This short story was published on Sunday, 11 January 2026 and is part of the Kakantiga Ultra or Cantos of the Beyond: a daily new short story or play dreamfishing and celebrating past, present, possible and future Kristang culture. This short story features the anticipated future 24th Kabesa and is set in Hastinapura / Corepoint in March 2249.
The problem wasn’t that I’d done something unforgivable.
The problem was that nothing in Corepoint was stopping me from continuing exactly as I was.
I realised this halfway through an argument with myself that I’d already lost.
It started badly, which is to say, ordinarily. I was late. I was irritated. I was rehearsing a defence for a conversation that didn’t exist yet, the way I always did when I felt the faintest scrape of threat. Corepoint does that to you if you grow up here. It teaches you that coherence is expected, not enforced. That’s worse. You can’t rebel against it. You can only fail quietly.
I turned a corner too fast and almost collided with them.
My body reacted before my mind did. Heat. Pressure. A sharp, instinctive calculation: what do they know, what do they want, what version of me will keep this small.
They looked at me, recognised me, and then didn’t do anything with that recognition.
No tightening. No freezing. No visible effort to manage the moment.
That was the first fracture.
If they had been angry, I would have known what to do. If they had been kind, I could have interpreted it as permission. If they had avoided me, I could have stayed righteous and intact.
Instead, they just existed.
They were holding a crate, badly balanced. One corner gave out and a scatter of fasteners hit the floor, ringing softly against the stone. My body moved automatically. We both knelt. Corepoint muscle memory. You don’t let things spill alone.
Our hands were close enough that I could feel the warmth of them without touching.
I wanted to say something that would locate the moment safely in the past. A joke. A neutral comment. Something that would turn this into a coincidence instead of a reckoning. I could feel the sentence forming, slick and competent.
I didn’t say it.
They thanked me. Flat. Accurate. Not hostile. Not forgiving. Then they stood, adjusted the crate, and walked away.
No ceremony. No confrontation. No absolution accidently granted through politeness.
Just the world continuing.
I stayed kneeling longer than necessary, staring at a single fastener I’d already picked up, because something inside me was panicking.
Not because I felt bad. I’d felt bad before. Bad is manageable. Bad wants resolution.
This was different.
This was the sudden collapse of every story I’d used to make what I did survivable.
It was complicated.
I didn’t understand myself then.
They were strong, they bounced back.
Time changes things.
I’m not that person anymore.
All of it was still available. That was the terrifying part. No one had taken my excuses away.
They’d just stopped working.
*
Novokoroza doesn’t arrive as judgment. It arrives as uselessness. The moment when your internal defences are still intact but no longer functional.
I walked the rest of the way home like someone trying not to spill a full bowl of radioactive waste.
Not because I was careful. Because I was terrified of how easy it would be to drop it and then claim it had never been mine.
My dwelling is on the mid-eastern inner terraces, where the air tastes faintly of wet stone and garden runoff. Everyone says the east side feels calmer. They mean it feels less watched. The high cavern walls there don’t echo as sharply. The light is softer. People greet each other without checking for subtext.
Which is exactly why it’s so good for lying.
I stepped inside, kicked my boots off too hard, and stood in the centre of the main room as if I’d forgotten what I lived there for. My hands were still carrying the shape of kneeling. My knees still remembered the cold.
I did what I always did when something old surfaced: I tried to outrun it with routine.
Water on. Tea. Wash hands. Wipe counter. Check the civic feed. Scan the assignment schedule for tomorrow. Anything that could re-anchor me in now.
My mind started its little courtroom performance anyway. It had rehearsed for decades. It knew the moves.
You didn’t mean it.
You were young.
You were scared.
You were not the only one.
If they were truly harmed they would have said something.
They didn’t say anything.
You have been a good citizen since.
You have done rotations.
You have contributed.
You have never repeated it.
I caught myself on the last sentence and nearly laughed, except it came out as a dry exhale that tasted like metal.
“Never repeated it,” I said out loud, alone.
As if harm only counts when it becomes a habit.
As if one time doesn’t enter time.
That was the problem with Corepoint. It’s built to make you hear yourself. There are no loud enough distractions to drown out your own logic when it starts to rot.
I poured the tea and took one sip and my stomach turned.
Not guilt. Not shame. Something more clinical. The body’s refusal to swallow a lie.
I set the cup down carefully, like it could explode.
The memory tried to surface then. Not the whole thing, not neatly. Just flashes, like a badly indexed archive.
A corridor that smelled of old cloth. The press of my own breathing too loud. The way I’d watched their face for signs of “yes” because I’d trained myself to interpret ambiguity as permission. The way I’d been relieved when they didn’t fight, because it meant I didn’t have to think of myself as someone who could be refused.
I felt my throat tighten. My hands went cold.
I hated myself in that moment not because of what I’d done, but because of how my mind still tried to save me from naming it.
It tried to pull the scene into a softer category. Miscommunication. Mutual confusion. Shared immaturity.
The old impulses they taught us in school rose up like a trained animal:
If you can make it unclear, you can make it survivable.
Novokoroza is the opposite of that.
Novokoroza is not “I am sorry.”
Novokoroza is “I will stop making it unclear.”
I walked into the washroom and turned on the water and stared at my own face as if it belonged to someone else. The mirror in Corepoint Dragonsglass is never flattering. It doesn’t distort to make you look kinder. It shows exactly what it sees: a person with a functional life, stable housing, ordinary eyes, and a history that did not stop existing just because it was inconvenient to carry.
I gripped the sink.
“Say it,” I told myself.
My jaw clenched. My mind instantly offered alternatives.
