather than composed. "I wanted it to be impossible to bury. That meant doing it where everyone could see, including my own family."
"They're going to be furious."
"They're going to be furious," he agreed. "I've been thinking about that since last night, and I keep arriving at the same answer. I would rather be someone my family is furious with than someone Milo draws an insulting picture of and turns out to be right about."
"That's a low bar to clear."
"I told you. I set a low bar for myself in the registration line. I've been trying to clear a better one ever since."
She looked at him properly then, past the composed exterior he'd worn like armor since the day they met, and found something underneath it that she hadn't let herself examine too closely until now, not with cameras and hearings and sabotage taking up all the available space for feeling anything at all.
"For what it's worth," Wren said, "I don't think you needed the low bar. I think you've been better than you let yourself believe this whole time."
Kai didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost every trace of its usual composure. "That might be the nicest thing anyone from outside my own sponsorship contract has ever said to me."
"Don't get used to it."
"I intend to get used to it immediately."
The moment held a beat longer than either of them strictly needed, close enough in the small office that Wren could hear him breathe, and for one dangerous second she thought he might actually close the last of the distance between them. Then Achebe's voice carried back through the door from the hallway, sharp with urgency, and the moment folded itself away, unfinished, into the growing list of things neither of them had said out loud yet.
Achebe's comm chimed. She read the message, and her expression went carefully, deliberately blank in the exact way Doyle's had, back in his office, three days into a conversation none of them had wanted to have.
"We have a name," Achebe said quietly. "The credentials used to access containment belong to Priya Malhotra. She is not the one who used them. The access logs show them used remotely, routed through an authorization override that only one person at Vantage-Hale's Institute liaison office is cleared to issue."
"Who," Wren said, though some part of her already suspected the answer.
Achebe looked up, and for the first time all week, something like genuine unease crossed her face.
"Selene Vantage's own mother," she said. "Head of Vantage-Hale's Institute sponsorship division. Which means whatever Project EMBER actually was, someone senior enough to have known about it fifteen years ago is still protecting its secret today, and just used her own daughter's sponsorship access to do it."