The Truth Show

On the far couch, Sentinel sits hunched, elbows on knees, spine shaped like a question mark. No wedding ring. No nervous fidget, either. Just tremor, clockwork and incurable. Mara makes a note on her tablet: “minimize closeups.”

They’d rolled out the promo campaign last week: “A Night With Sentinel—An Icon Returns.” Hashtag: #FirstAmongUs. Old newsreel cuts, drones screaming over city skylines, the slow-motion shot of Sentinel punching through the river wall at Carthage. Twenty years ago, every other apartment had his face on the fridge. Now, most of the interns don’t know which side of the war he was on.

Mara checks her watch, then taps her earpiece. “Greenroom’s dead, repeat dead. Has anyone seen hair or makeup?”

A static squawk, then: “They’re patching the anchor’s roots. Five minutes.”

“Tell them to skip the foils. I’ve got corpse-time in here.”

Sentinel is muttering. Not to her, not to the camera bulb that’s on in the corner, but to himself—a tape loop with no clear start. She edges closer, clipboard at her chest like a bulletproof vest. The mutter’s a cocktail of syllables and wet clicks. She catches: “—always cold. Teeth cold. Cold gets in the teeth.”

“Hey, Mr. Sentinel,” she says, using the honorific like a cattle prod. “Can I get you anything?”

He stares at her a beat, then at the wall clock. “You keep it at meat-locker in here.” The voice is slow, gummed up with muscle relaxants. “Can we turn down the air?”

She scribbles it down, then lies: “Absolutely. I’ll tell Facilities.” There’s no Facilities. The vent is welded open, the temperature set by union contract.

Mara rounds on Sentinel, squats to level with his knees. “We’ll walk you out just before the break, hit you with a sizzle reel, then you’re on the couch with Garin. You remember Garin?”

Sentinel’s jaw moves like he’s chewing the name. “Tall one. Lots of teeth.”

“Exactly. He’ll throw you some softballs. First flight, ‘what’s it like up there,’ the cape story, then we tease the memoir. You’ll have a teleprompter if you want it.”

His head tilts. “Memoir?”

Mara scrolls to the page: “Tomorrow’s History: The War in My Words.” She flashes the logo, a burnished gold helmet with wings.

“I didn’t write a memoir,” Sentinel says, the syllables all friction.

She shrugs, not unkind. “That’s what the publisher says. Your byline, at least. Bestseller list by noon, guaranteed. You ready, Mr. Sentinel?”

He stands. For a second, the old silhouette surfaces: six feet and change, jaw squared against gravity, the memory of someone who used to outrun bullets.

Mara leads him to the corridor. The light changes from greenroom sickly to studio white-out. She can hear the crowd warming up—nothing like the old stadium roars, but enough to make you believe in nostalgia as a marketing plan. She whispers to him, “Just eight minutes. Piece of cake.”

He says, so soft she almost misses it, “It’s never eight minutes.”

She just straightens his jacket, fixes the camera smile, and signals the floor manager that her charge is live and as close to presentable as he’ll ever get.

The house lights hit like a riot cop’s flashlight. Mara squints from the control pit, one hand on the comms, one finger massaging the tension in her jaw. Onstage, the band vamps something that sounds like a sports drink ad. The audience—real humans, all seventy-six of them—pop up on cue.

Garin owns the stage. He’s all studio genetics, hair and jawline, engineered for prime time. His suit is blue enough to star in its own detergent ad. His left hand never leaves the desk, but the right is pure semaphore.

“Ladies and gentlemen, citizens and other mammals,” Garin booms, “it is an historic pleasure to welcome back to the planet—Sentinel!”

The band spikes a major chord. Sentinel walks in like a giraffe with two bad knees, every step an argument with gravity. He sits on the couch, carefully, like it might be booby-trapped. Garin goes in for the handshake. Sentinel’s grip is weak, but his gaze—marinated in cataract and old stories—drills holes anyway.

Garin puts on the full-court press: “You look incredible, Sentinel! How do you do it?”

Sentinel shrugs. “Most of me’s plastic.”

Laughter, but thinner than the cue card says. Garin barrels forward. “Seriously, folks, this man once held up a bridge with his bare hands. I get winded just holding up a conversation.”

Better laughter now. The screens in the audience flash as people record—nobody just watches anymore, they all want the clip.

Garin smooths his hair and leans in, conspiratorial: “First question—everyone wants to know—what’s it like up there, first time flying?”

On the prompter: “Like nothing else. Sky tastes like tin, clouds look soft but aren’t. The best view in the world.”

Sentinel says, “First time, you black out. Your skin tries to leave your bones. There’s blood in your mouth all the way down.”

No one laughs, but someone coughs. Garin does a microsecond of panic, but sticks the landing: “That’s… a vivid image! You hear that, kids? Don’t try it at home!” He throws a wink at the camera three.

Mara taps her comm. “Control, can we get a five percent boost on the laugh track?”

“Already at max,” someone whispers back.

Garin segues: “And the costume—legend says you designed it yourself. Tell us, was the cape for the drama, or the aerodynamics?”

Script says: “Both! You’d be surprised how much wind you eat at a thousand MPH.”

