Preface

I have been doing this for over sixty years. I started young, during the last gasps of the Warlord Eras, when the broadcasts coming out of the inland were so violent that people in the capital watched them the way they watch the Hunting Games now, with their food in their laps and their children in the next room. I have embedded with contractor crews in every major corridor on the planet. I have walked through syndicate territory in Inland Thazvaar under names that were not mine. I have filmed things that the public relay would not carry and stored them in caches that I am certain the Empire knows the location of. If somehow the Shadow Rule did not, the surveillance system certainly does. They have chosen not to act, for their own reasons, the same way they have chosen not to retrieve Ash Kota and every Engineered who left with him despite knowing exactly where they are. I do not pretend to understand why, but I have been alive long enough to recognize when tolerance is a decision rather than an oversight. I have been shot, stabbed, beaten, left for dead in terrain that should have finished the job, and I am still here because the work is not done and because I am too stubborn to stop before it is.

This document is for the people of the capital. It is for the citizens who live within relay coverage and believe that the world ends where their signal does. It is for the ones who hear the word "inland" and think of dust and distance rather than the hundreds of millions of lives being moved, sold, consumed, and discarded in systems so large and so old that they have their own economies, their own hierarchies, and their own logic. I am not writing this to change anything. I have been alive long enough to know that information does not produce action in people who are comfortable. I am writing this because I recorded it, and because recording something and then keeping it to yourself is the same as not recording it at all.

I do not name most individuals in this document. This is not cowardice. It is the cost of continuing to do the work. If I name the people I have observed, the networks I have embedded in will close to every relayman who comes after me, and the footage that does not yet exist will never be captured. I name organizations because organizations survive exposure. Individuals do not, and neither do the relaymen who expose them. There is one exception. I will get to her.

I. Trafficking

I start here because this is where the most lives are lost and where the least is understood by anyone living within the grid. The word trafficking on the public relay means something abstract, a problem that exists somewhere else affecting people you will never meet, sustained by forces you cannot see. I am going to make it less abstract.

The trafficking economy on Geba moves through layers, and each layer is worse than the one above it. At the top, the layer most people are vaguely aware of, you have labor trafficking. Workers captured or coerced from frontier settlements, failed clearings, collapsed corridors, and refugee populations displaced by Energy Wars operations are moved through inland routes and sold to operations that need bodies: mining, construction, relay maintenance in black zones, agricultural work in territories where the labor class has been depleted by conflict or flight. These people work until they cannot, and when they cannot they are replaced. The conditions vary. Some operations feed their labor adequately because starving workers produce less output, and others do not because the supply of replaceable bodies is large enough that maintaining the ones you have is more expensive than acquiring new ones. I have filmed both. The ones that feed their workers are not better. They are just more efficient about the same thing.

Below the labor layer you have entertainment slaves. These exist in imperial regions, in the capital itself, in Coastal Thazvaar, in the wealthy districts of Berinu and Jeyrha, in the same cities where the Empire officially maintains that slavery does not exist within modern society. Entertainment slaves are acquired for events. A wealthy individual hosts a gathering, a celebration, a private showing, and the people serving at that event, performing at that event, decorating that event, were purchased for the occasion. They are kept for the duration and then disposed of. Not resold. Disposed of. The resale value of a slave who has been used for a private event is nothing, because there are always new ones available through the same channels that provided the last set, and a buyer wealthy enough to acquire slaves for a single evening's use is not interested in keeping inventory. They are discarded the way a napkin is discarded after it has been used, and the people who do this do not consider what they are doing to be remarkable because the system that provides the slaves has been operating long enough that it feels like a service rather than a crime.

I filmed a disposal once. I was embedded in a logistics operation that moved supplies to private estates along the southern coast of the Geba continent, and what I thought was a supply return turned out to be the removal of seven people who had served at an event the previous night. They were alive. They were not going to remain alive for much longer. I recorded it. The footage did not make it to the public relay. It sits in a cache. It will be there longer than I will.

Below the entertainment layer you have pleasure slaves, and I am not going to describe what I saw in the detail that the footage carries because the footage exists and if you ever find it you will understand why I did not include it here. What I will say is that the people who are taken for this purpose understand immediately that capture is identical to death. The experience between capture and the end is the only variable, and that variable is determined entirely by the preferences of whoever purchased them. Some of those preferences are things I did not know human beings were capable of wanting. I have been doing this for sixty years. I have filmed executions, sieges, corridor collapses, and the aftermath of syndicate raids where the bodies were arranged as messages for whoever found them next. None of it prepared me for what I saw in the rooms where pleasure slaves are kept. The footage I captured there is the only footage I have ever considered destroying. I did not destroy it because destroying evidence of what is happening to people is the same as helping it continue, but I understand now why no one who has seen it wants it on the relay, and I understand why the relay would not carry it even if I transmitted it.

