We ordered takeout, Thai food from a place three towns over that Stephen bribed to deliver this far out into the woods. The cartons sat on the table, steaming and largely ignored.
We were winning.
It wasn't a sudden knockout blow. It was a siege. Vance was fighting back with everything he had, from injunctions, tosmears and liquidity moves, but for every move he made, we had a countermove waiting in the chamber.
I typed the final paragraph of my response to the injunction.
Therefore, the Defendant asserts that the Applicant approaches the court with unclean hands, seeking to enforce contracts that are void ab initio due to gross negligence and product defect.
I hitSend.
"Filed," I said.
"Data packet four uploaded," Juno chimed in, leaning back and stretching his arms over his head. "Social media is having a meltdown over my retention rates in 2019. Warson has stopped posting."
"Asset freeze confirmed in three jurisdictions," Stephen added, closing his laptop with a snap. "His credit cards will stop working within the hour."
"He's leaving the airport," Mateo reported, watching a GPS dot move on his screen. "Heading back to the city. He has nowhere else to go."
We sat there in the quiet. The fire in the wood stove crackled.
The Machine had thrown everything it had at us. We had caught it, dismantled it, and sent it back in pieces.
I looked around the table. At Juno, fierce and vindicated. At Stephen, sharp and lethal. At Mateo, the wall that held us all.
"We're betting everything on this," I whispered, the reality of it settling in.
"We already won," Juno said, reaching for a cold spring roll. He dipped it in sweet chili sauce and pointed it at me. "He just doesn't know he's dead yet."
"He'll know tomorrow," Stephen said. "When he tries to buy a coffee and his card declines."
I finally picked up a fork. I was starving.
"Eat," Mateo ordered. "We fight again in the morning."
"In the morning," I agreed.
We ate in the warm, electric silence of the pack, while outside in the cold and the rain, Julian Vance's world quietly, methodically, fell apart.
THIRTY-ONE
Rowan
The webcam light blinked green, a single, unblinking eye connecting me to the High Court of Justice.
I adjusted my blazer. It was the same one I’d worn to the King interview, the black silk catching the harsh tones of the ring light Stephen had rigged up. Outside, the rain was turning the woods into a grey smear, but on the screen, I was sitting in a phantom boardroom, backed by a digital background involved nothing but clean lines and neutral grays.
"Ms. Quill," Justice Halloway said. Her voice was tinny through the laptop speakers, but the weight of the institution behind her was heavy enough to crack the screen. "The Applicant asserts that theAnchor Protocolconstitutes a deliberate inducement to breach contract. They argue you are actively encouraging talent to violate exclusivity agreements."
I didn't look at Stephen, sitting just off-camera with a notepad. I didn't look at Mateo, guarding the door. I looked straight into the lens.
"With respect, My Lady," I said, my voice steady, "one cannot induce the breach of a contract that does not legally exist."
"The contracts are signed," the opposing counsel interjected, a man named Sterling who cost six hundred pounds an hour and looked like he hadn't slept since the manifesto dropped. "They are valid commercial instruments."
"They are defective products," I countered.
I didn't use legal precedents from labor law. I used the Consumer Protection Act.