Sentinel says, “Mostly it soaks up the blood on landing.”

This time, the laughter is definitely not in the room. Mara checks her watch. The segment has seven more minutes, but already it’s running on black ice.

Garin is sweating now, but it reads as charisma. “Oh! Let’s switch gears a bit. Give us something for prime time!” Garin is a snake charmer now, wrapping easy loops of nostalgia. “If you could go back in time and give young Sentinel one piece of advice, what would it be?”

Prompter: “Never give up.”

Sentinel: “Don’t save anyone who doesn’t want to be saved.”

He gives the camera nothing.

The audience is a frozen lake. Offstage, Mara sees it in the camera feeds, the way the bodies lean away from the couch. She logs every deviation from script, but tells herself it’s just drift. Live TV’s like that. Weirdness is the brand now.

Garin, still smiling, does the “whew, what a character!” hand sweep and pivots, ready to coast through the last safe question on the list. Mara watches from the pit, half her brain on the next segment in the show, half on the dread-glow building in her gut.

Garin: “Okay, this one’s for the true fans—every legend needs a villain, right? So who, in your opinion, was your greatest enemy?”

The crowd perks up. Even the interns, all surgically glued to their devices, tune in for the vintage beef. The answer is supposed to be Sovereign. Always Sovereign. That’s the myth, the bedtime story, the animated gif.

On the prompter: “Hard to pick just one, Garin, but the Sovereign was always a step ahead. Kept me honest. Kept me humble.”

Sentinel’s face is a landslide. He doesn’t even blink at the teleprompter. “We made him up,” he says, clear enough for the back row.

The audience doesn’t know what to do with it—somebody whispers, someone else drops a phone. Blank confusion.

Garin chuckles and the control booth catches up, nervous laughter spreading. Brittle sound, glass ready to shatter. He runs the recovery script: “You mean, the Sovereign was a metaphor? I love that. Tell us—”

“No,” Sentinel cuts in, voice iron and gravel. “Never was a Sovereign. Sometimes three actors. Sometimes none.” He hesitates, jagged as paper cuts. “Faked the newsreels.”

The room stops.

Garin’s fingers twitch. He forces a smile: “That’s a new angle…” The words trail off. His hosting energy drains, leaving him blank—frozen, not sure what to do.

Sentinel leans forward, spine straightening, hands suddenly steady. For the first time all night, the tremor is gone—he’s every inch the legend from the war reels. Every screen, every body, caught in his gravity. His voice, clear and flinty, slices through the silence: “Fake fights. Real blood. Smoke and screaming, that’s true. The rest—stories for the feed.”

A silence slams down, so hard you can hear the whir of the cooling fans in the overhead rig.

Mara’s earpiece detonates in her head. “Kill the feed!” Control yells, and there’s a scramble of hands at the console. The switcher locks, frozen in “live.” Someone curses. Mara hits every button she knows, but the cameras keep rolling, red lights burning like signal flares.

Garin’s smile wilts. He tries to interject: “I think what Sentinel means is—”

Sentinel doesn’t let go. His face hardens, voice coiling with old anger. “You want to know my real enemy?” He looks straight down the lens, past every living body in the room. “Lies. Fff..Fucking lies. That’s the only thing that ever wins.”

The audience forgets to breathe. Mara does, too.

Someone in the booth is pounding the kill switch with a closed fist but the studio lights don’t so much as flicker.

For a moment, nobody moves. The only sound is Sentinel’s slow, clicking exhale.

Garin folds his notes, his hands white-knuckled.

On the couch, Sentinel wipes at his face and leaves a comet tail of pancake and sweat. “Sorry,” he says, almost inaudible. “I tried to stop. I really did. But truth flies slower than lies.”

Mara stares through the glass, and for the first time all night, Sentinel looks alive, in the way a dying animal is alive when it feels the teeth.

Garin closes the show with a line nobody hears. The applause sign flashes, but nobody claps.

And in living rooms and bars and late-shift gas stations everywhere, people watch and wonder if they just saw the world change, or if it’s just another night in the meat grinder.

The network yanks the feed so hard they lose a second of color bars. The screen jumps to a cartoon mascot pitching life insurance, voice syrupy and oblivious. In the control room, someone punches the air.

But the damage is viral. Seventy-six audience phones upload the show before Mara can even get out of her seat. Clips go wide: the handshake, the first line, the moment the myth detonates. #FirstAmongUs trends with a velocity no PR rep can outrun.

In the bar across the street, nobody turns from the wall-screen. A woman with a day-old shiner says, “Knew it,” and her buddy nods, but neither stops drinking.

In a bedroom, a kid with more followers than real friends mouths “truth flies slower than lies” into a camera ring. Their post is clipped and memed and flipped into thirty languages before sunrise.

In the studio, Sentinel is gone. Garin is gone. The band is packing up, one string at a time, as if the wrong note might trigger another collapse.

Mara stays in the control room, the blue from the monitors painting her bones. For the first time, she wondered if it was all true. The room is empty, the hum of the servers like a lullaby for the terminally ill. She watches the last frozen frame on the monitor, Sentinel’s eyes boring a hole through time, daring the world to blink.