You can say it later.
You can say it to a facilitator.
You can say it in the abstract.
You can write it down in a journal and call that growth.
You can be gentle with yourself first.
You can do more good things and let that balance it.
Balance. As if reality is a set of scales that can be negotiated.
I stared until my eyes began to sting.
“I didn’t—”
I slammed my palm against the sink hard enough to sting. Not as punishment. As interruption.
“No,” I said.
Not to some imaginary judge.
To myself.
That was when I understood what “uselessness” really meant. It wasn’t that my defences disappeared. It was that every time I used them, I could feel the distortion as distortion. Like trying to walk with a pebble in your shoe you can’t ignore anymore.
I stood there, breathing too fast, and thought of them again, not as a character in my internal story, but as a person who had continued to exist without my permission.
The part of me that wanted relief began to bargain.
Maybe reconciliation can be quick.
Maybe you can apologise and be done.
Maybe if they accept it, you can breathe again.
Maybe the Twenty-Fourth Kabesa can mediate, like they always do, even when they don’t want to.
But the thought of the Kabesa made my stomach drop.
Because the Kabesa isn’t supposed to be a cleaner. Again, like we learned in school: not a sink for everyone’s mess. Not a mythic absolution machine. The Kabesa doesn’t take your truth away. They return it to you in a shape you can’t dodge.
I knew that. Everyone knows that. Corepoint kids learn it the way they learn not to touch the heat vents.
The bargaining continued anyway.
You could go to them right now.
You could explain.
You could be sincere.
You could perform remorse so convincingly that even you believe it.
I felt something in me recoil at the word perform.
That was the other half of Novokoroza: the refusal to make the harmed person the audience for your inner work.
If I went to them now, I would not be offering repair.
I would be asking them to carry my panic.
I turned off the tap. The sudden silence was enormous.
And in that silence, the real sentence finally formed. Not slick. Not competent. Not rescuing.
Not a speech.
A decision.
I would live in fidelity even if no one ever spoke to me about it again.
I would carry consequence without demanding relief.
I would stop arranging my life so that I never had to look directly at what I’d put into the world.
Because Corepoint wasn’t going to stop me from continuing.
Which meant I had to stop myself.
I left the washroom and crossed the room to the window cut into the rock. Beyond it, the terraces fell away in stacked arcs of light and garden and human movement. People crossing bridges. Children running. Someone laughing in a corridor. Life, durable and ordinary, continuing even with harm inside it.
I pressed my forehead against the cool stone frame.
Somewhere out there, the Twenty-Fourth Kabesa was also moving through a day. Not thinking about me. Not watching for my moment of redemption.
The Kabesa’s job isn’t to chase perpetrators.
It’s to hold the line in the last functional city on Earth where truth can’t be drowned.
Which meant the next part of this wasn’t going to be an event.
It was going to be a practice.
And the first practice was brutal in its simplicity:
I had to stop lying even when no one would catch me.
Especially then.
And of course, the first thing I did was to lie some more.
I tried not to remember it.
Not in the dramatic way people imagine. No shoving thoughts away. No panic. I just… kept it shallow. I stayed with the version that fit into conversation. The version that could be summarised in a sentence and followed by a sigh.
Something happened. It was messy. We were young.
That version was smooth. Portable. It let me keep walking.
So when the memory started pushing for more, I pushed back.
I cleaned. I reorganised. I checked messages I didn’t need to check. I stood under the shower longer than necessary because the sound filled my head and made thinking optional. I told myself this was regulation, not avoidance. That I was being responsible by not spiralling.
That was a lie.
What I was actually doing was protecting myself from specificity.
Because specificity is where I lose control.
The harm didn’t come back as a story at first. It came back as irritation. A sharp, sour edge under everything. The feeling that something was being demanded of me unfairly.
That was familiar.
That was the part I never liked to look at.
I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and told myself, You already know what you did. Which is what you say when you very much do not want to know it properly.
My mind tried to bargain again.
If you go into it, you’ll exaggerate.
You’ll collapse into shame.
You’ll turn yourself into the villain and that helps no one.
You’ve already taken responsibility.
Taken responsibility how?
By thinking about it sometimes?
By feeling bad in private?
By never quite letting the memory finish forming?
The truth came in sideways, the way it always does when you stop cooperating with your own bullshit.
I hadn’t just been confused.
I had been self-centred.
I hadn’t just misread them.
I had prioritised my momentum over their hesitation.
I hadn’t just failed to notice harm.
I had noticed something was off and decided it wasn’t my problem.
That was the ugly part. Not the act itself. The decision point.
The moment where I felt uncertainty and chose to push through it because stopping would have been inconvenient.
I sat up suddenly, heart racing, and said the old line automatically, like muscle memory.
“I didn’t force—”
I stopped.
Because even as the words formed, I knew exactly what they were doing.
They were shrinking the frame.
They were trying to move the line somewhere safer.
I laughed then. A short, ugly sound. Not humour. Recognition.
Of course that was the sentence I reached for. I’d been reaching for it for years.
I didn’t force.
I didn’t mean to.
I didn’t know.
I didn’t repeat it.
All variations on the same theme.
I don’t want this to count.
That’s what hyperavoidance actually sounds like when you strip it down.
I swung my legs off the bed and planted my feet on the floor hard enough to feel the stone through my skin.
“Say it properly,” I said.
My mouth went dry.
Because saying it properly meant giving up control of how it landed inside me.
It meant not cushioning it with intent or context or relative severity.
It meant letting the word be what it was.
“I harmed them,” I said.
Not loudly. Not bravely.
Like stating a fact you don’t like.
