Chapter 320

I dragged the marker to the beginning of the file again, letting it hang on the first frame while I collected my thoughts. The video’s timestamp caught my attention first – or what remained of it. A blurry clump of eroded light text sat in the bottom left corner, mangled beyond readability. After letting the file loop a few times, I wasn’t sure there was much point in discovering when the interrogation took place, but if I ever needed to, it was probably possible.

More telling was the camera angle. Unlike typical interrogation footage shot from the downward angle of a closed-circuit camera, this was positioned like a deposition – over the shoulder height, mounted on a tripod. The quality and ground-level placement suggested expensive equipment, and whoever set it up cared more about pageantry—making sure the subject felt the pressure of being recorded—than protecting their gear. In terms of budgetary bureaucracy, that was pretty much sacrosanct.

The subject, centered in the frame, was a young Caucasian man, somewhere between sixteen and nineteen. His expression was hard-edge masquerading as aloof. A cracked, faded, black zip-up jacket concealed his arms and the palm portion of his hands, loose-fitting enough to suggest it wasn’t bought new but handed down or thrifted.

Jackson took the turn more aggressively than usual. “How bad is it?” The mere presence of someone watching the video near him seemed to set his teeth on edge, speaking to whatever experience he’d had with the feds.

I rubbed my hands together, feeling cold inside and out despite the car’s thermometer reading a balmy seventy-three. “Depends. Nothing as terrible as you were expecting. Still. Hard to stomach. In a sick way, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Jackson grimaced, gunning it through a yellow light just before it turned red. “Guessing it’s a problem for him then. The fed.”

“Worse than a problem. It’s devastating.” I shook my head, watching streetlights blur past. “The logic of keeping it is beyond me. This leaks to the general public before the dome, his career is over, no question. Hell, it could still hurt him now. Less than before. But people would never stop looking at him sideways.” I rested my head on my fist. “The best thing he could have done is make sure there was zero chance anyone ever saw it, and I mean zero.”

“Specks said there was an attempt to delete it.” Jackson’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.

“Yeah. An attempt. This isn’t a let-me-google-how-to-safely-delete-a-file situation. A fed would know exactly how easy it is to recover scrubbed data with the right tools. This is a drill to the hard-drive, full-stop. So he was trying to obfuscate it, rather than remove it entirely.”

“He make a mistake?”

I snorted, exasperated. “Yeah, I’d fucking say.”

Silence filled the car until Jackson rolled through a stop sign, twisting to check both ways. “Ever cut yourself?”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

I looked over, tearing my eyes from the laptop’s screen for the first time since watching. “No. Slid just under the age threshold for cut for Bieber. Why?”

“Okay smartass.” Jackson sighed, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Have you ever done anything you regretted? And I mean really regretted. And then found yourself compelled to do things that made no logical sense, but provided a vehicle for you to either inflict harm on your person as either an expression of pain, or a form of self-punishment?”