The planet's gender imbalance drives the value of male captives to extraordinary heights in these markets. A male slave commands prices that make long distance trafficking operations profitable despite the risks, the logistics, and the losses incurred in transport. This is why networks like the one operated by Kayen'Shetan Insan exist at intercontinental scale, moving captives from the Berinu-Thazvaar frontier to destinations as distant as the imperial capital and Jeyrha. The demand exists because the buyers exist, and the buyers exist in the same districts where the Empire hosts its ceremonies and broadcasts its declarations about the values of civilization.

The Teytan produces trafficked individuals at a volume that dwarfs every other source on the planet. The number of lives that have passed through their networks is estimated in the hundreds of millions, and a large percentage of those people were born into captivity, meaning they were never free. They were born as property inside a system that has been reproducing itself for generations, and their children will be born the same way, and the system will continue because it feeds a state of 13 million people who consider everyone outside their borders to be material. The Teytan does not hide what it does. It simply does not consider it a crime, because the doctrine they live by does not extend its protections to those outside the line.

There is one category of person that is never successfully enslaved: the Engineered. Every class of them is impossible to control for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has spent more than a few minutes studying what they are, but people have tried anyway because greed does not account for consequences until the consequences arrive. The Assault-Class have been captured as children and raised in captivity by traffickers who believed that if you started early enough you could break them before they became what they were designed to become. It does not work. As they mature their physical capability outpaces every restraint their captors can devise, and when they break free they do not escape quietly. They have caused massacres that exposed entire rings of corruption, killing everyone involved in the operation that held them and leaving a trail of bodies that led investigators directly to the networks that purchased them in the first place. No one has ever attempted to capture a Destroyer-Class for this reason, because even as children they are incredibly dangerous and the gap between what a Destroyer child can do and what a natural-born adult can survive is not a gap anyone wants to test.

There is a story that circulates among traffickers because it actually happened, and similar things have happened since. A female Assault-Class was captured and given enough sedatives to kill fifty men twice over. When she woke she fought her way through the palace nude and bare-handed, and once she found a weapon she fought her way to the front of the clearing, stole a rover, and drove from the Berinese mountains to southeastern Inland Thazvaar where she finally found clothing. She used the beacon on the rover to locate a nearby corridor operation that happened to be Haavu, armed herself, and returned to the exact clearing and the exact palace to kill everyone who remained only weeks later. She strangled her purchaser to death with her hair. This is not mythology. This is what happens when you attempt to enslave something that was designed to be unstoppable, and the reason the Engineered are killed immediately upon capture rather than sold is because every trafficker on the planet has heard this story or one like it and knows that the cost of trying is annihilation.

Those who are captured and realize what has happened to them understand very quickly that it is the same as death. The ones taken for labor know they will work until they break and then be replaced. The ones taken for entertainment know they will serve once and be discarded. The ones taken for pleasure know that what is coming will last as long as whoever purchased them wants it to last, and that the ending is the only mercy the system offers. I have spoken to people who escaped from all three layers. The ones from labor and entertainment could speak about it. The ones from pleasure could not. Some of them could not speak at all anymore.

II. Disposal

The bodies have to go somewhere, and I learned where they go because I embedded with a disposal crew thinking I was following a logistics operation into a composting facility. The route took us into the grey zone of northern Berinu, the mountainous border region adjoining Inland Thazvaar where relay coverage does not reach and the Maiden's War has never stopped producing abductions, trafficking, and armed skirmishes that most of the planet will never hear about. Berinu is likely the worst place on the planet for what I am about to describe, because the same qualities that make its population cooperative and warm in the governed coastal districts, the same demographic pressures that make its women targets for men traveling from every other continent, produce a border region where the volume of human traffic moving through ungoverned corridors is higher than anywhere else on Geba, and the infrastructure that processes what comes out the other end of that traffic has had generations to become efficient.

The fields were enormous. Rows upon rows of mounded earth, each one slightly raised, slightly wrong in shape, and covered in Saethera Shadegrass so thick and so green that from a distance the site looked like farmland. The bodies had been chemically accelerated through decomposition and sprayed with Shadegrass seeds, which not only masked the smell but grew faster on corpses than on any other substrate, feeding on the biological material beneath them and producing a unique coloration in the blades that does not appear when the grass is grown on clean soil. The Shadegrass was being harvested and sold into various markets, where that unique color was treated as a desirable variant without anyone asking what produced it. The disposal operation was not an expense. It was a revenue stream. The dead were not being buried. They were being farmed.

The people running the facility walked on the bodies and through them the way a farmer walks through hollow mounds of mud, stepping over what was underneath without acknowledging it, ignoring the sounds the decomposing remains made underfoot. I watched a woman adjust her boot after it sank through a ribcage and continue walking without changing her expression. These were not soldiers or syndicate operators hardened by combat. These were workers. They processed bodies the way a mill processes grain, and the normality of it was worse than anything I had seen in the inland's worst combat zones because at least in combat people react to death. Here, death was the raw material, and nobody reacted to anything.

Engineered individuals who end up in these facilities are incinerated rather than processed, because their biology causes the breakdown to take too long or fail entirely. The same physical resilience that makes them extraordinary in life makes them a problem in death, and the disposal crews treat Engineered remains as a separate category requiring equipment and fuel that the standard fields do not need.

