Percy’s document opened with a table of contents.
A table of contents. For an insurance regulatory analysis. Written by an eighteen-year-old with blue hair who timed his showers to the second and considered emotional vulnerability a statistical event.
I flipped to page one. The header read: REGULATORY FRAMEWORK ANALYSIS: CATEGORY SEVEN PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION EXEMPTIONS AND THEIR APPLICATION TO NON-STANDARD ASPECT DEVELOPMENTAL PROFILES (REVISED DRAFT 3.2).
Page two contained a glossary of acronyms. Twenty-six of them. Percy had alphabetized them and included pronunciation guides for the ones derived from Latin legal terminology.
Page three was a flowchart.
I put the document down. Picked up my phone. Texted Percy.
give me the version for people who don’t read insurance law recreationally
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Reappeared. Disappeared again. This was Percy deciding whether my request constituted intellectual disrespect or legitimate time management. The dots reappeared a final time and stayed.
Page 31. I anticipated this. Section titled "Executive Summary for Lukas."
I flipped to page thirty-one. Percy had written the section header in slightly larger handwriting than the rest of the document, and underneath it, in parentheses so small I had to squint: (I am disappointed but not surprised.)
The summary ran two pages instead of thirty-four, and it read like a human being wrote it rather than a regulatory textbook that had gained sentience.
Category Seven covered progressive manifestation, meaning Aspects that continued developing past initial activation. The classification existed because a handful of documented cases showed genuine late bloomers whose powers kept evolving for months or years after first appearance.
The IHL created the category to avoid reclassifying these people every time their Aspect did something new. So far so good.
This was the bucket Diane and I had shoved my entire fictional identity into, and it fit well enough that three separate diagnostic appointments had accepted the label.
The problem Percy identified lived in subsection language that nobody read unless they enjoyed suffering.
If two or more independent agencies filed registration inquiries against a Category Seven file within thirty days, the regional IHL office generated an automatic secondary verification request.
Someone in an office reads the file, confirms the classification matches observed capability, stamps it, moves on.
Three agencies had filed inquiries against my registration in seven days.
The verification request should have appeared on the public docket eleven days ago.
It hadn’t.
Percy’s analysis offered three explanations. First, the regional office was slow. Average processing lag sat at eleven days, and bureaucracies ran behind schedule with the reliable consistency of continental drift. Second, the request had been filed and subsequently buried through administrative channels by someone with access and motivation.
Third, the request had been generated, reviewed, and cleared before it reached the public docket, which required someone inside the system who could see the paperwork before it became visible to external observers.
Percy’s money was on option three. Mine too. And both of us knew exactly who had the connections, the motivation, and the specific institutional leverage to make a verification request vanish before it generated a paper trail that someone like Margot Lang’s analysts could follow.
Diane Fitzgerald had been in my room forty minutes ago with her legs wrapped around my waist and her mouth doing things that made regulatory analysis physically difficult to contemplate.
She had also, at some point in the last eleven days, reached into the IHL’s administrative machinery and made a problem disappear with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d been managing Hero careers for two decades and understood that the most effective interventions happened before anyone knew intervention was required.
I loved that woman. I also recognized that loving someone who could manipulate federal databases on your behalf while simultaneously rearranging your furniture by text message from forty-seven minutes away constituted a specific category of relationship that no insurance framework had a classification for.
Percy’s summary concluded with a recommendation section containing exactly one recommendation: Maintain current classification. Do not volunteer additional information. Let the system’s ambiguity work in your favor. Category Seven’s language is deliberately vague because the IHL wrote it to cover situations they didn’t fully understand, and situations they don’t fully understand are situations they prefer not to examine closely.
Underneath this, in the same tiny parenthetical handwriting: (This is the smartest thing I have ever written and you will never appreciate it properly.)
I appreciated it. I just couldn’t tell him that without explaining why, and explaining why required disclosing that my entire Aspect registration was fabricated by a woman whose perfume was currently soaking into the surface of my desk.
I closed the document and checked the time. Twelve forty-seven. One hour and thirteen minutes until the meeting that would determine whether Lukas Belmont’s fraudulent identity survived contact with the Lang family’s professional infrastructure.
The plan was simple enough that even I couldn’t overcomplicate it.
Step one: remind Petra of her place.
She had signed onto this meeting as my co-representative, which meant her family name sat next to my registration on the institutional record. If Odette Reyes found something problematic, Petra’s involvement transformed the inquiry from an investigation into a courtesy meeting.
The daughter of Margot Lang does not attend meetings that produce unfavorable outcomes for people she has publicly associated with. Petra understood this. Petra had agreed to this. Petra would hold her line because Petra Lang did not sign documents she intended to abandon.
Step two: let Diane handle the talking.
Diane Fitzgerald had been managing Heroes with complicated registrations and messier personal lives for twenty years. She had rebranded a Hero who punched a reporter on live television.
She had navigated a client’s arrest, trial, and acquittal without the client’s approval rating dropping below sixty percent.
She had walked into rooms full of people who wanted to destroy her clients and left those rooms with the destroyers signing endorsement deals.
Odette Reyes was an agency assessment specialist requesting an informal conversation. This was Tuesday morning for Diane.
Step three: put on the charm.
Smile. Make eye contact. Be the version of Lukas Belmont that a nationally broadcast interview had already introduced to two hundred thousand viewers.
The kid with the dead Hero parents and the late manifestation and the earnest answers about symbols and service who quoted Radiant on camera and made grown adults nod along.
That version of me wasn’t fake. He just wasn’t complete. And incomplete versions of the truth were what kept people alive in institutional settings that rewarded legibility over accuracy.
Three steps. Manageable. Almost boring in its simplicity.