Dr. Iona Vale (Human)

Iona had been waiting for him to say something like that, and was almost grateful he'd said it before she had to go looking for the argument herself.

She projected the clinical graph rather than answer him directly, and let the room read it before she spoke over it. "These are not edge-case complaints," she said. "They are expected outcomes under repeated exposure. Anxiety elevation. Depressive symptom growth. Central fatigue accumulation." Every word landed exactly as blunt as she'd written it. Blunting it for comfort was how people ended up gambling with somebody else's nervous system and calling it initiative.

"I'm not arguing the risk isn't real," Thorne said. "I watched it happen to Petrenko two hours ago. I'm asking whether a rule with no exception clause actually protects anyone — or just protects whoever wrote it from ever having to make the call twice."

Something in that landed closer to home than he'd probably meant it to. Iona set the stylus down.

"Say the rest of that sentence," she said. "The one you're not finishing."

"If I'd had ninety seconds less lock margin this morning, I'd have jumped him anyway. I know I would have. I want to know whether this protocol is honest about that, or whether it's a rule everyone in this room is already quietly planning to break the next time it's inconvenient."

Nobody answered that immediately, which Iona noted was its own kind of answer.

"Then that's the thing you should be afraid of," she said finally, "not the rule itself. A rule people quietly plan to break the moment it costs them something isn't a safeguard. It's paperwork with a due date on it. You write the rule to hold on the day it's hardest to keep, not the day it's easy — because the easy day was never the one that needed it."

Elvira, over by the viewport, had said nothing yet. She had the same intent stillness Iona remembered from the grove — the look of someone listening for the shape underneath an argument rather than the argument itself.

"You're both describing the same choice from two ends," Elvira said. "He wants a rule good enough to trust in the moment it's hardest. You want a rule that doesn't quietly go optional the day it's hardest. Those aren't opposite requirements. That's one requirement, said twice."

Iona looked at her for a moment, then allowed herself something close to a smile. "Say it back to him properly, then. I don't think he heard it from me."

"No exception clause," Elvira said, to Thorne directly, "because you already told us you'd have broken one. The rule isn't there to stop a good officer in a genuine crisis. It's there so a good officer in a genuine crisis has to feel the whole weight of breaking it — instead of signing a form that quietly excuses him in advance."

Thorne was quiet long enough that Iona wondered whether he'd take the point badly. He didn't.

"That's—" he started, and stopped, and started again. "That's a harder rule than the one I was arguing for. I still think it's the right one."

"So do I," Iona said. "That's usually how you can tell."