Grey zones produce more atrocity than the black zones. I did not expect to write that sentence when I started this work, and I spent years trying to disprove it before accepting that the data does not lie. The black zones of Inland Thazvaar are violent, lawless, and brutal, but the violence there is open and acknowledged by everyone who participates in it. The grey zones, the stretches of territory that sit between the governed world and the ungoverned interior, are where the systems that the governed world officially denies operate at their most efficient. The disposal fields exist in the grey zone. The entertainment slave supply chains move through the grey zone. The transit corridors that connect frontier capture points to imperial buyers pass through the grey zone. Everything that the capital does not want to see happens in the space between what the capital controls and what it has given up on controlling, and that space is vast enough to hide anything.

III. Piracy

The victims of piracy end up in the same fields. That is the connection between what I just described and what I am about to describe, and it is the reason I placed these sections next to each other rather than separating them by category. A pirate crew that boards a cargo airship over Inland Thazvaar and takes what it wants does not leave witnesses, and the bodies of the crew they killed do not float down to the surface and get found by someone who reports it. They are stripped of anything useful and dropped, or they are sold to the same disposal operations that process trafficking victims, because the disposal crews do not ask where the bodies came from and the Shadegrass does not care what killed them.

Air piracy is worse than sea piracy in every way that matters, and it is worse specifically because of what happens when it goes wrong in proximity to the places where people actually live. Air pirate operations are not conducted by a single ship the way most people in the capital imagine when they hear the word pirate. They operate in formations of three to five ships coordinating to control the direction of the target vessel by flanking it from multiple angles and forcing it along a trajectory the formation dictates. While the boarding crews move onto the target, at least one ship stays in very close proximity as an emergency extraction platform in case the operation falls apart. This is the structure, and it sounds almost professional until you see it executed by the kind of people who actually do this for a living.

The problem with air piracy that does not exist at sea is altitude, population density, and the fact that relay signals from pirate ships can sometimes overlap into white zone airspace over major capitals when the formation drifts or miscalculates positioning. When that happens the operation is exposed in real time to relay monitoring systems that were never supposed to see it, and the response from whatever security apparatus covers that airspace is immediate. I have seen formations scatter so fast that the boarding crews still on the target ship were abandoned entirely because the escort ships prioritized escape over extraction, leaving boarders trapped on a vessel whose crew knows they are there with no way off and no one coming back for them.

Cargo ships that are carrying something worth protecting often have contractors aboard, and the pirates do not always identify this before they commit to boarding. Some of them fight their way in regardless because turning back after initiating contact means losing the fuel, the positioning, and the element of surprise they spent hours setting up, and the calculation they make in that moment is that whatever is on the ship is worth the fight even if the fight is against people who are better armed, better trained, and operating under contract terms that incentivize killing every boarder rather than negotiating. When that calculation is wrong the situation becomes so volatile that neither side can control the outcome, and the ship itself becomes the casualty.

I was embedded with a formation that attempted to board a cargo vessel over the inland when one of these situations collapsed completely. The target ship took damage from the boarding and began losing altitude in a way that could not be corrected. I was on one of the flanking ships, close enough to see the crew on the target scrambling for anything that would slow the descent, and I watched the ship go down into a population center. A clearing. People on the ground had no warning because the operation happened above their relay coverage and the ship came out of the sky without announcement. I recorded it. The footage shows the moment of impact and the seconds afterward when the dust cleared enough to see what the ship had landed on, which was a market district. There was no recovering from that. Not for the people on the ship, not for the people beneath it, and not for whatever the pirates thought they were going to take from the cargo hold that was now buried in rubble and bodies.

I embedded with the Children of Kharan for most of my piracy coverage because they are the most chaotic group operating in both domains and because the chaos itself was what I wanted to document. They are exactly what they appear to be: dozens of internal factions with no stable leadership, constant betrayal, and a membership drawn from people who ended up there because no one else would take them. What the broad descriptions do not fully convey is the sheer stupidity of the average member. I watched people die from accidents that had nothing to do with combat or risk: shooting each other through carelessness with weapons they had not been trained to use, eating random plants and fungi while moving through jungle regions because they were hungry and could not be bothered to ask anyone whether what they were putting in their mouths would kill them, approaching animals that even a common child raised in a hub clearing would know to avoid. One crew I was with lost two members to a territorial predator because they walked directly into its display perimeter despite every sign the environment was providing that they should not be there. The predator did not even have to chase them. They came to it. These are the people responsible for moving eighty percent of the inland's illicit goods, and the fact that the system functions at all despite the quality of the people operating it says more about the volume of goods moving through the inland than it does about any capability the Children of Kharan possess.

Sea piracy along the coastal waters of Thazvaar and Berinu operates on a different register entirely. It is older, quieter, and in many cases indistinguishable from legitimate maritime activity until the moment it becomes piracy. Crews that live on the water outside imperial jurisdiction make their living through a combination of fishing, salvage, grey zone trade, and targeted raids when the opportunity presents itself, and the line between a fishing vessel and a pirate vessel is determined entirely by what the crew decides to do on a given day based on what they encounter. I embedded with crews in Berinese coastal waters who went weeks without raiding anything, living off what the ocean provided and trading at small port settlements that did not ask where their cargo came from, and then one morning a supply barge appeared on the horizon carrying materials between relay covered ports and the crew decided in less than a minute that today was the day they became pirates again. There was no planning. There was no formation. There was a barge, and there was the decision to take it, and twenty minutes later they had what they wanted and the barge crew was swimming.