My stomach flipped immediately, and my mind lunged for escape.
But they didn’t say no.
But they didn’t push me away.
But they stayed.
But they didn’t report it.
But they didn’t confront me.
Each one a rope thrown back toward innocence.
Each one useless.
Because none of those things undo the part where I chose my desire over their clarity.
That’s the piece I had never wanted to sit with.
Not the physicality. Not the labels.
The entitlement.
The quiet, unexamined assumption that my wanting was more important than their uncertainty.
That if harm occurred, it would be incidental, survivable, not my responsibility.
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and stared at the floor.
This wasn’t about becoming a monster.
It was worse than that.
It was about being ordinary.
Ordinary enough to make a selfish decision and then live comfortably afterward because nothing exploded.
Ordinary enough to mistake the absence of consequence for the absence of harm.
Ordinary enough to benefit from silence and call it peace.
I felt sick, and this time it wasn’t metaphorical. My mouth filled with saliva, sharp and metallic, and I had to breathe through it.
Another reflex surged up then. The nuclear option.
If you’re this bad, you should disappear.
You should withdraw.
You should never want anything again.
You should punish yourself enough that this balances out.
I recognised that too.
That’s not accountability. That’s theatre in reverse.
Self-erasure is just another way of making the harm about me.
So I didn’t take that exit either.
I sat there and let the memory finish assembling itself without commentary.
Not just what I did.
What I ignored.
What I rationalised.
What I benefited from afterward.
How easily I had gone back to my life.
How long it had taken for this moment to arrive.
My chest ached with something that wasn’t remorse exactly. It was exposure.
The kind that comes when you realise you have been lying to time, not just to people.
And here was the sharpest conflict of all, the one that made my hands curl into fists.
I could still stop here.
I could still decide this was enough truth for one night, enough ugliness for one lifetime. I could file this away as growth and go back to being a decent, functioning Corepoint resident.
No alarms would go off.
No one would knock on my door.
No Kabesa, past, present or future, would appear.
No one would knock.
That was the problem.
Corepoint doesn’t do interventions for people like me. It doesn’t stage reckonings. It doesn’t extract truth by force. It assumes adults will either meet reality or slowly rot around it.
I sat there and felt the weight of that assumption press down.
Because I wanted the knock.
I wanted interruption. Authority. Someone to step in and say enough, to give this moment edges so I wouldn’t have to keep deciding. I wanted the Kabesa to exist as an external force instead of what they actually are here: a boundary, not a broom.
But nothing happened.
The city kept breathing. Somewhere a lift hummed. Water moved through pipes. A neighbour laughed too loudly at something trivial. Life continued at exactly the same volume it always had.
Which meant the choice was still active.
I stood and paced the room, fast, like movement might burn the thought out of me. My hands kept clenching and unclenching. Every few steps my mind tried again.
You’ve done enough.
You’re not the worst kind of person.
You’re not dangerous.
You’re not repeating the harm.
You’re being honest now.
Honest about what?
About feeling bad?
About recognising a category?
About having a difficult evening?
That wasn’t honesty. That was containment.
I stopped pacing and pressed my palms flat against the wall, forehead nearly touching the stone. It was cool, steady, unmoved by my crisis. Corepoint stone doesn’t respond to pressure. It just stays where it is.
I envied it.
Another thought crept in then, quieter, more seductive.
What if this is all internal?
What if no external action is actually required?
What if fidelity is just a private alignment?
What if living differently from now on is enough?
This one had teeth.
Because it sounded ethical.
It sounded mature.
It sounded exactly like the kind of reasoning people used to excuse never making contact, never risking refusal, never putting themselves in a position where the harm might actually be named out loud.
I saw the shape of the future it offered me.
I would become careful. Measured. Perhaps even respected. I would volunteer more. Speak thoughtfully about consent and power and responsibility in abstract terms. I would be the person who gets it now.
And the person I harmed would remain a ghost in my heart, never consulted, never centred, never allowed to complicate my narrative again.
I felt something inside me recoil hard enough to hurt.
Because I knew that future.
I had been building it for years.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor again, back against the stone, legs stretched out, hands limp at my sides. Exhaustion hit me all at once, heavy and dull.
This wasn’t catharsis.
This was attrition.
I whispered, “What do you actually want?”
Not what would absolve me.
Not what would make this stop.
What did I want to be true?
The answer came immediately, and I hated it for its honesty.
“I want to keep my life.”
Not my breath. Not my beating heart. My life. My standing. My ease. My clean relationships. My ability to move through Corepoint without people’s eyes changing shape when they land on me.
I wanted to keep the version of myself that still got invited to dinners. That still got trusted with shared work. That still got treated as normal.
And that want had always been there, underneath every “I didn’t mean to,” every “it was complicated,” every careful, tasteful vagueness.
It wasn’t fear of being a monster.
It was fear of being known.
The old memory finally stopped flashing and opened like a door.
Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just… a room that had always existed, and I had spent years walking around the corridor outside it.
It was late. Not night, not day, that grey hour in Corepoint where the light is designed to be gentle and you mistake gentleness for consent. We were alone because of scheduling, because of work, because of convenience. There was nothing romantic in it. That’s what I told myself then. That it wasn’t that.
I remember the exact moment I decided to treat ambiguity as a green light.
I felt their hesitation like a hand on my chest. A small resistance. Not force. Not a fight. Just not yes.
And I went anyway.
Not with violence. With momentum.
With the assumption that if they didn’t stop me hard enough, it counted as permission.
With the quiet arrogance of someone who believes they are fundamentally decent, and therefore whatever they do must be interpret-able as decency if you frame it correctly.
