Chapter 77: Live on Camera

The suit was navy, which Beth had selected and shipped overnight with a note that said armor should look like power in her clean handwriting. Grace put it on in the safe house bathroom mirror and understood what Beth meant.

Pete was in the kitchen when she came out. He looked at her for a moment with an expression that took a moment to assemble — not just pride, something more complicated, something that had grief in it alongside the other things.

"Your mother would be proud," he said. "I never was — I mean, I was, I always was, but I never said it, and I should have said it every day for—"

"Pete," she said.

He stopped.

"You can start now," she said.

He nodded. He didn't say anything else, which was the right call.

She picked up the folder. She thought about Caleb's photograph with the annotation beside it. She let herself feel what that was — the cold, specific fury of someone threatening what you love to control you — and then she translated it into something she could use.

She walked out.

The briefing room was Hargrove's territory and felt like it — the particular arrangement of power that comes from controlling who sits where and who enters first. Grace entered last, deliberately, which shifted the room's attention before she'd said anything.

Senator Crowe was already at the dais. Hargrove beside him. The C-SPAN camera in the corner was live, the small red light a detail that Grace held in her awareness throughout.

The screen behind the dais flickered on. Footage — the highway ambush, but cut to begin three seconds after the ESC operatives attacked, which meant the first image was Grace's hands mid-shift, the claws visible, and the angle making it look like aggression rather than defense.

"The evidence before this committee," Crowe said, with the confidence of someone who had practiced this, "demonstrates a pattern of uncontrolled supernatural escalation in a federal corridor—"

"The evidence before this committee," Grace said, from her seat, without raising her hand, "demonstrates what happens when serum-dosed human operatives attack a civilian motorcade on a federal highway. If you'd like to review the footage from two seconds earlier, you'll see the impact that preceded everything you're currently showing."

Crowe stopped.

The room recalibrated.

Grace opened the folder.

She had prepared remarks, but she'd also decided, on the drive over, that prepared remarks were for people who needed to hide behind language. She had the truth, which was both simpler and more dangerous.

She talked about the bond-severing serum — not as an allegation but as a demonstrated fact, citing Mitchell's test, citing Cole's recovery, citing the specific chemical notation Pete had identified in the ESC documents. She talked about the bridge-blood harvesting program. She talked about her mother, briefly, factually, because the personal was also evidence.

Crowe interrupted twice. She answered both interruptions without stopping her larger point, which was a skill she hadn't known she had until she needed it.

"The real threat is not supernaturals," she said, and she was looking at the C-SPAN camera now rather than the committee, because the room was a conduit and the camera was the actual audience. "The real threat is the people who have spent decades trying to turn us into weapons and are now trying to arrest the person most publicly opposing that project." She paused. "I have documentation. I have primary sources. I have the journal of a woman who died in 1987 in an ESC facility. I'm asking this body to look at all of it."

The room erupted. Not uniformly — some of it was the eruption of people who hadn't expected this and were recalibrating, some of it was Crowe's people moving to control the moment.

Two security personnel moved toward her from the side.

She was out of her chair before they reached it. The partial shift gave her the speed to be at the microphone stand before the room understood she was moving, and she took the microphone with both hands.

"The real threat isn't supernaturals," she said again, into the live feed, into the room, into the C-SPAN camera and whatever downstream broadcast was carrying this. "It's the people trying to turn us into weapons. I'm standing here with documentation that proves it and I'm asking anyone watching to ask why that documentation makes this committee so uncomfortable."

Then she set the microphone down and walked toward the service corridor door.

Pete was in the corridor, which she'd known he would be because she knew him now, which was a thing she hadn't expected to be able to say three months ago.

They moved fast. The building's service corridors had a specific logic — the infrastructure of a large institutional space, all utility and right angles. Pete had memorized the floor plan. She followed his lead.

The shot came from behind them in the east corridor and grazed her left arm — the same shoulder she'd hit in the morning, which felt like the universe making a point. The pain was information. She filed it and kept moving.

The blood from the graze did something she hadn't anticipated. The shift arrived faster and more completely than it had since the training field with Pete — full claws, the amber pushing into her vision, the world going layered and precise. She was aware of Pete behind her, aware of the two pursuers, aware of the exit at the end of the corridor in a way that bypassed language.

She put herself between Pete and the second pursuer and it was short and it was efficient and she was very careful about what she did and didn't use.

The back exit opened onto a service road. A white van. A woman in an SRC jacket at the wheel who said, "Get in," without looking at them.

They got in.

The phone lit up before the van had gone a block. Caleb's face, and behind him — she looked closely — the specific motion of someone in a physical confrontation, his shoulder dropping and recovering in a way she recognized.

"I'm coming for you," he said. His voice had the particular quality of someone doing two things at once and allocating language to the less urgent one. "I'm already in D.C. Hold on."

"Caleb—"

"I'm coming," he said. "Hold on."

Behind him, through the small phone screen, she watched him move through something she couldn't fully see and felt through the bond as heat and velocity and the focused attention of a wolf who had decided on his direction.

She held on.