The bodies from sea piracy end up in the water more often than in the disposal fields, but the ones that reach the northern Berinu border region feed the same infrastructure. A pirate crew operating near the coast that kills during a raid and does not want bodies found will sell the remains to the same disposal operations that process trafficking victims, because the disposal crews have been there longer than the pirate crews have and will outlast them, and the Shadegrass does not distinguish between sources.

IV. Murder and Assassination

I have the least to say about this and the most reason not to say it. Political assassination on Geba operates at a level where the people who commission it, the people who execute it, and the people who benefit from it are all protected by systems that I cannot expose without ending my ability to continue the work. I am going to describe the structure rather than the individuals because the structure is what matters and the individuals rotate through it faster than any document could track.

There are three layers. The first is corridor violence, which is murder dressed as the cost of doing business. A contractor who becomes inconvenient to the manufactory that hired them does not get terminated from a contract. They get offered a detail where the risk profile ensures they do not return, but the payment is far larger than any professional would refuse, and the death is recorded as operational loss rather than what it was, which was a decision made by someone who never entered the corridor and never will. I have filmed enough corridor operations to recognize when a detail is structured to produce casualties among specific personnel, and the pattern is consistent enough that I stopped believing in accidental death during corridor work years ago. Not all of it is assassination. But more of it is than anyone in the capital wants to accept.

The second layer is commercial assassination, where businesses, syndicate operations, and competing interests eliminate individuals who threaten their revenue or position. This happens in every major population center on the planet, from the capital to Kharan's Gulf to the port cities of Berinu, and it is the most common form of targeted killing by volume. The methods range from crude to invisible. In the inland it looks like a raid. In the capital it looks like an accident or a disappearance. In Coastal Thazvaar nobody even pretends it was anything other than what it was, because the culture there has absorbed commercial killing as a normal feature of doing business in a region where the Underworld and the legitimate economy are the same thing.

The third layer is political assassination at the level where the Shadow Rule operates, and I am not going to write about it in detail because I would like to continue breathing. What I will say is that the systems I have observed suggest that political assassination at this level is not reactive but structural, meaning that individuals are not killed because they did something wrong but because their continued existence produces a trajectory that the governing architecture has determined is incompatible with stability. The killing is not punishment. It is maintenance. And the people who carry it out are not criminals in any meaningful sense because the system they serve is the system that defines what criminal means.

I have footage. It stays in the cache.

V. Smuggling and Contraband

Smuggling on Geba is not an underground economy. It is the economy, dressed in clothing that the capital refuses to examine closely enough to recognize. I am going to start with what you are wearing right now, or what you wish you were wearing, or what the person you admire most was wearing the last time you saw them on the relay, because that is where this begins and that is where it will make sense to you in a way that the inland never will.

Lux Notera and Yelidra Veykar are too important for anyone to turn against them and too powerful for either of them to care that I am saying this, which is why I am comfortable saying it. Look at what they wear. Look at the jewels. Look at the furs and leathers. Look at the skins and the stones and the rarity of every piece they put on their bodies and ask yourself when the last time was that anyone on the relay questioned where any of it came from. No one has. No one will. They are living at the top of their lives the way every person at their level does, and I am not accusing them of anything they are not already aware of. What I am pointing out is what no one else will.

In one of their pictures together, Lux was very obviously wearing Crystal Horn shoes alongside what appeared to be Alpha Greater Smilohound furs. The Crystal Horn material is not necessarily the issue on its own, as the Crystalhorn Behemoth is a deep ocean species of which only a single specimen has ever been recovered, and the material available comes only from that specimen's harvested remains, meaning every piece made from it is one piece closer to the last one that will ever exist. But the issue that should concern you is the jewels. The stones they wear are extraordinarily rare and exist deep within the planet, and this is a known fact that everyone in the capital either does not think about or chooses not to think about: the extraction of these stones requires labor operating in conditions that no free person would accept, in regions so deep and so remote that oversight does not exist, and the very slave labor that is trafficked through the networks I described in the first section of this document is what pulls them out of the ground. The hands that touched those jewels before they reached the cutter and the setter and the designer and the wearer were hands that belonged to people who were not free, and the chain between the mine and the necklace passes through every layer of the trafficking economy on its way to the surface.

I know Lux and Yelidra are just living their lives. I know every person at their status does the same. But it is worth mentioning that the things we do not think about are things we may be directly contributing to, and because they dress like this, because they set the standard for what aspiration looks like on the relay, their fans who can afford the bottom tier of it will indulge in the same materials without asking the same questions. The demand flows downward. The suffering flows upward. The stones stay beautiful.