The most disgusting part is how calm I was.
How managerial.
How I kept checking their face not to protect them, but to protect myself from having to stop.
How relief washed through me when they didn’t make it ugly, because ugliness would have forced me to see myself.
When it was over, I didn’t think, I harmed them.
I thought, thank god that didn’t turn into a problem.
That was the first lie.
The second lie came minutes later, when they went quiet and I asked, in that gentle voice people use when they want credit for being gentle, “Are you okay?”
I didn’t ask because I wanted to know.
I asked because I wanted them to say yes.
Because if they said yes, I could file the whole thing under mutual. Under fine. Under we’re both adults.
They didn’t say yes.
They didn’t say no either. Their face did that careful blank thing Corepoint kids learn early, the one that means, I don’t know how to make this safe.
And instead of hearing that as a stop sign, I heard it as an inconvenience.
So I did what I always did when I felt threatened.
I started arranging reality.
I laughed softly, like it was ridiculous to make a big deal out of it. I said something like, “Hey, it’s okay,” which is what you say when you want to be the one offering comfort instead of the one who caused the need for it.
I told them they were overthinking.
I told them it was normal to feel strange after “first times,” because that way I could pretend it had been a shared first time, not a unilateral push through uncertainty.
I told them I’d never want to hurt them.
As if the wanting was the point.
As if the outcome was negotiable.
As if the harm could be argued out of existence by insisting on my own good intentions.
I watched their expression while I talked, and every time it wavered, every time they looked like they might name it, my voice got smoother.
Kinder.
More reasonable.
That’s what gaslighting is in a place like Corepoint. It’s not movie-villain cruelty. It’s elegance. It’s the weaponisation of coherence. It’s turning your own comfort into the default version of events and making their reality sound like a glitch.
I didn’t say, You’re lying.
I said, “I think you’re reading into it.”
I didn’t say, You don’t get to be upset.
I said, “I don’t want this to become a thing between us.”
I didn’t say, Your boundaries are inconvenient.
I said, “I thought we trusted each other.”
Trust. That word. I used it like a rope around their throat and still told myself I was being sincere.
They looked away. They nodded, once. Not agreement. Compliance.
And my body unclenched. Because compliance looks a lot like resolution if what you care about is getting to keep your life.
Afterward, I did the final, cowardly thing.
I acted normal.
I messaged them the next day about something practical. Work. Scheduling. A shared task. I didn’t mention what happened. I didn’t check in. I behaved like the night before was already sealed, already neutral, already past.
This is the part people love to deny about themselves, as if harm is always loud.
But so much of it is quiet administration.
You harm someone, and then you make sure the world continues in a shape where it doesn’t count.
And when, weeks later, months later, they finally tried to circle it, finally tried to name that something had gone wrong, I didn’t explode.
I didn’t yell.
I did something worse.
I looked confused.
Genuinely, performatively confused.
I said, “What? I thought we were okay.”
I said, “Why are you bringing this up now?”
I said, “If you felt uncomfortable you should have told me.”
As if they hadn’t.
As if their body hadn’t.
As if their silence hadn’t been a survival strategy in the presence of my insistence.
I made the timeline itself into a weapon. I turned delay into evidence. I turned their caution into unreliability. I turned their attempt at naming into a breach of some social contract I had invented.
And because Corepoint doesn’t like mess, because people here are trained to avoid escalation, because no one wants to be the reason a social group fractures, my version slid into place like it had always belonged there.
A misunderstanding.
Two young people.
A messy moment.
Nothing to see.
And the worst part is, it worked.
It worked on them first.
I watched them start doubting their own memory in real time. I watched them soften their language, take responsibility for “mixed signals,” apologise for being “confusing,” as if the problem was their lack of clarity and not my willingness to exploit it.
That’s the thing I can’t unsee now.
Not the act.
The after.
The way I took someone’s uncertainty and made it into their fault so I wouldn’t have to change.
I sat on the floor in my dwelling in March 2249 and felt the shape of it settle into my bones like a verdict.
Not I made a mistake.
I built a reality where the mistake couldn’t exist.
I built it using my voice, my calm, my reasonableness, my careful Corepoint manners.
I built it out of phrases that sound ethical until you look at who benefits.
And now, decades later, I wanted the city to knock on my door.
I wanted some external force to do what I refused to do then.
Name it.
Because if I named it fully, I would have to admit the most humiliating truth of all:
I wasn’t just someone who crossed a line.
I was someone who, afterward, taught another person to doubt the fact that the line had ever been there.
I didn’t sleep.
Not in the melodramatic way, not in the “haunted by my sins” way.
I just couldn’t let my body drop unconscious while my brain was still trying to negotiate with physics.
By third shift, the civic feed had cycled the same three announcements twice and my tea had gone cold enough to taste like regret. I sat at the small table, hands flat, and watched the light in the room do its slow programmed drift toward “morning.”
Corepoint doesn’t have mornings. It has settings.
I opened a blank statement page on my console.
The header blinked at me, polite as a knife.
REPAIR REQUEST: INITIAL DISCLOSURE
I stared at the cursor until my eyes watered.
My fingers hovered.
And then I did what I always did when I was about to lose something.
I reached for language that would keep me.
I typed:
A mutual encounter occurred when we were younger which may have been experienced differently by the other party.
I read it back and felt my stomach turn so hard I nearly gagged.
May have been experienced differently.
As if harm is a preference.
As if truth is a menu item.
I deleted the sentence. Then I deleted the whole line. Then I deleted the entire form and closed the window like it had insulted me.
That was my reflex: if I can’t control the phrasing, I’ll control the existence.
