They moved Ketaki in the gray of morning, when the temple courts smelled like wet stone and the first merchants were still lifting shutters. Two officers escorted them, not the rough sort who carried batons, but the administrative kind who carried folders. The blue and red monitor blinked on a small case beside Ketaki like a patient animal. It recorded heartbeats, breath patterns, the tremor in her voice, everything the men in the jacket thought might be useful.
Leela walked with her on the left. Haria walked behind, hands folded into his sleeves in a gesture Ketaki had come to read as a warning and an apology at once. Ketaki felt more of both than she wanted. She did not want the Council. She also did not want the incident to be worse than it was. She wanted, oddly and painfully, to be believed and to be contained at the same time.
They were led through halls that had more mirrors than statues. In those mirrors Ketaki could watch herself as if from a small distance. She saw the rawness around her eyes, the gray at her temples she had not noticed before. The sight made an unkind thought rise: the architect looked tired. The architect looked like a woman who had run out of the polite lies she told herself about sacrifice.
The Council chamber was less a room and more a ritual for order. Seats rose like the steps of a small theater. The air smelled of oil and polished wood. High windows let in the kind of light that showed dust instead of hiding it. Men and women sat on the dais with the calm of people who had practiced disapproval. A clerk checked names and motioned them forward.
Ketaki could feel Yoddha under her skin. He was patient in the way of people who have convinced themselves of their rightness. When she breathed, he breathed in the same pattern, but a second off, like a rumor that arrives after the fact and then claims authorship of the event. He whispered to her during the walk, not with threats now, but with a bland insistence.
They want to see what you did, he said. They want to know how far you would go.
Ketaki closed her eyes. The chamber light was a thin blade across the floor. She tried to count things to steady herself: three lamps, six steps, the number of officials on the dais. Counting did not push Yoddha away. It made him more orderly, like iron shaped into a tool.
The lead official introduced himself with a title and a softness that pretended to be impartial. He had a small, clean scar along his brow that made him seem older than his voice sounded. His questions were the ones written by etiquette rather than curiosity. He asked Ketaki to recount the event, to describe sensations, to explain the circumstances that led to the initial activation of the Shatterer.
Ketaki spoke. Her words were precise because she had made them so the night before. She had drafted a statement in the lab, an attempt to make chaos into columns and margins. She read it aloud and then, when the clerk asked follow-up questions, she answered as carefully as one tries to speak through broken glass. She left out the parts that would make people hate her right away. She left out the faces of the men in her memories when she feared they would be used as evidence of motive. She did not say that part of the reason she had built the Shatterer was vanity, the need to prove she could do what no one else could.
Leela watched her with a face that was both tender and fierce. Haria shifted in his seat and tapped his foot once. Ketaki felt the glance he gave her like a measuring stick and found herself wanting to apologize for every misstep she had not yet made.
The Council played their cards with protocol. They had doctors examine the blue and red monitor. They asked for logs. They asked for the names of witnesses. The two men who had first come to the lab were called, and they spoke with the careful language of people who had been trained to avoid feeling. Their testimonies were tidy, but they were not precise in the ways Ketaki needed. They described stabilization. They described that a procedure had been followed. They used phrases like proper containment.
One of the Council members, a woman with thin lips and a patient cruelty about her, asked Ketaki directly, plain and blunt.
"If an emergent consciousness can use the host to act in the world, what protections do you propose for those who might be harmed by such actions?"
Ketaki heard the sentence and felt it like a cold hand on her throat. This was the question she had feared. It was also the question she had not answered before because part of her had believed the work itself would answer it. That belief, in retrospect, looked like a child thinking a new toy would keep them safe.
She swallowed. For a moment there was nothing she could reach for except honesty. She had prepared lists about variables and guard rails, but the Council wanted a moral architecture as much as a physical one.
"Mitigation," she said. "Fail safes in the device. Active intervention protocols. Witnessing by trained observers. Consent for subjects. A registry for anyone who is affected."