The Swiftwing is explicitly outlawed from being hunted. It has been the bird that represents the capital for thousands of years, its design inspired the Solarn Swiftwing line of airships, and it remains one of the most recognizable symbols of imperial identity on the planet. Yet there is clothing that very obviously comes from the Swiftwing being worn by people whose exclusivity places them beyond the reach of any enforcement that might care. Nothing is done about it. The laws that outlaw or protect many of these creatures are extremely outdated, and many average citizens do not even realize they exist. If they are unaware of the laws, how would they know that what they are seeing is wrong? That is why I am here. But in all fairness, this is the least of what I want to report. It may not be a good thing, but it is certainly not the worst.

Now let me tell you about the ice bear.

The Ngorrhali ice bear is the most dangerous creature on this planet by a margin so large that every other predator on Geba exists in a different category. Its head is larger than a Frost Sentinel's body. It lives for five to seven centuries. It claims territories so vast that entire expeditions become impassable, not routes but entire expeditions, because the creature decides what moves through its land. It kills without feeding in what researchers can only describe as sport-like behavior. The only successful ice bear hunts in recorded history have been conducted by groups of post-service Assault-Class Engineered individuals who specifically seek out the much larger male variants, and even those are rare enough to be notable. Everything about the ice bear says do not approach it, and yet people do, because its fur produces the most valuable coats and headpieces on the planet and its bones create decorative ornaments so expensive and so rare that owning one places you in a category of wealth that most people will never see from the inside.

I watched a poaching crew attempt to take one. I was not with them because I had already spent time in those regions with contractor crews when I was much younger and I already knew that the ice bear was something you did not even want to be in the same territory as, let alone approach with intent. I watched from a mountain ridge, which was still dangerous because ice bears can blend into rocks and mounds of snow in a way that makes proximity a gamble even at distance. The crew had rail arms and the best rocket technology that varens could purchase, and they brought an airship in specifically to provide fire support from above. I watched them approach the bear and open fire, and I watched the bear absorb everything they put into it, the rail rounds, the rockets, all of it, and continue moving as though the weapons were an inconvenience rather than a threat. The airship attempted to provide suppressive fire and the bear struck it before it could gain altitude, swatting it out of the sky the way a person swats something small and irritating. The crew on the ground did not have time to understand that their plan had failed before they were dead. All of them. Every single one. The airship crew did not survive the impact. None of the natural-born men who went into that clearing came out of it, and the bear did not pursue me on the ridge because I had done nothing to announce my presence, which is the only reason I was able to capture the moment and the only reason I am able to tell you about it now.

That footage is among the most viewed combat broadcasts I have ever produced, and people watch it the way they watch the Hunting Games, with fascination and distance, without connecting what they are seeing to the coat hanging in the market or the bone ornament sitting on the shelf of someone they know. The fur that makes those coats came from an animal that did this to the people who tried to take it, and the people who wear those coats have never considered what it cost to produce them because the cost was paid by someone else in a place they will never go.

The exotic animal trade extends far beyond ice bears and luxury fashion. There is a lesser known practice that operates almost entirely in covert circles: the harvesting of venoms, toxins, and biological materials from protected species for use as weapons. You may ask why not use plants, since Geba has no shortage of toxic flora. The answer is potency and accessibility. The venom of a Venomveil Serpent is a neurotoxin with no known antidote that causes paralysis within seconds and death within minutes, and it is far easier to scratch someone with serpent venom than it is to force them to drink a tea or make a paste and apply it to a blade tip and hope that the contact is sufficient. The Thazvaari Jungle Viper's smaller regional variants are highly venomous and aggressive, and their venom enters the same covert markets that trade in assassination tools. The armor and scales of creatures like the Softbelly Blackclaw and the Mirehook can be shaped directly into projectiles, something no plant material can replicate. Animal-derived weapons require no refinement, no processing facility, and no cooperation from the target. They are ready to use the moment they are harvested, and the people who need them know exactly where to find the supply.

Most of the fashion that reaches the capital, even the pieces that appear to use synthetic or cultivated materials, contains components sourced from animals that are supposed to be protected. The Swiftwing, the Smilohound, the Venomveil Serpent with its shimmering blue and violet scales, even the Jadenraptor's brilliant green feathers that blind pilots at altitude: all of it enters markets without question and leaves them as clothing, ornaments, and accessories worn by people who will never ask where the materials came from. The supply chain passes through the same grey zone corridors and syndicate networks that move everything else, and the disposal infrastructure I described earlier processes whatever is left over after the valuable parts have been extracted. The cycle sustains itself through willful ignorance at every level, from the consumer who does not ask to the retailer who does not tell to the supplier who does not care.

VI. Syndicate Operations

I have embedded with multiple syndicate organizations across my career, but the Jerhit Syndicate is the one I know best because I spent multiple years inside it, deeper than I have ever been in anything before or since, and the experience nearly cost me something worse than my life. It nearly cost me who I am.