My hands shook with a fury that felt stupidly entitled.
Why is this so hard?
Because I had built my entire adult self on the assumption that words could save me.
Corepoint loves words. We’re the last city with time for them. We treat precision like sanitation. We teach children to argue cleanly, apologise cleanly, repair cleanly.
And I had used that culture like camouflage.
I opened the form again.
REPAIR REQUEST: INITIAL DISCLOSURE
Cursor blinking, still patient, still indifferent.
This time I forced myself to write without softness.
Not as penance.
As sabotage of my own skill.
I coerced someone when we were younger. I treated their uncertainty as permission. Afterward, I denied it and made them doubt themselves.
My throat tightened immediately.
My mind tried to lunge into the sentence and fix it.
Coerced is too strong.
Uncertainty is vague.
Made them doubt themselves is an interpretation.
That’s how the rot talks. It always wants a loophole. It always wants a technicality. It always wants to become a debate you can win.
I kept typing before it could.
I did it because I wanted what I wanted and I assumed that mattered more than their clarity.
I stopped. My hands went numb, as if the nerves themselves were embarrassed.
The form requested identifiers.
OTHER PARTY (if known):
DATE RANGE:
CONTEXT:
WHAT REPAIR ARE YOU SEEKING:
There it was. The cliff.
Because this is where the fantasy usually lives: the part where you name the harmed person and then the system does something neat and restorative and you emerge lighter.
But Corepoint doesn’t do neat.
Corepoint does witness.
Corepoint does record.
Corepoint does consequence.
And because we do not worship punishment here, the consequence is almost always the one thing people like me dread more than pain:
loss of narrative control.
My hand hovered over the “OTHER PARTY” field and my chest started to burn, hot and quick, as if my body was preparing for attack.
Not guilt.
Fear.
Fear of their name becoming a fact I couldn’t talk around.
Fear of it leaving my private mind and entering a public system where people don’t care how reasonable I sound.
I typed the first letter.
Then stopped.
My eyes stung. My mouth went metallic again.
I wanted to be interrupted so badly it made my teeth ache. Some official. Some alert. Some Kabesa-assigned sentinel. Someone to take the choice away.
No one came.
So I did the next worst thing.
I opened a message thread.
Their name sat there in my contacts list like it had never done anything to me. Like we hadn’t built years on top of a lie.
My thumb hovered over SEND.
A small, vicious impulse unfurled: You should tell them. You should do it now. You should go straight to them, so you can finally be seen doing the right thing.
It dressed itself up as bravery.
It was not bravery.
It was my hunger for relief.
It was me trying to turn them into my exit door again.
I stared at the blank message field and saw the old pattern line up instantly:
If I contact them directly, I can steer the tone.
If I steer the tone, I can steer the outcome.
If I steer the outcome, I can keep my life.
I closed the thread without writing anything and felt my skin crawl with its own disappointment.
That’s what I hated most.
Even now, even after naming it, a part of me still wanted to use them.
To use their response as proof that I was salvageable.
To use their forgiveness as a certificate.
To use their anger as a punishment I could endure and then call it done.
Novokoroza, in practice, was apparently this:
Do not ask the harmed person to manage your hunger.
I breathed out hard, slow, until the room stopped tilting.
Then I did the only thing left.
I filled in the fields.
Not perfectly. Not elegantly. Not with the right tone. Just truth, clumsy and intact.
OTHER PARTY: their name.
DATE RANGE: a year.
CONTEXT: a shared duty shift, an empty corridor, my decision.
WHAT REPAIR ARE YOU SEEKING: I do not get to decide repair. I want a process that centres them and holds consequences for me even if it ruins my standing.
Typing that last line felt like voluntarily stepping into cold water.
I hit SUBMIT.
The system accepted it with a quiet chime.
No fireworks. No sirens. No dramatic moral soundtrack.
Just a new status line:
CASE FILE CREATED. INITIAL FACILITATOR WILL CONTACT YOU WITHIN 3–5 DAYS.
Three to five days.
A neat little time window, like Corepoint believed I was a person who could wait.
My body reacted like I’d just signed my own death warrant. Not because I thought I would be harmed, but because the next stage was out of my hands.
I sat there, staring at the confirmation, and realised something else, something worse.
I wasn’t afraid of consequences.
I was afraid of being treated the way I had treated them:
as a problem to manage.
Because the facilitators wouldn’t care about my intent.
They wouldn’t care about my story.
They wouldn’t care about how ordinary I looked.
They would care about impact.
They would care about pattern.
They would care about the other person’s reality.
The thought made my stomach drop again.
And then, because Corepoint has a cruel sense of timing, my console chimed a second time.
Not the repair system.
Not a work assignment update.
Something even more terrifying.
*
I met her where she had requested me to meet her, in one of the first parks they had built around the first Edentree once she had got it up and running nineteen years prior, when I was just a boy. When I hadn’t yet—
The thought tried to continue through my mind, and I buried it as I walked, and then raced up to meet her, realising I was late.
Of course I was.
The park sat in a shallow bowl of stone and living root, the Edentree rising from its centre like a paused gesture. Not monumental. Not theatrical. Just… present. Its bark was pale where the light touched it, darker where it folded back into itself. The air around it felt denser, as if the city had learned how to breathe more slowly here.
She was already there.
Not waiting in the way people wait when they want to be seen waiting. She was seated on the low stone edge of one of the water channels, sleeves rolled up, hands in the flow, letting it run over her fingers as if she were testing temperature rather than making a point. No entourage. No visible recorders. No performance of authority.
