I woke beneath my desk because someone knocked three times.
The first knock became rifle fire inside my dream.
By the third, I had rolled onto my injured ribs and raised both hands to protect my head. Morning light entered through the cracked window. No soldiers stood in the room. No red cloth moved beneath the door.
Only the empty little Scotch bottle lay beside my face.
"XH?"
June.
I looked at the time.
Nine forty-three.
My medical review had been scheduled for eight. My first interview with the independent inquiry was supposed to begin at nine. Both appointments had called me repeatedly.
"I'm sleeping," I said.
"You are speaking."
"I learned to do both during exam season."
The joke sounded dead when it reached the door.
June tried the handle. I had locked it.
"Open the door."
"Go home."
"I brought breakfast."
"Not hungry."
"You said that yesterday."
"Then you already know the answer."
Silence settled in the corridor.
For one hopeful second, I thought she had listened.
Then NS spoke from beside her.
"I have the spare key."
I sat upright too quickly. The room turned sideways. I barely reached the bed before the lock opened.
NS entered first with his injured eye covered by a black medical patch. He looked like a pirate who had lost a fight with an entire ship.
June followed with a paper bag of food.
She saw the bottle immediately.
NS saw it after her.
Neither of them said anything.
That was worse.
"What?" I asked. "We shared a bottle two nights ago."
"We shared it because we believed tanks were going to kill us at sunrise," NS said. "What was the occasion last night?"
"I survived sunrise."
"That's not an occasion requiring punishment."
I pushed myself to my feet.
"Don't start talking like your father."
"My father would have sent six men to carry you into a private clinic. I'm asking you to put on pants and attend your medical review. Appreciate the difference."
June placed the breakfast on my desk. Rice porridge, one boiled egg, and sliced fruit arranged with the unreasonable care of someone trying to keep the world ordinary.
"I told them the inquiry interview has to wait," she said. "The doctor agreed to see you at ten-thirty."
"You called them?"
"Someone had to."
"I didn't ask you to manage me."
"No. You locked the door and missed everything instead."
I wanted to argue.
Then thunder shook the loose glass in my window, and all three of us looked toward it at once.
That was what victory had done to us.
Congress reassembled at 3:14 that morning.
They met inside a chamber with two broken doors, bullet marks behind the government benches, and an empty row for lawmakers who remained dead or missing. Congresswoman Thiri Win introduced the Emergency Recovery and Restitution Act before the clerks had finished replacing the microphones.
The bill created immediate funeral grants, injury compensation, hospital coverage, income assistance, and a fund for destroyed homes and businesses. It also ordered the government to preserve every detention site and publish the names of people recovered from them.
The treasury could not fully support what Congress promised.
MALT had made sure of that.
The Lady President announced a temporary central-bank guarantee and asked neighboring governments for emergency medical credit. Foreign hospitals offered medicine before some foreign banks agreed to freeze MALT's stolen accounts.
Recovery moved at two speeds.
Bandages arrived before justice.
At the hidden reactor, civilian engineers reduced output while international inspectors traveled toward Yandong. Officials warned that an abrupt shutdown could destabilize cooling systems and remove power from hospitals already depending on emergency grids.
The reactor remained alive.
So did its weather.
Weak sulfuric rain crossed the city in short gray waves. It stung uncovered cuts, reddened eyes, and turned every thunderstorm into another reminder that MALT had fled while leaving his machine behind.
Public advisories told citizens to carry umbrellas, rinse exposed skin with clean water, and avoid collecting rainwater.
Children began calling it junta rain.
VT watched the recovery broadcasts from a guarded house near a foreign military coast.
MALT occupied the largest bedroom and demanded to know why the destination government had not recognized him as Yandong's lawful leader. His remaining officers argued over access to stolen accounts. Two shell companies had already been frozen. Seven others continued moving money through banks that asked few questions.
VT ignored the shouting.
His shoulder remained strapped against his body. The bruises left by the five Utopia students had darkened across his ribs.
On the desk before him, the surviving bot network divided itself into two campaigns.
The first called me a national hero.
The second called me the Butcher of Utopia.
Both accounts followed the same students, entered the same memorial pages, and reposted the same photographs. Praise made my name impossible to avoid. Blame made it poisonous.
One technician reported that government cyber investigators had disabled more than twenty thousand accounts.
"How many remain useful?" VT asked.
"Enough to shape the first week. Not enough to control it."
"The first week is when people decide which pain belongs to whom."
He enlarged a photograph of June standing outside my dormitory.
"Push the story about her mother," he said. "A promising medical student trapped by a violent boy. Make it sound sympathetic."
"And XH?"
"Let him read it."
VT could no longer enter Yandong.
He still knew which doors inside me had weak locks.
By the fourth day after the raid, the northern gate had become a battlefield without guns.
Families arrived with flowers for the defenders. News crews arrived with microphones. MALT supporters arrived in civilian clothes and pretended not to know one another until the same slogans came from all of their phones.
Genuine grief stood among them, needing no bot account.
A father waited outside the temporary medical building with his son's photograph held against his chest. I recognized him from the day of victory.
This time, he did not shout.
"Did my son ask to stay?" he asked.
I looked at the photograph. The student wore an Information Science uniform and an embarrassed graduation smile.
"I don't know."