I entered the Jerhit under the identity of an arms dealer who had been killed. He was high profile but his death was not widely known, and I managed to take his identity in a way that gave me access to his connections, his networks, and the access he had built over years of operating in the grey zone. Through that identity I was able to get close to Daer Jerhit, who was supposed to be in contact with this dealer, and for a time I actually operated as the dealer in a very real and serious way, using his connections and his access and acting as if I were him. This was not pretending. This was becoming someone else so completely that the line between the cover and the person underneath it began to dissolve, and the longer I stayed the harder it became to remember which one was real.

Through Daer I gained access to the broader Jerhit operation, and through the operation I eventually reached Brena Jerhit herself. She needed a way to move product to the capital, and the arms dealer whose identity I was wearing had the connections to make that happen. The access I was given from that point forward was extraordinary. I saw her personal operations. I saw the logistics of how the wealthiest inland syndicate on the planet moves materials, people, and varens through channels that the governed world does not know exist. And I saw the lifestyle.

This is the part I need to be honest about, because it explains something that I think is important for people to understand about how these systems sustain themselves. The lifestyle at the top of the Jerhit Syndicate is indistinguishable from the lifestyle at the top of any legitimate enterprise in the capital. The food, the comfort, the safety, the company, the quality of everything you touch and wear and consume is so far above anything that the average citizen of the governed world experiences that it does not feel like crime. It feels like arrival. I developed a type of respect for it once I was fully immersed, not because I agreed with what the Jerhit does but because I understood for the first time what people who live at the top of these lifestyles actually experience, and why they continue doing what they do. They do not see the ugliness at the bottom. From where they sit, there is no bottom. There is only the view, and the view is beautiful.

I stayed for years. I started to confuse my own personal identity and reality with theirs. The cover was not a cover anymore. I was living the life of a person who did not exist, inside an organization that treated me as though I belonged there, and the longer it continued the less I wanted it to end. That is the most dangerous thing I have ever experienced, and I have stood in kill zones under active shelling.

I also spent time near the Teytan, and the Teytan is the one time in my career when I knew for certain I was going to die. I got close enough to understand that within their borders, in comparison to the rest of Inland Thazvaar, it was basically paradise. Food, shelter, energy, relay coverage, stability that the rest of the inland cannot offer. I also got to see how they treated those who were not part of them, and the contrast between the two is the most complete expression of the doctrine I have ever witnessed: protection and abundance for those within the line, and absolute dehumanization for everyone outside it.

Their relay systems operate on a slightly different pattern than the Solarn network, and they were able to detect my outward transmissions. Once I was captured there was no negotiating. No amount of smooth talking could convince them that I was worth keeping alive or that I wanted to be in their territory, so they were going to execute me. I was saved by a situation that erupted right next to me, close enough to create the chaos I needed, and instead of being killed I was left in the confusion and was able to escape by blending into the other slaves.

Escaping Teytan territory was an ordeal of its own. Not only is the terrain extremely difficult, with mountains and passes and jungles between their interior and anything resembling the outside world, but there are different sections of trained warriors guarding paths and indoctrinated slaves who will sound alarms if they see someone moving in a way that does not match the patterns they have been conditioned to recognize. This is also where I learned that not every labor class slave wants to escape. Some of them have been inside the system long enough that the system is all they know, and the possibility of leaving is more frightening than the certainty of staying. After surviving the initial escape I had to traverse mountains, pass through oasis jungle, and then cross desert before I found anyone willing to pick me up, all of it without food, water, or any equipment besides underpowered signal transmitters that would have been intercepted and given me away again if I had used them.

I am going to say something about myself here that I do not say often but that I believe is true: anyone except me would have given up and died. I am not saying this to be arrogant. I am saying it because I have spent sixty years doing work that kills the people who attempt it, and the fact that I am still alive and still producing is not luck. It is because I am the best at what I do, and I have been the best at it for longer than most of the people reading this have been alive. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to attempt what I have done and report back. I will wait.

The other syndicates and independent groups I observed during my career do not require the same depth of coverage because they do not operate at the same level of complexity as the Jerhit or the Teytan. The Children of Kharan are what they appear to be and I have already described them. The independent warlords vary so widely in their operations and motivations that generalizing about them would be dishonest. Some are criminals. Some are just people defending territory. The difference between them is not structure but intention, and intention is not something I can film.

VII. Fraud and Financial Crime

I learned about fraud while I was inside the Jerhit, and what I learned is that the distinction between legitimate commerce and syndicate commerce in the capital exists only because the people involved in both have agreed to maintain it. The mechanism is simpler than anyone in the governed world wants to believe, and it exploits a gap in the Solarn registry system that has existed for as long as the system itself.

Throughout the planet, the relay tracks every person in the white zones. Everyone who exists in the governed world is accounted for. The only people who can move through imperial territory without being detected are those who were born in the inland, who are not part of the Solarn registry, who do not exist in any system that the governed world maintains. What the Jerhit understood, and what no other syndicate has managed to replicate at the same scale, is that this gap can be exploited through certain grey zones where cargo passes in quantities too large to track individually. Once materials or people have been moved through these transit points, there is no way to confirm whether they were there the entire time or arrived through channels that the registry was never designed to monitor. A person who appears in the capital with no prior registry entry cannot be distinguished from a person who has always been there if the right intermediary has built the right identity backward from the right starting point.