The Twenty-Fourth Kabesa looked younger than the stories made her sound and older than her years in the way people do when they have stopped pretending they are untouched by consequence. Her hair was tied back carelessly. Her clothes were practical, worn in at the edges. She did not look up when I approached. Most other people did, but kept to themselves. That was how it had always been with the Kabesa for two hundred years now; everyone knew, and nobody said anything, because nobody needed to.
I stopped a few steps away, suddenly unsure where my body was supposed to go.
“I’m sorry,” I said automatically, awkwardly and extremely shambolically. “I’m late.”
She nodded, still watching the water.
“Yes,” she said. Not accusing. Not forgiving. Just factual. “You are.”
The silence stretched around my mind. I waited for instruction. A gesture. A script. None came.
She lifted her hands from the channel and dried them on her trousers. Only then did she look at me, really look, not with the sharpness people mistake for judgment, but with the unsettling steadiness of someone who is not scanning for threat or leverage.
“You submitted a…repair request,” she said. ”That…you subverted into a repair request about…yourself.”
“Yes.”
“And then you also…stopped trying to control what happened next. Even though…nobody does this. Ever.”
The words landed harder than anything I’d imagined. Not because they were harsh, but because they were accurate.
“I tried,” I said, again, really shambolically, and immediately hated how defensive it sounded.
She tilted her head slightly. Not sceptical. Curious.
“That sentence usually comes later,” she said. “After the first few attempts to regain footing.”
My mouth went dry.
She chuckled, stood then, brushing grit from her palms, and gestured for us to walk. Not toward the Edentree itself, but along the outer path, where the grass gave way to stone and the city pressed in close enough to be felt.
“I want to be clear about something before we continue,” she said, as if we were discussing logistics. “I am not here to assess your character.”
I flinched anyway.
“I don’t need to decide whether you are good or bad. That isn’t my function. I would expect the same of you if the roles were reversed.”
We passed three children crouched near the water, quietly watching a floating leaf. They looked up at us as we passed, and beamed. The Twenty-Fourth Kabesa offered a very adult beam back, and one of them looked at me. Someone important talking to the Kabesa! Must be a wonderful person.
My mind contorted inside itself.
“My function,” the Twenty-Fourth Kabesa continued, “is to make sure that reality does not get outpaced by comfort.”
I swallowed.
“You understand that this process does not guarantee forgiveness.”
“Yes.”
“You understand that it does not guarantee reintegration.”
“Yes.”
“You understand that it does not guarantee things will be okay.”
“Yes,” I said, and meant it, even as my chest tightened.
She stopped walking then and turned to face me fully.
“And you understand,” she said, “that the most likely outcome is that your life becomes smaller.”
There it was.
No myth. No thunder. Just the clean edge of it.
I nodded. My throat refused to cooperate.
“Good,” she said. “Then we can begin.”
She didn’t ask me to recount the act. Not yet. She didn’t ask for my intentions, my remorse, my growth arc. She asked something else entirely.
“When did you first realise that you had been protecting yourself at their expense?”
The question knocked the air out of me.
Not what did you do.
Not why.
When.
I opened my mouth and the old answer surged up immediately. Years later. Recently. Last night.
She waited.
I closed my mouth.
Because the real answer was already there, burning.
“Immediately,” I said. “I knew immediately.”
She nodded, once.
“And what did you do with that knowledge?”
“I buried it,” I said. “I reframed it. I made it into something survivable.”
“For you,” she said.
“Yes.”
She studied me for a moment, and for the first time there was something like weight in her expression. Not anger. Not pity.
Recognition.
“This is where most people try to skip ahead,” she said. “They want to talk about learning. About change. About who they are now.”
She stepped closer, just enough that I had to hold my ground consciously.
“But reconciliation does not begin with who you are now,” she said. “It begins with who you allowed yourself to be then.”
My hands curled into fists at my sides.
“And with what you did to preserve that version of yourself.”
The park felt suddenly too open, the Edentree too quiet, as if it were listening without comment.
“I’m not here to punish you,” she said, and there was iron under the calm now. “And I am not here to save you.”
She let that sit.
“I am here to make sure you do not get to finish this story alone.”
I felt something in me crack then, not loudly, not cleanly.
Not relief.
Fear.
Because finishing it alone had always been my plan.
She turned and began walking again, back toward the centre of the park, toward the slow, patient presence of the Edentree.
“Come,” she said. “The first thing you will learn is how to stay present when the ground does not give you anywhere to stand.”
I followed.
And for the first time since I had submitted the request, I understood what people meant when they said the Twenty-Fourth Kabesa did not have to chase you.
She only had to stop you from running.
*
There were many, many legends about the Twenty-Fourth Kabesa.
People said she could hear your lies if she pressed her ear to the beating heart of the Edentrees. People said she could tell what you’d done by watching how you walked on stone. People said she could make you confess without speaking, just by letting silence pool around you until your own tongue drowned. People had hated her, driven her out of her seat on the council, terrorised her, infantilised her, dehumanised her for being all sorts of things.
None of them were true. At least from what I knew.
What I did know she actually had, what made her so difficult to be near, was simpler and more terrifying: an almost aggressive willingness to remain in contact with reality even when reality offered no social reward.
She didn’t flinch away from ugliness. She didn’t inflate it either. She held it at the exact size it was, the way you hold a shard of glass: carefully, without pretending it’s a flower.
As we walked toward the Edentree, the park changed almost imperceptibly. The air cooled. The sound of the city softened at the edges, like someone had wrapped the cavern in cloth. Even the light seemed to lose some of its performative friendliness and become what it actually was: illumination.
