Shawn's POV:
I opened my eyes to the same cold light I had always hated: fluorescent bulbs humming above a sterile table, the hum of systems and the slow, deliberate steps of people who thought order could fix anything. Geneva looked different through the small window of the debriefing room, an organized city of clean lines and polished promises, a place that had learned to hide the rot beneath its marble.
Adawe stood before me like a judge, not a commander, arms folded, expression carved from the kind of steel that had kept nations from falling apart. The holo recordings from Ethiopia looped behind her: the airstrip, the trucks, the scientist stumbling blindfolded. The final frame caught my eye. Abebe smiling, palms up, the phrase no chains, no masters echoing like some poisoned benediction.
"You went off-script," Adawe said. Her voice was low, but it carried a weight that made the hairs on my forearms rise. "During wartime, we tolerated certain things. We accept improvisation because it buys lives. The world was different then. It was smaller. An enemy made of code could be predicted; you could outthink it."
"I know that," I said in defense. The words came out thin. Many times before I had I defended myself with confidence but none of them fit the coldness in Adawe's eyes. We both knew that I had messed this one up. Still, I continued, "I saved the scientist. I saved Tesfaye. I did what I had to."
"You endangered them both." Adawe's jaw tightened. "You endangered Overwatch." She took a step closer, careful, measured. "We were entrusted by the council to be more than shock troops. We were entrusted to be a stabilizing force in the world's eyes. That trust is fragile. The press will not tolerate recklessness. The governments that lent us authority, some willingly, some under duress watch our every move. If we break their rules, we break their faith in us."
I wanted to say that the Prime Minister's staff had shown him courtesy, that their dismissal had smelled like a trap the moment Abebe's hands had waved the matter away. Through experience, he knew that he needed to say that what he'd seen, those words, that smile, had rung like an echo too similar to Anubis's rhetoric for it to be coincidence. But Adawe's face did not ask for protest; it asked for honesty.
"I know," I said instead. Before I knew it, I was admitting fault. "I broke command. I—" The confession scraped at me, not because it was hard to say but because it felt so small in a room built for larger things. "I accept whatever punishment you give me."
Adawe's expression softened for the barest fraction of a breath, but it was only enough to remind me she was human. "You will be suspended for one month," she said. "No field operations. No deployments. No authorization of strikes, extractions, or unilateral missions. You will do desk duty. You will assist with medical training and treatments. You will obey the chain of command. You will not act on your own."
It was worse and better than the worst things I feared. A month of inactivity would feel like a sentence to a man who measured himself by action. But it kept me alive, unshackled by the more permanent penalties, no demotion, no court-martial. Adawe was giving me a leash, taut and visible one.
"Why a month?" I asked. He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice and failed. "Why not more?"
"Because I recognize the value of the work you do," she said. "There isn't a single country that hasn't requested for you. You're reckless in the best and worst ways, Rose. You think in angles and trajectories and electricity. You win fights. But Geneva is not a battlefield. It's a theater of perception. We need you, but not at the risk of our legitimacy. If the final choice was between you and Overwatch, I would always choose Overwatch."
She let the words sit with him. They were fair in tone and ugly in consequence.
Before Adawe could dismiss him, I needed to know. I asked the thing that had been burning under my tongue since Abebe's smile. "Did you know that the Prime Minister was part of Talon?"
Adawe's eyes sharpened. For a moment, the posture of commander returned, less judge and more strategist. "Why do you think that?"
I told her everything. How Abebe had risen from his seat like an actor, how his 'dismissive' promise had landed like a wave that would wash them from the shore, how no chains, no master's had rung in his ears like someone repeating a creed they'd heard in a cage. I told her the unsubtle smallness of the man's hand gestures, the way he had used the word "shadows" with a taste that wasn't quite the same as the country's grief, more of relish than sorrow. How, even in the sterile room of his office, Abebe had used phrasing I remembered from the Titan husk: liberation, no masters. It was the kind of coincidence that felt deliberate.
Adawe listened without interruption. When I finished, I didn't wait for rebuttal. She tilted her head, thoughtful, sharp.
"That's not proof," she said finally. "It's observation. It's a chain of suspicion and pattern-matching. Valuable, but circumstantial."
I wanted to press, to declare himself right, to fling every scrap of uneasy memory at her until it stuck. But Adawe's next words stole my momentum.
"That's the issue, Rose. Talon played you because you are brilliant at outthinking patterns machines, algorithms, relay signatures. You assumed, correctly, that the enemy would make the same mistakes as a machine. Talon is human. They plan, they lie, they use ceremony and language as weapons. They hide behind legitimacy and smile. You hunted an enemy of code with strategies that worked on pulses and protocols. You forgot that humans are messy. They are adaptive. They will use your habits against you."
I felt that like a physical blow. The truth stung, my strength had become my own blind spot. I had thought in models and failures and feedforward control, the same way I once dissected an omnic's neural lattice. I had never learned to listen to the cadence of human lies, to the tiny tells of the politician who hid his intent beneath honeyed words.
Adawe's gaze grew gentler but no more forgiving. "You will learn that," she said. "Use this month to relearn how to read people. Help us train medics and field teams in interrogation standards, in chain-of-custody, in legal procedure. Study diplomacy. Sit with our intel teams and learn how the council thinks. You cannot be a one-man solution. You are a tool, and tools are only useful inside a machine that knows how to use them."
My mouth tightened. "So, I'm being punished with study."
"It's not punishment, Rose. It's adaptation. The world has changed. You are still needed. But we won't risk the trust of nations because one man can't stand waiting while a life is on the line." Her voice had the edge of sorrow now, not anger. "I know you feel responsible for what happened in Ethiopia. I know you feel you can have fixed it. The problem is you did fix one thing at the cost of undermining the whole."
I thought of the scientist's wide, terror-rolled eyes; of Tesfaye's hollowed look when the guards told them the kidnapped man had been seized; of Prime Minister Abebe's glossy hands. I thought of Anubis whispering Talon like a laugh and of the cage and of Geneva's council, who had looked to Overwatch with equal parts hope and fear. I thought of every time his quick choice had bought a life, and every time it had complicated a thousand more.
"You're not sending me away forever," he said. It was a weak joke. He didn't try to be braver than he felt.
"No," Adawe said. "You'll be here. Monitored. Integrated. Useful." She paused. "And Rose? If you uncover proof, solid, verifiable proof, that Abebe is connected to Talon, you bring it to me. Not to the press, not to Tesfaye, not to your medics. To me. Don't act on it by yourself, either. We will act according to the council's decision. We will not be used as a propaganda tool."
I nodded. It was the chain of command he'd always argued with and the same chain that now saved him from making a larger mistake. "Understood."
She held his gaze for a beat longer, the kind of look that blurred the line between superior and something like compassion. "One month. No field ops. No unilateral moves. Learn to read people, Rose. The enemy has teeth now made of promises."
When I left her office, the city of Geneva glittered in the afternoon sun, diplomats and technicians moving like pieces on a board too large for one man to see. I walked toward the medical wing, the leash of my suspension already snug around my neck. The decision weighed on me. Just, measured, unavoidable.
On the way, I paused in the corridor and looked out the window at Geneva still being rebuilt. For so long my answer to danger had been force and speed and the hunger to fix. Now the map of the world had changed. Talon had taught me an ugly lesson: the enemy could speak kindness and still mean ruin.
I breathed in, slow, and let a resigned resolve uncoil inside him. A month. Learn. Watch. Wait. When the leash slackened, I would do what I always did, move forward, adapt. I wasn't fighting omnics anymore, but fellow humans.