6 June 2032.
Hotel The Pierre — Private Meeting Room, 14th Floor 14:22 The room had been chosen by CORG.
Not the hotel — the hotel itself was neutral, which was the point.
Territory that belonged to neither side, without the symbolic weight of a government building or the exposure of any public venue.
The room contained an oval table, six chairs, water, and no windows — which, in the context of meetings of this nature, was a logistical advantage rather than an architectural limitation.
Aldren Mous arrived first.
With Serel Kaine and two field agents who remained outside the door.
He entered, surveyed the room, checked what needed checking — not out of any specific distrust, but from decades of habit — and sat down.
He waited.
Robert Elis De Brás arrived seven minutes later.
With two advisors who also stayed outside.
He entered alone.
Looked over the room with the same kind of gaze Aldren had used — the quick inventory of someone who reads spaces before reading people.
Then he looked at Aldren.
He sat.
On the opposite side of the oval table.
Between them there were perhaps six feet of table, forty years of institutional history, and something else that still had no name but was present in the same way the table itself was present.
— President De Brás — said Aldren.
— President Mous — said Robert.
Neither extended a hand.
Not out of hostility.
Out of mutual recognition that such a gesture, in that context, would be theater — and neither of them had come for theater.
— The speech was well constructed — said Aldren.
Directly.
In the tone of someone who respects the work even when the work was directed against him.
— The speech was true — Robert replied.
With the composure of someone who did not receive the compliment as praise, but as assessment.
— The two things are not mutually exclusive.
— They aren’t.
Silence.
Aldren rested his elbows on the table.
— What do you want from CORG?
Robert looked at him for a moment.
With the eyes of a sixty-four-year-old man whose gaze looked unnaturally young, carrying the specific quality of someone who had seen the question before it was asked and had prepared the answer long before the moment arrived.
— I want CORG to acknowledge — he said — that there are parts of the world this organization has managed as territories of secondary interest while the problem Angola faced in 2029 had been growing for decades.
That CORG knew.
And chose not to act.
Aldren did not flinch.
— What are you basing that claim on?
— CORG’s internal classification of Angola as a secondary-interest zone — said Robert — which we obtained in 2031.
Silence.
— Obtained — Aldren repeated.
— Obtained.
Aldren remained still for two seconds.
The pause of someone calculating not what he had heard, but what it implied about what he had not known.
— The secondary-interest classification — he said slowly — is determined by Don indices, the presence of higher-grade Dungeons, and Rift risk.
Angola scored low on all three.
— Angola scored low — Robert replied — because CORG measured what CORG had decided was relevant.
— His voice remained perfectly even.
— It did not measure what existed in Angola that did not fit CORG’s metrics.
— The Katta Beshlik.
— Among other things.
Aldren looked at him.
With the attention of someone rereading a text he thought he had understood, only to realize he had never fully read it at all.
— How long — Aldren said — have you known them?
Robert did not answer immediately.
He was looking at the table.
With the expression of someone deciding not what to say, but how much.
— I have known Captain Angola — he finally said — for twenty-two years.
Aldren remained still.
— He’s — Aldren did the math — in his thirties.
— Twenty-six — Robert corrected.
— I met him when he was four years old.
Under circumstances irrelevant to this conversation, but relevant enough to understand that what Angola possessed was not discovered in 2029.
— A pause.
— 2029 was simply when the world saw it.
Angola had known for much longer.
Aldren Mous remained silent for a moment.
Hands clasped.
Eyes on Robert Elis De Brás.
— So the Angolan government — he said — consciously hid from CORG the existence of individuals with capabilities beyond any classification we possess.
For years.
— The Angolan government — Robert said, with the precision of a man who chooses every word — protected Angolan citizens from an organization that classifies, licenses, and when necessary eliminates, using metrics developed by powers that never prioritized Angola’s interests.
Silence.
— That is a very serious accusation — Aldren said.
— It is a very serious observation — Robert corrected.