The Twenty-Fourth Kabesa stopped beneath the lower branches, where the leaves cast a faint, moving pattern on the stone.
“Before we go further,” she said, “you’re going to tell me what you think this meeting is.”
My mouth opened on instinct.
A hearing. A pre-facilitation consult. An assessment. A warning. A chance to show I’m serious.
I caught myself.
That was the same impulse again: give it a neat category, so it becomes manageable.
“I don’t know,” I said. My voice sounded strange in the open air. Too naked.
She nodded, as if that was the first honest thing I’d done all day.
“Good. Because if you knew,” she said, “you’d already be trying to win it.”
I swallowed.
She crouched and placed her palm against the stone at the base of the Edentree, not reverent, not ritualistic. Practical. As if she were checking for vibration.
“I’m not your facilitator,” she said. “The facilitators will do what they do. They’ll centre the harmed person. They’ll follow procedure. They’ll make sure you don’t turn the process into a performance.”
I waited for the familiar sting of being corrected by someone in power.
It didn’t come.
Her voice wasn’t punishing. It was engineering.
“I’m here,” she continued, “because your request flagged two things.”
She stood again and brushed dust from her hand.
“One: you used language that doesn’t usually survive first submission.”
My throat tightened. I could still see my own words, clumsy and intact, sitting in the case file like a brick.
“Two,” she said, “you didn’t try to contact them directly.”
The air between us tightened.
“I wanted to,” I admitted.
“I know.”
That was it. No praise. No reassurance. Just: I know. As if want was weather.
She looked past me, toward the terraced paths where people moved like ordinary blood cells through the city. A couple on a bench. Someone carrying a basket of seedlings. A tired worker leaning against a railing, eyes closed.
“Us humans still produce two kinds of harm,” she said quietly. “The kind that explodes. And the kind that gets folded into normal.”
I felt my jaw clench.
“You did the second kind,” she said. Not accusation. Diagnosis.
I waited for my body to lunge into argument. To offer nuance. To plead context.
It didn’t.
Or maybe it did, and it simply bounced off the fact of her steadiness and fell back into me, useless.
She turned to face me again.
“So,” she said, “we’re not going to talk about what you did.”
My pulse spiked anyway, like my body didn’t believe her.
“We’re going to talk about what you built.”
I flinched, because that word had teeth.
She saw it and didn’t soften.
“Tell me,” she said, “the first sentence you used afterward.”
I stared. I could see it, suddenly, bright as a stain. Not the words exactly, but the shape of them. The way they arranged the room so I could keep breathing.
“I don’t remember,” I lied, automatically.
Her eyebrows lifted a fraction. Not anger. Not disappointment.
A signal: we’re not doing that here.
I felt heat crawl up my neck.
“I…” My throat tightened. “I said it wasn’t a big deal.”
“And what did that sentence do?”
It was such an odd question that I almost missed how brutal it was.
It wasn’t asking if the sentence was true.
It was asking what it accomplished.
“It… shrank it,” I said. “It made it… small.”
“For whom?”
“For me.”
The Twenty-Fourth Kabesa took a step to the side, and we began walking again, slowly, circling the Edentree the way you circle a problem you can’t charge straight at without getting cut.
“Our children are taught,” she said, “that if you can explain something cleanly, you can live with it.”
I nodded, because that was true.
“However, if you can live with it,” she said, “you can also mistake that for having repaired it.”
My stomach dropped.
“I didn’t repair it,” I said, hoarse.
“No,” she agreed. “You managed it.”
We walked in silence for a few breaths.
Then the Twenty-Fourth Kabesa said, “Now I’m going to ask you something that will make you angry.”
My hands tightened at my sides.
“When you look back,” she said, “what was the benefit you gained from their doubt?”
The question went straight through me.
My mind immediately tried to answer with morality. I didn’t gain anything. I just… survived. I was young. It was complicated.
But she hadn’t asked for my moral posture.
She’d asked for the benefit.
And I knew exactly what it was.
“I got to keep everything,” I said.
My voice sounded too loud in the park.
She didn’t react like I’d confessed a shocking truth.
She reacted like I’d finally stopped pretending not to understand basic arithmetic.
“Yes,” she said. “You got to keep your life.”
I felt something hard in my chest crack, not into emotion, but into clarity.
“And they got to carry the cost,” she said.
I couldn’t speak.
She let the silence stay.
Then, softly, not kind, not cruel, just precise: “Say that sentence again, but complete it.”
My mouth went dry.
“I got to keep my life,” I said.
“And?”
“And they paid for it.”
There it was.
It didn’t feel like catharsis.
It felt like stepping onto a floor that didn’t flex.
The Twenty-Fourth Kabesa nodded, once, and that tiny gesture felt heavier than any speech.
“Good,” she said. “Now you can stop pretending the harm was only in the moment.”
She paused near a low stone bench and sat. She didn’t invite me to sit, but the shape of her calm made standing feel like posturing, so I lowered myself onto the far end of the bench, stiff as if the stone might accuse me.
She watched the water channel for a moment, eyes unfocused.
Then she said, “You’re waiting for me to tell you what happens next.”
My throat tightened. “Yes.”
“Of course you are.”
She looked at me again, and for the first time I saw something almost like weariness, not personal, not emotional, more like the fatigue of someone who has watched the same human strategy repeat in a thousand slightly different costumes.
“You want a sequence,” she said. “A ladder. You want to know which rung you’re on so you can feel progress. You want an ending you can picture.”
My hands clenched.
“I can’t give you that,” she said.
Because you don’t have siruwi yet, my mind supplied stupidly, and I hated it. As if power was what mattered. As if she needed anything beyond her own refusal to collude.