"You gave the speech at the fountain."
"Yes."
"You said leaving through VT's corridor meant disappearing."
"It did. They were taking people to Lake Clear."
"My son stayed after your speech."
There was no answer that could return him.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Were you right?"
The Lady President's answer came back to me.
No decision carrying this many lives becomes clean because you survive it.
"I don't know how to call it right," I said. "I only know the corridor wasn't safe."
The father's face folded.
"Then what am I supposed to do with that?"
"I don't know."
He struck my chest once with the flat of his hand.
Security moved toward us. I raised my arm to stop them.
The second strike was weaker. On the third, he grabbed my shirt and cried against it.
Cameras recorded only the first.
Within an hour, one account posted that a grieving father had attacked a national hero.
Another posted that the father of a murdered boy had confronted the man responsible.
Neither showed him crying.
Neither showed me holding him because his knees had failed.
The truth was too complicated for a hashtag.
After that, I stopped leaving my room.
I missed the rescheduled inquiry. I ignored Mr. Kim's calls. When JP video-called from his hospital bed, I placed the phone facedown until it stopped vibrating.
I bought two small bottles from a shop beyond the eastern gate.
The owner recognized me and refused my money.
"For what you did," he said.
That made the first bottle free.
It made the second taste worse.
I drank neither quickly nor happily. There was nothing cinematic about it. My head hurt. My stomach burned. Sleep came in broken pieces and always returned me to gunfire, a rooftop, or headlights cutting across rain.
The alcohol did one useful and terrible thing.
For several minutes, it lowered the volume.
I began waiting for those minutes.
On the sixth evening, June entered with the spare key.
I was sitting on the floor beside my bed. One bottle stood empty near the wall. Another remained open between my feet.
She closed the door behind her.
"Give it to me."
"No."
"XH."
"Don't use that voice."
"Which voice?"
"The one you use when you already decided I'm broken."
"I decided you're drunk. The bottle helped me diagnose it."
She reached down.
I snatched it away and stood. Pain crossed my ribs. The room tilted, and my hand struck the metal cup on the desk.
It flew into the wall.
June flinched.
The sound emptied every angry word from my mouth.
We stared at the cup on the floor.
"I wasn't throwing it at you," I said.
"I know."
"I would never..."
"I know that too. Pick it up."
I looked at her.
"What?"
"Pick it up. You don't get to frighten me and then turn the frightened part into your tragedy."
Shame climbed into my throat.
I put the bottle down, crossed the room, and picked up the cup.
"I'm sorry."
"Say it while looking at me."
I did.
June's eyes were wet, but she did not soften the boundary she had placed between us.
"I am not your enemy," she said. "I am also not a wall you can hit because you don't know where to put your anger."
"Then leave."
"No."
"Your mother is right about me."
Her expression changed.
"What did she say?"
"I heard your call outside the clinic. She said I would drag down your future."
"She was afraid."
"She was correct. Look at this room. Look at me."
"I am looking."
"You should be preparing for the UK. You should be first in the class. You shouldn't be checking whether I ate or drank myself unconscious."
"Stop using my future as a polite way to abandon me."
"I'm trying to save you."
"From what? Loving someone after he became inconvenient?"
The words struck harder than the father's hand.
"I don't want you to remember me like this," I whispered.
June went completely still.
For one strange moment, fear crossed her face as if I had touched a wound I could not see.
"Remember you like what?" she asked.
"Like a burden."
"Then give me something else to remember."
She held out her hand.
"The bottle."
I gave it to her.
She placed it on the desk, away from both of us. Then she called JP.
He answered on the first ring.
"Finally," he said. "Do you know how hard it is to threaten someone dramatically through voicemail?"
"He's here," June said.
JP looked at my face and stopped smiling.
"My boy," he said quietly. "We did not drag your ass through a war so you could become the next casualty in a locked dorm room."
"Don't call me a hero."
"I was going to call you an idiot."
NS joined the call from another hospital room. TZ appeared beside him, still in a wheelchair, and HS connected from the Public Health command center.
None of them forgave me with a speech.
They argued about who would take which night shift outside my room.
That was how the brotherhood answered.
June remained after the call ended.
She sat beside me on the floor and rested her head against my shoulder. Thunder traveled across Yandong. Acid rain whispered against the window instead of striking it.
"Why did you come back?" I asked.
"Tonight?"
"Under the fountain. Before the final attack. You were already safe."
"I told you. I needed you to remember."
"Remember what?"
She closed her eyes.
"That we were real. Even when everything around us tried to rewrite it."
Her answer sounded prepared, like something she had repeated alone until it became safe to say.
"If I become worse..."
"Then we deal with worse."
"And if I ruin your future?"
"It is mine," she said. "You don't get to ruin it by making choices for me."
She stayed until my breathing slowed.
Before leaving, she collected the empty bottles and made me promise to attend the inquiry in the morning. At the doorway, she checked the corridor, returned to the desk, and looked for her phone.
It was already in her hand.
She laughed softly at herself.
"I really need sleep."
"We both do."
After she left, I reached beneath the mattress.
One unopened bottle remained there.
I held it for a long time.
Then I placed it back.
I told myself hiding it was not the same as choosing it.
It was the smallest lie I had told all week.
That did not make it harmless.