"Nearly shooting a member of a minority group in the street."
Jude read the headline again. His mouth had stopped working.
"Am I," he said, very quietly, "being used as a prop for political correctness?"
The word sacrifice came to mind, and he decided it was accurate. Because the nature of what was happening had shifted — completely, and without his input. He'd uploaded the video anonymously through Satsuki. Clean, neutral footage. A military general pointing a weapon at an unarmed civilian. The kind of thing that makes people uncomfortable and forces institutional caution. That was the entire plan.
He had not written that headline.
The earpiece clicked. "Don't look at me. I didn't change the title."
So someone else had gotten there first.
Jude scrolled to his push notifications. The video was already there without him searching for it — surfaced by algorithm, riding a wave he hadn't started. He opened the comments section and spent thirty seconds reading before the sweat started.
Someone seeded this. It was obvious once you knew what to look for. He'd spent years writing web fiction, watching comment sections fill with coordinated waves of outrage, learning the difference between organic anger and manufactured momentum. The ratio was wrong. The talking points were too consistent. There were paid accounts in there, or something close to it.
"I wanted rubber bullets," he muttered. "Who switched them to artillery."
He'd calculated this carefully. A general drawing a weapon on a civilian was bad optics — bad enough to make Eiling cautious, to force him to operate through indirect channels rather than direct confrontation. That was the ceiling Jude had been aiming for. Keep the pressure administrative, not existential. Make it a liability Eiling had to manage quietly.
But someone had taken his carefully proportioned problem and weaponized it. The framing had jumped from powerful official intimidates citizen to high-ranking military officer suspected of racial targeting. That was a different category of fire. The public attention wouldn't just increase — it would compound.
The word "Asian" gives Eiling some room, Jude thought, still scrolling. If this had been framed differently, it would be completely uncontrollable. He knew what large-scale online movements looked like when they found genuine traction — he'd watched them build and break across his old timeline, tracing back years, reshaping entire cultural conversations. Asian Americans occupied a particular position in the American political landscape: present, largely overlooked, not the powder keg that other communities had become through decades of documented, explosive injustice. Firecrackers, not dynamite. Which meant this was bad, but not catastrophically bad. Yet.
What worried him was whoever had changed the title doing it again. Escalating further. Pushing it somewhere he couldn't predict or contain.
"Jude."
Barry's hand on his shoulder. "You okay?"
"Fine." He lowered the phone. "A little surprised. Eiling's having a worse morning than I am, I can tell you that."
Wells had been watching him throughout. "Did you arrange this? The video — did you film it?"
"No idea who filmed it." Jude set his phone face-down on the counter with the calm of a man who has just spent $150,000 on master-level acting and intends to get his money's worth. "I was a little busy at the time. Hiding someone in my food cart doesn't leave a lot of hands free for recording."
Wells held the look for three full seconds. Then he moved on.
"Speaking of which — how did you transport Miss Sans Souci here? If she came in without cover, we need to think about exposure."
"I put her in the cart."
A silence descended on the lab.
"You— in the cart," Cisco tried. "Like, you drove her—"
"In the cart." Jude patted the side of tricycle. "Lower storage shelf. It fits a person if they tuck in. Barely, but it fits."
The silence continued for another beat.
"That is," Wells said, with the careful enunciation of a man choosing words the way a bomb disposal technician chooses which wire, "an unconventional but genuinely discreet solution. Miss Sans Souci's presence here remains uncompromised."
Cisco's mouth moved twice without producing sound.
"Jude," Caitlin said, with the tone of someone who has been holding a question for a while, "are you actually a food truck owner? Or is there some family business somewhere that you haven't mentioned? Because the food truck has a compartment sized for a human body, you ran a counter-surveillance operation against a military general this morning, and you apparently have safe houses."
"I'm a food truck owner," Jude said. "Your imaginations are doing a lot of work."
Barry said nothing. He was thinking, privately, that no normal food truck owner casually describes their vehicle as having a compartment that "fits a person." The phrasing alone was strange. But he filed it under things about Jude that don't quite add up — a folder that had been accumulating entries for nine months without ever resolving into a clear picture.
"Alright." Wells clapped once, bringing the room back to purpose. "We'll run the capability analysis at the test site. Barry — get Miss Sans Souci there without being seen. Cisco, Caitlin — with me, we need the equipment prepped."
People began moving. The lab reorganized itself into motion.
Jude stood in the middle of it and looked around.
"What do I do?"