I dragged the marker to the beginning of the file again, letting it hang on the first frame while I collected my thoughts. The video's timestamp caught my attention first - or what remained of it. A blurry clump of eroded light text sat in the bottom left corner, mangled beyond readability. After letting the file loop a few times, I wasn't sure there was much point in discovering when the interrogation took place, but if I ever needed to, it was probably possible.

  More telling was the camera angle. Unlike typical interrogation footage shot from the downward angle of a closed-circuit camera, this was positioned like a deposition - over the shoulder height, mounted on a tripod. The quality and ground-level placement suggested expensive equipment, and whoever set it up cared more about pageantry—making sure the subject felt the pressure of being recorded—than protecting their gear. In terms of budgetary bureaucracy, that was pretty much sacrosanct.

  The subject, centered in the frame, was a young Caucasian man, somewhere between sixteen and nineteen. His expression was hard-edge masquerading as aloof. A cracked, faded, black zip-up jacket concealed his arms and the palm portion of his hands, loose-fitting enough to suggest it wasn't bought new but handed down or thrifted.

  Jackson took the turn more aggressively than usual. "How bad is it?" The mere presence of someone watching the video near him seemed to set his teeth on edge, speaking to whatever experience he'd had with the feds.

  I rubbed my hands together, feeling cold inside and out despite the car's thermometer reading a balmy seventy-three. "Depends. Nothing as terrible as you were expecting. Still. Hard to stomach. In a sick way, it's the best thing that's ever happened to me."

  Jackson grimaced, gunning it through a yellow light just before it turned red. "Guessing it's a problem for him then. The fed."

  "Worse than a problem. It's devastating." I shook my head, watching streetlights blur past. "The logic of keeping it is beyond me. This leaks to the general public before the dome, his career is over, no question. Hell, it could still hurt him now. Less than before. But people would never stop looking at him sideways." I rested my head on my fist. "The best thing he could have done is make sure there was zero chance anyone ever saw it, and I mean zero."

  "Specks said there was an attempt to delete it." Jackson's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.

  "Yeah. An attempt. This isn't a let-me-google-how-to-safely-delete-a-file situation. A fed would know exactly how easy it is to recover scrubbed data with the right tools. This is a drill to the hard-drive, full-stop. So he was trying to obfuscate it, rather than remove it entirely."

  "He make a mistake?"

  I snorted, exasperated. "Yeah, I'd fucking say."

  Silence filled the car until Jackson rolled through a stop sign, twisting to check both ways. "Ever cut yourself?"

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  I looked over, tearing my eyes from the laptop's screen for the first time since watching. "No. Slid just under the age threshold for cut for Bieber. Why?"

  "Okay smartass." Jackson sighed, eyes fixed on the road ahead. "Have you ever done anything you regretted? And I mean really regretted. And then found yourself compelled to do things that made no logical sense, but provided a vehicle for you to either inflict harm on your person as either an expression of pain, or a form of self-punishment?"

  "Conscious or subconscious?"

  "Either."

  I saw myself, drenched in midnight shadow, standing barefoot in front of the crackhead's house where my father died, knife in hand. Remembered the disorientation of suddenly waking up in that moment, putting together that I'd sleepwalked, hearing sirens in the distance and the fear in my mother's tone as she hollered my name, her shrill voice echoing over sleepy suburbia.

  "Not really."

  Jackson kept one hand on the steering wheel while reaching for his water bottle. After taking a draw, his expression turned grim, pained. "People hold a high opinion of themselves by default. Most start out believing they’re doing the right things for the right reasons. When that's challenged, they continue to hold onto that, only now they’re doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Other people doing the same as them are assholes, because even when they're practically identical, assumption is, everyone else is doing it for the wrong reasons."

  "Morality pick-me's," I mused.

  Jackson chuckled, relaxing slightly. His momentary ease vanished as he continued. "Then, IT happens. Whether by mistake, or coincidence, or just plain bad luck, you find yourself doing the wrong thing, for the wrong reason. And you realize there's no justification to be found. You got greedy. Made a bad call. Ignored information because it was inconvenient. And now either those around you, or random people who didn't do a damn thing to anyone end up suffering for it. For lack of a better term, it's a Moment of Clarity. Because the outcome is bad enough that the mental muscle that provides your justifications and your holier than thous ain't working so good."

  "A shrink would say that a single mistake or bad action doesn't define anyone. That deriving too much importance from a single misstep without accounting for the variables that played into it is innately harmful, and worse, inaccurate."

  "Ah, but it's never just one, is it?" Jackson's gaze grew distant as we approached another intersection. "Maybe you're a saint. But there's two ways people react in that moment. Face forward, ignore the lesson beyond 'shit happens.' Or they look back, picking through all those wrong-things-right-reasons with newfound clarity, examine the retrospectively paper-thin justifications without bias, and eventually, realize they ain't the well-meaning closet hero they thought they was. Cause you're not. You're just an asshole, same as all the others you looked down on."

  My mouth quirked. I understood what he was getting at, but somehow it still didn't complete the picture. "So what, you'd keep something like this, even if it's damning, as a reminder?"

  Jackson nodded. "If you wanted to remember the lesson? Sure. Because, as the name implies, the Moment of Clarity doesn't last forever. That justification muscle rebounds with a vengeance, starts working overtime. Our minds sand over the fine details, the granular ick, eroding how hideous it was with the passage of time. Revisiting the lesson too much can be a form of self-harm. But revisiting it a little, keeps you grounded. Real. To others and yourself."

  It almost made sense. My instinct was that Miles fell into the latter category. It still bothered me he'd kept it, but everyone had blind spots. Maybe this was his.

  I put my earbuds back in and pressed play.

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