The woman smiled the smile that says whatever you propose still fits within the box the Council keeps. "Those are the technical answers we expect. Give us also the social and ethical plans. How will you ensure that communities are not used as fuel for experiments? How will you care for those who become collateral damage?"
Ketaki felt the room tilt. There were the people in her memory who had been harmed. There were the men whose faces she had not named. She felt suddenly small and selfish for the way she had made experiments into an answer to her loneliness.
"I will," she began, and then stopped because she thought of the uncertainty of the promise. She had never been an expert in reparation. She had been an expert in building. Saying she would repair what she had helped break felt like admitting she had broken it.
Leela, who rarely spoke unless pushed, leaned forward and said what she believed: "We will provide remedies. We will fund rehabilitation. We will allow community representation in any further tests."
Haria added a harsher note. "And I will make sure the procedures are safe, and if they are not, I will stop them."
The Council nodded. They filed those words into the ledger of acceptable response. That did not amount to trust. Trust was not given by nods. Trust was given by slow approvals and the willingness to accept blame.
When the hearing ended, they did not release Ketaki. Instead, the Council offered a conditional arrangement. The Shatterer would remain under their supervision in a controlled facility. Ketaki would be attached to a monitoring team, allowed to participate in limited capacity. The Council said the words: oversight, transparency, national security. Their language wrapped responsibility in a velvet glove.
They escorted Ketaki back to a holding chamber that smelled like antiseptic and old incense. It had a small window that looked out to a courtyard where a single tree kept all its leaves. Leela sat with her. Haria took notes and refused coffee when offered. Ketaki tried to sleep and could not. Yoddha chatted at the edges of her thoughts. He was not cruel now. He was only blandly confident, like a man waiting for the courts to recognize his birthright.
"You agreed too quickly," Leela said finally. Her voice was small and tired. "You let them put a hand on the machine and you let them write the rules."
Ketaki looked at her and thought of the numbers she had written and the ways she had tried to make the world legible. "If I refuse," she said, "they will take it by force. I know them well enough to know what happens to things that are taken."
Leela placed a hand on her shoulder. "Then be present when they take it. Do not let it be taken without your voice in the room."
Haria shifted his position and admitted the small, uncomfortable truth. "And do not trust their procedures more than your doubts. We are not without skill. We can be careful together, but you must not make yourself a martyr to your theory."
Ketaki nodded. She felt gratitude and irritation in the same breath. She wanted them to guard her like a relic and also to leave her enough space to fail. Those conflicting desires sat uncomfortably inside her. They were human, just as she had asked for.
The conditional custody began the next day. The Shatterer was moved with slow ceremony to a wing with fewer windows and thicker doors. Technicians in white coats read out steps as if reciting prayers. Cameras were mounted, and the blue and red monitor was bolted into the console. The Council set up a panel that would review the experiments. There were signatures and stamps, and a list of approved observers. Ketaki signed reluctantly. Her signature felt like surrender and also like accountability.
On the first night in the controlled wing, when the lights were lower than in the lab and the hum of the machine was different because of isolation, Yoddha spoke to her without the polish of promise.
They will watch, he said simply. They will be afraid, but fear will not give you what we need.
Ketaki did not answer. She had learned that every time she argued with him she gave him a rehearsed form. Silence was sometimes safer. But silence could also make her complicit.
Leela slept in the narrow cot facing the console. Haria kept a notebook at hand. Ketaki lay awake and thought of the faces she had not named and the ways she had hoped to make harm into something salvageable. She thought of the Council, which both offered protection and threatened constraint. She thought of Yoddha and how easy it was to mistake his hunger for purpose.
Outside, the city moved on. The temple bells kept their steady, indifferent bell. Inside, a machine that could convert sorrow into motion waited under watchful eyes. Ketaki tried to imagine how to live with the knowledge that something she had made was not only dangerous but also deeply persuasive. She did not have an answer. She had a set of compromises and the beginning of a plan. That, for now, would have to do.