— The difference is that an accusation requires proof, while an observation requires recognition.
Aldren looked at him.
For four seconds.
With the expression of someone who had reached the point in a conversation where both available outcomes were equally difficult, and was calculating which one would be less disastrous in the long term.
— What do you want in return?
— Aldren asked.
— Specifically.
Not the speech.
What do you want?
Robert looked at him with the air of someone testing whether the man in front of him truly was what he appeared to be.
Apparently, he was.
— I want — Robert said — CORG to open the archives regarding what was inside the destroyed facilities.
Publicly.
Or with Angola acting as a verifying witness.
— A pause.
— I want Angola’s classification reviewed using metrics that were not developed exclusively by powers with colonial histories in the African continent.
— Another pause.
— And I want the Katta Beshlik recognized as a legitimate entity.
Not classified as a threat.
Not integrated into CORG’s structure.
Recognized.
Aldren remained silent.
— That — he said — will face resistance from every power with a seat on the Inner Council.
— I know — Robert replied.
— The United States specifically will— — I know what the United States will do — Robert interrupted, with the first trace of something that was not quite impatience, but rather the outer limit of patience.
— I know what every power with destroyed facilities will do.
The question is not what they will do.
The question is what CORG will do.
Aldren looked at him.
— Because — Aldren said slowly — you are speaking to CORG.
Not the United States.
Not the United Kingdom.
— Because — Robert answered — CORG is the only organization in this world with enough cross-national authority to change what needs to be changed without individual powers being able to block it unilaterally.
Pause.
— And because — he continued — President Mous has spent eleven years in office with the reputation of a man who believes in what he claims to believe in.
— He looked directly at Aldren.
— I need to know whether that is true, or merely another well-crafted mask.
The silence that followed was the longest of the meeting.
Aldren Mous remained motionless.
Hands clasped.
Eyes on Robert Elis De Brás.
With eleven years of presidency and everything those eleven years had cost him, and everything they had revealed about what CORG was, what he wanted it to be, and the distance between those two things.
— It’s not a mask — he said.
Robert studied him.
For five seconds.
With those eyes that inventoried people.
— Then — he said — we have the beginning of a conversation.
Robert Elis De Brás opened the folder he had brought.
Three documents.
Physical copies.
He placed them on the table between them.
Aldren looked at them.
The first was a partial transcript of an internal CORG meeting from 2027, where Angola had been discussed as a secondary-interest zone with the specific language of people who had never considered the possibility that they might be wrong.
The second was a map.
Coordinates.
Handwritten notes in Portuguese.
The third was a photograph.
Just one.
Black and white, with the quality of something taken from a distance using long-focus equipment.
Five silhouettes.
In a location Aldren recognized — not immediately, but after a careful look.
Angola.
2028.
One year before Eclipse.
— We knew — Robert said, his voice returning to its factual tone — before 2029.
We knew what was growing.
And we chose to handle it our own way.
Aldren looked at the photograph.
At the five silhouettes.
— Why didn’t you tell us?
— he asked.
Not as an accusation.
As a genuine question.
Robert looked at him.
— Because — he said — back then, CORG would have classified, licensed, and then attempted control.
— A pause.
— And what Angola had was never meant to be controlled by CORG.
It was meant to belong to Angola.
Aldren Mous’s communicator vibrated.
He did not look at it immediately — the meeting operated under a no-interruption protocol, and for him protocol was real, not merely formal.
It vibrated again.
The specific vibration code meaning: urgency level that could not wait.
Aldren looked at Robert.
— Excuse me.
He checked the communicator.
Read.
His expression did not change — but there was something in his eyes, in the second the information arrived, that for Aldren Mous was the equivalent of taking an impact his composure absorbed before it could become visible.
— What is it?
— Robert asked.
Aldren looked at him.
For a moment, Robert’s question — asked with the directness of someone who understood immediately that something had changed and had no patience for the protocol of pretending otherwise — lingered in the air.
— New York — Aldren said.
Pause.
— Right here.