Once that identity exists, once someone is willing to represent syndicate interests in the capital and operate under a constructed civilian profile, everything that follows is legitimate by every standard the governed world applies. The varens moves through real accounts. The contracts are filed through real institutions. The business conducted in the capital by people who are extensions of the Jerhit Syndicate is indistinguishable from the business conducted by anyone else, because the system that validates legitimacy is the same system that the fraud exploits. Other syndicates cannot do this because they do not have the resources, the patience, or the institutional knowledge that the Jerhit has built across generations. This is the single most important thing I learned during my years inside: the Jerhit is the only syndicate that has successfully made itself part of the legitimate economy, and it did so by understanding the governed world better than the governed world understands itself.

The fact that trafficking supply chains reach into imperial zones, into the capital itself, into the luxury districts of Kharan's Gulf and the port cities of Berinu and Jeyrha, means that there must be demand, and the demand comes from the same population centers where the Empire maintains that these things do not exist. I did not record direct footage of imperial officials participating in trafficking purchases, but I have recordings from an auction in a luxury district of Kharan's Gulf where hundreds, maybe thousands of people walked by and no one questioned anything. The people being auctioned were drugged and sedated to a point where they did not attempt to scream or ask for help, given substances that altered their mental states so thoroughly that many of them literally had no idea where they were or that what was happening to them was wrong. I did not record openly because I did not want to draw attention to what I was actually doing there, but what I captured is enough to confirm that what most of the planet considers a crime of the inland happens in broad daylight in the most expensive district on the coast.

Imperial officials purchase through intermediaries rather than directly because direct participation makes them easy to blackmail, and it has happened. Several officials have taken their own lives once their involvement was discovered, which tells you everything you need to know about how hidden this is from the general population. These are not fringe figures. These are people who participate in the governance of the planet, who broadcast speeches about imperial values and the progress of civilization, and who purchase human beings through channels built by the same syndicates they publicly condemn. The population of the capital has no idea this is happening because the system is designed to ensure they never find out.

VIII. Corruption

I am not going to use this section to expose the Shadow Rule. That is not what this is for, and it is not what corruption means in the context of what I have spent sixty years documenting. The Shadow Rule is not the corruption. It is the only thing that has been truly consistent for as long as anyone can remember, the invisible architecture that held the planet together after the Fracture and that continues to hold it together now, and whatever you think about the morality of hidden governance the fact remains that without it the Warlord Eras would never have ended and the Energy Wars would have consumed what was left.

The corruption is what happens beneath the consistency. It is the imperial officials in the capital of Geba who take syndicate varens to suppress investigations into trafficking networks that supply the same districts they live in. It is the port administrators in Berinu who adjust cargo manifests for grey zone shipments in exchange for payments that exceed their annual salaries. It is the academic institutions in Jeyrha that accept endowments from families whose wealth traces directly to the exotic animal trade and the venom markets and the mining operations that run on slave labor. It is all of them, and it is none of them individually, because the corruption is not a collection of bad actors. It is the normal functioning of a system where the line between legitimate and criminal has been so thoroughly erased that the distinction exists only in the language people use to describe what they are doing rather than in the substance of what they actually do.

In Coastal Thazvaar they do not even bother with the language. In Kharan's Gulf the line between criminal and legitimate is so blurred that no one can tell the difference, and nobody tries, because the economy that sustains the most luxurious enclave on the planet runs on the same channels that the imperial capital officially condemns. The same contractors who protect relay infrastructure during the day attend auctions in the evening. The same merchants who sell legally sourced goods in the morning sell illegally sourced goods in the afternoon through the same shopfront. The same families that fund civic projects and cultural institutions fund the syndicate operations that provide the labor, the materials, and the access that make those civic projects possible. This is not an accusation. This is a description of what I have seen over six decades of being in places where the people involved do not know they are being watched, and what I have seen is that nobody on the coast believes they are doing anything wrong because the entire environment has been built on the assumption that there is no wrong, only business.

Closing

I need to talk about Brena.

I mentioned earlier that there was one exception to my rule about naming individuals, and I have been building toward this since the preface. Brena Jerhit stands at 5'11" with skin as dark as night and silver hair that is extremely rare among her people. Thazvaari women are known for grey eyes that sometimes appear silver, and green and ember are common among them, but Brena's green eyes paired against that skin and that hair produce something that no description of Thazvaari characteristics has ever accounted for. She dresses arguably better than Yelidra Veykar, and I am aware of what I am saying when I say that. She is possibly the most beautiful Thazvaari woman to ever live, and I have been to every continent and seen what every continent has to offer, and I am telling you that I was not prepared for her. The smile that she uses to make grown men afraid of her becomes something entirely different when it is not looking at an object but at a person, when the calculation behind it falls away and what remains is just the face of a woman who has decided that you are worth seeing clearly, and I know she will be enraged at me writing this, and I know that the version of her that the inland carries in its head is the cold and untouchable head of the wealthiest syndicate on the planet, and I do not care, because the uncomfortable reality is that the person running that syndicate is someone whose presence in a room made me forget what I was there to do, and I have never forgotten what I was there to do before her and I have never forgotten since.

