Consent decree (SEC, 20XX): market manipulation,no admission; $240M.
Injunctions filed last 5 yrs: 31—pattern: preempt press, freeze scrutiny.
NDAs settled (labor + personal): estimated 57; settlements sealed.
Private security licensing across three flags of convenience.
I needed the incoming agents to understand why I called them.
02:01
Agents stacked outside conference room two. I muted the floor mics and kept one clip I wouldn’t share: last winter’s Dogpatch fire. Stairwell blown out, sprinklers dry. She went back in because she could stillheara mind panicking on the third floor. Crown off—the hum made terror worse. Heat shimmered the cams; I reversed roof fans to shove a cool corridor and unlatched the fire doors one by one. Her voice, smoke-rough: “Borrow my calm,” to the trapped woman—and then, into my pendant, barely there: “Stay with me.” I rerouted air until the plume map bent around her. I’ve worn grooves in that second.
00:30
My presentation deck was ready. The clock was a vise. I kept my voice flat where they would hear it and warm where she would.
00:00
“Begin.”
Royce sighed the second my deck ended. He was a good man, but he preferred invoices to crusades; the sound was a budget line dying. “Thirteen unidentifiable women,” he stated aloud, gravely shaking his head.
“Working ages projected nineteen to thirty-two,” I clarified, basing my numbers off of the van filmed earlier. “But Annex C can take them tonight.” It was a safehouse we’d used before for high-heat clients. “We’ve got six suites there, convertible to thirteen with temporary partitions. No networked devices inside—paper charts only. We’ll need trauma-informed intake, STD screening, pregnancy tests, full photos before and after SANE kits, all sealed. Chain-of-custody logged from dock to exam.”
Aceon scratched his voluminous beard. “How’d the loose one even find Thorne?”
Sirena shrugged slightly. “He wasn’t forthcoming.”
“Which means he could be in on this,” Royce said, looking at her like the wordexwas an indictment.
“Toward what end?” I asked from the speakers set into the ceiling. “I’ve scraped his accounts. No anomalous deposits.”
“But you just told us you can’t trace Voss past a certain point, because he uses his own currency,” Cassia stated. She was a gorgon, dressed like it mattered, and always wore gaze-diffusing glasses. Non-ironically statuesque. Head wrap snug, the snakes lived under it, invisible until one by her left temple flicked a curious tongue beneath it.
Cassia called that particular one Susan.
Susan occasionally had opinions.
Sirena waved the idea down. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see him. He was very attached to the girl.”
Cassia shrugged. “Or her handlers embedded her with a gargoyle-targeted pheromone.”
