The violet glow on the primary regulator's ‘Cryo-Core Output’ dial pulsed against the brushed steel. Mantas tracked the dense vapor pooling around Oskars’s boots on the surveillance feed. Acid rose in Mantas’s throat. Oskars, a shadow moving through the vapor, wiped something from his hands onto his worn tunic, a smirk stretching his lips as he glanced directly into the camera feed, a silent challenge. He had understood the core's calculus faster than Mantas had thought possible. “You!” Mantas barked through the mic, the speaker screeching across the holding cells. “Berzins! Release my brother! You touch him again, and I swear, I’ll vent your sector. I’ll open the intake valves and let the White Scald reclaim you, piece by agonizing piece!” Oskars merely chuckled, a dry, rattling sound that echoed eerily through the speakers. He adjusted his stance, planting a boot lightly on Tadas’s splayed arm. Tadas rasped through cracked lips. Sub-zero air drifted across Tadas's sector, frost filming his collar. “Vent me?” Oskars’s voice, calm and measured, carried an infuriating confidence. “And lose your precious cryo-energy? You saw the dials, Mantas. You saw the *violet*. My little act of penance bought you more juice than all of Ruta’s grand confessions combined. You need me. You need my… *motivation*.” [AMBIENT TEMPERATURE: COOLING WARD THETA DECREASE BY 3°C] The apparatus chimed, a brass hammer striking an iron pin to confirm the drop. Mantas gripped the edge of the desk until his knuckles whitened. “Don’t you dare lecture me about penance,” Oskars continued, his voice dripping with venomous amusement. “You, the great Mantas Kaminskas, who built this glorious contraption. This ‘Sub-Terra Shelter,’ you call it. I call it a bespoke torture chamber. You’re playing God, deciding who deserves to live, who deserves the warmth. You judge us, you bind us, you extract our shame for your own survival. What makes you any better, Engineer?” Bile stung the back of Mantas’s tongue. Oskars’s words, crude and pointed, struck a nerve. Mantas *had* built this. He *had* created the rules. He *had* relished in the others’ suffering, in his own vindication. “I’m nothing like you,” Mantas ground out, voice flat. “You’re butchering my brother to siphon freon.” “Wicked ends?” Oskars laughed again, louder this time. “My end is survival, just like yours. And your brother’s… and his little girl’s.” Mantas shifted his view to the feed of his own living pod, where Laima slept behind thick acrylic plating. He had assumed her uncoupled from the network. Oskars had seen the same display. “Ah, yes,” Oskars murmured, his eyes still fixed on Mantas through the camera. “The innocent one. The useless one, as far as your cryo-core is concerned. But imagine, Mantas, the *guilt* your brother would generate if something… unfortunate… were to befall his precious, innocent daughter. The sheer, unadulterated agony of a father who failed to protect his child. That would be a surge of cryo-energy, wouldn’t it? Enough to chill this entire bunker to the absolute zero, perhaps. Enough to buy us… weeks? Months?” [AMBIENT TEMPERATURE: COOLING WARD THETA STEADY] The core gave no tone, holding its silence. Oskars began to move, slowly, deliberately, towards the partition separating his ward from Tadas’s. The internal access hatch, Mantas knew, was theoretically secured from within each ward, but Oskars had already shown a terrifying ingenuity in bypassing his restraints. Venting Oskars's compartment would flush the violet charge down the intake flues, collapsing the core's baseline before noon. Mantas could not vent him without starving the chiller loops keeping Laima alive. He watched Oskars’s hand reach for the simple latch on the internal partition. It was a flimsy thing, designed for emergency medical access, not for containing a predator. If Oskars touched that latch and broke through to the quarters, the guilt would freeze the pipes solid—and kill the child in the process. The sensor bars flashed green, then amber. Only one option remained. Mantas’s hand hovered over the heavy, reinforced door of his Safe Quarters. The blast door stood two inches thick, sealing his quarters from the perimeter pens. He had designed these doors to be impenetrable, to keep the dangers out, to keep *him* safe. Now he had to disengage the manual deadbolts. The air in his Safe Quarters, once a comforting warmth, now felt stifling, a cage of his own making. He pressed the release. Pneumatic latches clanked open along the frame, one by one. The gasket seal popped with a rush of pressurized nitrogen, venting sub-zero vapor over Mantas’s boots as the slab slid open, unmasking the frosted corridor where Oskars waited.

The Hypocrite's Dilemma