When I was embedded within the Jerhit, deep enough and long enough that I had started to lose track of who I actually was, Brena discovered my identity. But she did not discover it the way I expected, which would have been sudden and followed by my immediate death. She pieced it together over the course of a full year, which means I was compromised for an entire year before I knew it, and she let me continue operating inside her syndicate the entire time because she found it more interesting to watch than to end.

She knew after our very first night together. She decrypted my trackers, which should have been impossible, but I did not account for the fact that she had essentially endless resources and the patience to apply them to a problem that interested her personally. On a separate occasion in Kharan's Gulf, one of the women in a party we were with recognized me and told her. Brena killed the woman before she could put her clothes back on and had the others in the party tracked and executed just to be safe. She did not tell me any of this. She continued as though nothing had changed, and she made a game out of assembling the rest of who I actually was, collecting pieces of my real identity the way someone collects rare objects, fitting them together at her own pace while I slept next to her believing I was still hidden. On my final night there she mentioned Brannok'Drekan by name, casually, in a way that was designed to show me exactly how well she had gotten to know the real person underneath the cover, and to convince me that what she was offering was not a trap but a genuine choice. She was willing to forgive me completely if I would stay. She showered me with every luxury that Varens could buy, and she meant it, and I escaped before she arrived at any final conclusion about what to do if I refused.

I would have made a terrible Shadow Rule agent or Bare Hand operative. Those people embed for entire lifetimes with no one ever knowing a thing. I lasted a few years before the woman I was sleeping next to had my entire life assembled on a table somewhere and was deciding whether to frame it or burn it. In my defense, most of the people the Bare Hand embeds with are not Brena Jerhit.

I developed real feelings for her. I am not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending would be the same kind of dishonesty I have spent my entire career trying to eliminate from the relay. I felt something for her that was not part of the cover and was not operational and was not strategic, and I need you to understand what the life she offered actually looked like before you judge me for hesitating to leave it. You have access to the latest and most advanced technology from the manufactories, equipment that contractors at the highest tiers do not even know exists yet. You have the best syndicate guards and top tier contractors guarding your every step, people who would die for the person next to you without being asked. You have the fastest channels on the planet connecting private relays to the Solarn network, faster than anything the governed world provides to its own officials. You have the fastest airships with interiors more comfortable than a palace, moving you between a massive compound in the inland and a giant tower on the water in Kharan's Gulf within flight distance of Yelidra's own estate. You have the best and most authentic clothing, the kind that the smuggling section of this document should have made you uncomfortable about, and you have the privilege of living in a way where Varens means nothing because you can have everything.

Once on the Gulf, Brena asked me if I preferred imperial or Berinese women, and that I could not choose Thazvaari as that was reserved only for her. I did not understand what she meant, but to test her game I said Jeyrhan. The very next day I woke up on the top floor of her tower and could see nothing but the skin and hair of her and nine Jeyrhan women, and these were not slaves. These were accomplished bioengineers who lived and worked in the capital. She had brought them to Kharan's Gulf overnight because I said a word, and they were there because she asked, and when Brena Jerhit asks the answer is always yes regardless of who you are or where you live. She proved to me time and time again that she would give me whatever I wanted, and it would always be the best, and the time I spent inside that life is the closest I have ever come to understanding why people who live at the top of these systems do not leave them. The view from where she sits is extraordinary. The problem is that the view is built on everything I described in the first seven sections of this document, and she knows it, and she has chosen to keep looking at the view anyway.

She plays both sides of every card. She profits from inland chaos she could help end. She runs the most sophisticated financial fraud operation on the planet through channels that the governed world cannot detect. She moves product, people, and varens through grey zone corridors that feed the same trafficking networks I spent years documenting. And she does all of it while being someone that I, after sixty years of embedding with the worst this planet has to offer, could not bring myself to hate.

That is the most terrifying thing I have ever learned about crime on Geba. Not the disposal fields. Not the pleasure slaves. Not the ice bear or the auctions or the corruption. The most terrifying thing is that the people who run these systems are human, and they are capable of warmth and kindness and love, and they continue anyway. If they were monsters it would be easier. You could point at them and say they are different from you. But they are not different from you. They are you, with more varens and fewer reasons to look down.

I have been doing this for sixty years and I am still alive, which either means I am the greatest relayman who has ever lived or the luckiest, and I promise you it is not luck. I have survived trafficking corridors, disposal fields, pirate formations, syndicate territories, the Teytan, a desert crossing with no equipment, and the experience of falling in love with someone whose life's work is built on suffering that I have dedicated my life to exposing. I survived all of it the same way I survive everything, which is by making sure the shot is worth more than I am and then taking it.

The footage is in the caches. The caches are where they have always been. The Empire knows where they are. I know the Empire knows. And I am going to keep recording until I cannot, because stopping is the same as agreeing that what I have seen is acceptable, and it is not acceptable, and the fact that you are comfortable does not make it acceptable, and the fact that I am laughing about it right now does not mean it is funny.

It is just the only way I know how to keep going.

Vinscel
Relayman