She spoke again before I could drown in that thought.
“What I can give you,” she said, “is a rule.”
I looked at her.
“One rule,” she repeated, as if the simplicity was intentional, as if she were placing something small and sharp in my hand.
“You do not get to set the pace.”
My breath hitched.
“The facilitators will contact you. They will contact them. The other person will decide whether they want engagement, what form, what distance, what conditions. You will not chase. You will not pre-empt. You will not recruit sympathy. You will not build a ‘new you’ in public to cushion the fall.”
I felt the old panic rise: the urge to do something, to show something, to get ahead of consequence like you can outrun gravity if you sprint early enough.
She watched it flicker across my face and said, almost gently, “Yes. That feeling.”
I swallowed.
“That’s the engine you used then,” she said. “It’s the engine you’ll want to use now. You will think motion is virtue. You will think urgency equals sincerity.”
She leaned forward slightly.
“Your work,” she said, “is to endure stillness without turning it into avoidance.”
I stared at the stone beneath my feet. The patterned shadows of leaves moved across it, slow as breathing.
“And if they don’t want to engage?” I asked, because some part of me needed to know whether there was an escape hatch labeled closure.
Her eyes sharpened, and not unkindly.
“Then you will live with that,” she said. “Not as tragedy. As consequence.”
My throat burned.
“And you will not call their refusal cruelty,” she added. “You will not call it punishment. You will not call it unfair.”
I nodded, once, because I could already hear the future versions of myself trying to use those words as bandages.
She stood, and the meeting felt suddenly like it might end, which made my body surge with desperate, childish need.
“One more thing,” I blurted. “Why are…you meeting me at all?”
The you, like everything else I had said out of true, wavering, terrified vulnerability, landed shambolically. She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she said, “Because you wanted a knock.”
I froze.
She continued, voice steady. “Corepoint doesn’t do interventions, like you said. Not for adults. Not for people who can speak cleanly enough to hide in their own competence.”
She stepped closer, and in the shifting leaflight her face looked almost ordinary, just a person who had agreed to carry a role that made most people flinch away from their own reflection.
“So this,” she said, gesturing lightly to the park, the Edentree, the open air. “This is your knock.”
I couldn’t move.
“It’s not absolution,” she said. “It’s not a shortcut. It’s not even a beginning, really.”
She paused.
“It’s a boundary,” she said. “So you can’t pretend you were never offered one.”
My stomach twisted.
“And now,” she said, “you’re going to do something harder than confession.”
I swallowed. “What?”
She looked past me, toward the outer paths.
“You’re going to go back to your life,” she said, “and you’re going to live like a person who knows.”
*
The first thing I noticed was how quickly my body reached for camouflage.
At work, I caught myself softening my voice in meetings, performing a gentler version of myself that had always been there, just not quite so polished. I stopped mid-sentence once, hearing the familiar cadence kick in, and finished more plainly. Less likable. More exact.
Nobody commented.
That was unsettling.
I had spent years believing that if I stopped managing perception, something would collapse. Reputation. Belonging. Safety.
Nothing collapsed.
Which meant I had been doing all that work for myself.
In the evenings, the city felt louder, not in sound but in presence. Every ordinary interaction carried a second track now, a question running beneath it like a current:
Am I speaking to be clear, or to be intact?
Sometimes the answer was ugly.
Sometimes I chose wrong.
The difference was that I noticed.
And noticing, I was learning, is not the same as fixing. It doesn’t absolve you. It just removes your excuse to pretend you didn’t know.
Three days later, the facilitator contacted me.
A neutral message. Polite. Procedural. No adjectives that could be misread as hope.
I confirmed availability. I did not rehearse speeches. I did not write drafts. I let my hands stay idle, even when my chest buzzed with the old desire to get ahead.
You do not get to set the pace.
I repeated it like a structural rule, not a mantra.
That night, I walked the long way home, past one of the older terraces where the stone still bore marks from early construction, before Corepoint had decided what it wanted to be. Children were chalking crude shapes on the floor. Someone had drawn a crooked line and written STOP next to it, then laughed and stepped over it.
I watched them for a moment, then kept walking.
The line didn’t move just because you ignored it.
At home, I stood in front of the mirror again. Same face. Same eyes. No visible sign that anything essential had shifted.
That, too, was part of the discipline.
No visible sign doesn’t mean nothing has changed.
I thought of the person I had harmed, not as a memory to be processed, not as a figure waiting to forgive or condemn me, but as someone living their own life somewhere in this city, or beyond it, with or without me in their frame.
I did not imagine what they might say.
I did not imagine reconciliation.
I imagined only this: that they would never again have to doubt what happened because I had decided it was inconvenient.
That was as far as I was allowed to go.
Before sleep, I opened my console once more, not to check the case file, not to reread my own words, but to do something smaller and harder.
I opened a private log.
Not a journal. Not a confession. A record.
I wrote one sentence.
Today, I noticed myself trying to make this about me, and I stopped.
It felt inadequate. Almost laughably so.
Good.
I closed the log.
Corepoint dimmed its lights into night-mode, the city breathing into its lower register. Somewhere, water moved through roots. Somewhere else, a door closed softly. Somewhere, someone lived with a truth that did not include my comfort.
I lay down and let myself sleep, not because I felt at peace, but because staying awake would have been another way of performing urgency.
Tomorrow, there would be more chances to lie quietly.
Tomorrow, there would be more chances to refuse.
That, I understood now, was what living like a person who knows actually meant.
Not redemption.
Not erasure.
Just a life finally finding ways to actually, for the first time, be real.
Against all the odds, I finally slept better.