Ledger of the Burned
A Jude Carver “Chapel” Short:
The rain came in ash-flakes, as though the sky were burning pages. Jude Carver stood on the rim of Sector Omega’s ruins: broken towers, conduits like shredded veins, lights flickering in the dark. He’d been sent to retrieve something: a ledger. Not just any ledger. Names, confessions, protocols, yes—but also, the crux, a single sentence to split belief in two.
Operation Sentinel was a trustworthy mission. We were the good guys. But belief had teeth now, and it was biting back. Everything led here: the files, the betrayals, the dangerous safe houses.
The dead eyes.
He slipped beneath the collapsed glass dome of the former Cathedral of Light, now a ruin used for command-broadcasts. Ash ghosts drifted inside. A glow ahead: lamp over a fallen altar, wires spliced into the image of the Cross, inverted, flickering.
He moved low. Memory whispered Dostoevsky: thought without act is paralysis.
He had argued every possible risk. A trap? A lie? The razor edge of second doubt passed through his bones. Tension in the neck. Bile in the gut.
He breathed into his lats. Held it cold. Marched on.
On the altar, a small chest. Blood-smeared, keys missing. He forced the lid, pried the clasp. Inside: the ledger, trimmed, in black leather, pages singed.
Inside. The names. His own, among others. Mission dates, live notes, narrative control, workers lines, assets pressed. And a single line:
“Total public trust secured.”
He heard voices above. Men in boots, their laughter distant in the dome.
Hand trembling—he did not debate.
He stuffed the pages in his inside pocket and moved.
Outside, the storm was sending down thick, cold droplets, lonely sentinels, vangards catching the sun beneath the billowing thunderheads rolling in to darken all.
From above came a shout: “Stand where you are.” Order or threat?
Heart locked in cold flood. Honor. Obedience. Truth. Duty.
One foot after the other, ledger safe, Jude Carver didn’t slow his steps, even when he started splashing up water, hiding the last spots of his tracks as he headed upstream in the tyrranic downpour that washed the burn out of everything save his soul.
He would deliver the ledger. He would let the narrative fracture. He would decide then what to do next.
Consequence was sure to come. All that mattered now was leaving the ruins far behind.
That’s All It Takes
On Crucial Conversations
On (“Animal Man”) Pack Dynamics
On Influence
On A Brief History of Power
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