Sloane didn’t hand me the phone. She turned the screen toward me and held it there, arm extended, like she wanted a witness before she committed to a reaction.
I read it twice.
Two hundred thousand views was a number I could file under good news and mostly believe it. Three agency scouts pulling my file was a number I filed somewhere considerably worse, in the drawer marked things that happen right before your entire life gets audited.
"Scouts pull files all the time," Sloane said. Her voice had gone flat and careful, which meant she’d already run the math and hated the answer. "First years get pulled. It’s not a big deal. My mother pulls twelve files a week."
"Your mother pulls twelve files a week and then she tells you what she found in them," I said. "That’s how you know when it matters."
She stared at the screen for another second. Then she pressed call and set the phone on the mattress between us, face up, speaker on, and folded her arms across her stomach in a way that had nothing to do with being comfortable.
Diane picked up on the second ring, which was faster than she picked up for clients.
"There you are." The drawl came through the speaker soft around the edges and hard underneath, the tone she used when she’d been waiting for a call and had decided not to mention that she’d been waiting. "Both of you? Good. Saves me the second conversation. Sugar, is he in your room right now?"
"He’s doing homework," Sloane said.
"Mm."
"He is."
"I believe you, honey." A pause with something underneath it. Ice moved in a glass. Six in the evening in Verano meant Diane had already closed one crisis and was pacing the kitchen with her sweet tea, phone in one hand, brand data in the other. "Lukas. Are you sitting down."
"I’m reclining aggressively."
"Sit up."
I sat up. Nine years of conditioning and my spine still answered that voice before my brain got a vote.
"Three pulls," Diane said. "The first one was Crestline out of San Diego, which I don’t care about, they pull two hundred files a season and sign eleven people, that’s a fishing net. The second was Halcyon, which I care about a little, because Halcyon has a scouting director who used to work for me and she does not waste her afternoons." Another pause. "The third pull came out of the Lang Agency."
The room got smaller.
Sloane’s head came up. "Margot Lang."
"Margot Lang," Diane confirmed, and the way she said the name made it clear this was a woman she’d sat across from at more than one table and lost nothing to. "Requested at eleven forty on Tuesday morning. Full registration packet, IHL diagnostic history, entrance examination scoring breakdown, and the manifestation timeline. That last one is the part I’d like you to focus on, baby."
I focused on it.
Everything I had was built on a story about a late manifestation at seventeen, cosigned by a doctor who owed Diane favors and buried under a progressive manifestation syndrome flag that Percy had spent one sleepless night reinforcing with thirty-six pages of insurance language. It held. It held the way a wall holds when you’ve patched it well enough that nobody looks twice. Margot Lang was not nobody, and she had pulled the exact page of my file that had the least actual paper behind it.
Sloane spoke before I did. "Petra pulled his file."
"Petra didn’t pull anything," Diane said. "Petra is eighteen years old and does not have credentialed access to IHL registration packets. Her mother does. Which means either Margot did it on her own initiative, or her daughter came home from her first three weeks at Halloran with a name she couldn’t stop saying at dinner."
I laughed. It came out wrong, more air than sound.
"Something funny, sugar?"
"I’m the male rep for 1-B," I said. "Petra’s the female rep. We had a strategy meeting today. She spent forty minutes telling me I got elected on a good speech and she got elected on being qualified, and then she watched me kiss your daughter in a hallway and left so fast she almost took the doorframe with her."
Silence on the line for about two seconds.
Then Diane made a sound that I recognized, low and amused and entirely without mercy, the noise she made when a client’s disaster turned out to be an opportunity she could sell.
"Well," she said. "That explains the timing."
"Mom." Sloane had picked the phone up off the mattress now, gripping it too hard. "That’s not funny. If Lang Agency is running his manifestation timeline through a real analyst, they’re going to find the gap. There’s a gap. There’s always a gap, you told me that yourself, you said no story survives a competent read."
"I said no story survives a hostile read," Diane said. "Which is why we’re going to make sure the read isn’t hostile."
"How."
"By getting to Margot before her analyst finishes the summary and by giving her a version of the story she’d rather believe than the truth." The ice moved again. "Lukas. Friday. What time is your representative meeting with 1-A."
"Fourteen hundred. Fourth floor conference room."
"Good. I’ll be on campus at eleven."
Sloane’s whole body changed. I felt it through the bond first, a spike of something bright and complicated, gone before I could name it. "You’re coming here?"
"I’m coming to look at his file with him and then I’m going to have lunch with a woman on the Halloran public relations liaison desk who owes me three favors and has never once been asked to pay one." A beat, and then softer, warmer, aimed at her daughter through a phone line and hitting anyway. "And I’m going to see you, baby. You haven’t sent me a picture in nine days. I’ve been reduced to looking at Koda Brynn’s public feed to find out what my own daughter is up to."
"I’ve been busy."
"I know you’ve been busy."
"I’m class representative for 1-A."
"I know that too, honey, I found out from a faculty newsletter, which was a delightful way to learn about my own child’s accomplishment." No heat in it. Diane never needed heat. She just laid the sentence down and let you walk into it on your own time. "Wear something with a collar Friday, both of you. I’m meeting people."
The call ended before either of us had a chance to negotiate.
Sloane sat with the dead phone in her hand and stared at the wall above her desk, where she’d tacked up a printout of the entrance exam scoreboard with her own name circled twice in red.
"She’s going to fix it," she said. It came out somewhere between a statement and a request.
"She’s going to manage it," I said. "Fixing means the problem stops existing. Managing means the problem gets a handler."
"Don’t do the thing where you get precise about words when you’re scared."
"I’m not scared."
She turned her head and looked at me, and I remembered a half second too late that the bond ran both directions inside fifty meters, and that lying to Sloane Fitzgerald about my own pulse rate had stopped being an available option somewhere around week two.
"Fine," I said. "I’m scared."
"Yeah." She dropped the phone on the sheets and pulled her knees up. "Me too."