Diane said "Come in" before I could, and that answered the question of who owned this room.
The door swung inward under its own momentum. Odette Reyes did not wait in the frame to be acknowledged, did not scan for the nearest chair, did not perform any of the small hesitations that people use to buy themselves half a second of social calculation. She simply arrived, the same way weather arrives, and the conference room reorganized itself around her while she was still closing the door.
She stood maybe five foot seven in low black heels that had been chosen for walking rather than for being looked at. Charcoal suit, tailored so close to her frame that it read less like clothing and more like a decision she had made about her own outline. The blazer was buttoned once at the waist. Underneath she wore a black shell top with a neckline that stopped precisely where professional stopped and never once considered continuing. Slim through the chest, narrow at the ribs, long through the leg, and her tailoring made no argument about her figure in either direction, which landed considerably harder than cleavage would have. She was not hiding anything. She had decided her body was not the negotiation, and the confidence in that decision took up more space in the room than my shoulders did.
Her hair was black and cut blunt at the jaw, one silver clip holding the left side back. High cheekbones, a straight nose with a small bump near the bridge that suggested it had been broken once and set by someone competent. Dark eyes, nearly black under the overhead panels, framed by thin wire glasses she pulled off and folded into her breast pocket the moment she finished looking at us. Her mouth was a deep plum that had not been reapplied since morning.
No rings. Silver watch, worn on the right wrist. A single leather folio, thin enough to hold six pages.
Six pages. Diane had brought color-coded tabs and a family photograph and a coffee. Odette Reyes had brought six pages, and I understood immediately that six pages was the flex.
〘 New Heroine Registered: Odette Reyes 〙
〘 Temptation Gauge initialized: 1% 〙
〘 Note: Subject is currently assessing you as an acquisition target. Attraction baseline exists and has been filed by her under "inconvenient." I would consider this a compliment. 〙
I dismissed it without moving my eyes, which was a skill I had developed too late and at significant cost.
Here is my honest read, stated once so I never have to pretend otherwise. Diane Fitzgerald is a lioness. She holds ground, she keeps a pride, she does her killing in the open with everyone she loves watching, and she wants you to know she did it. Odette Reyes was the other thing. Solitary, unhurried, comfortable being downwind for as long as it took, and by the time you registered her presence she was already close enough to touch your throat.
And I was the meat on the table between them.
"Diane." Odette set her folio down and pulled out the chair across from us. She sat without adjusting anything, no smoothing of the skirt, no settling into the seat. "Your hair’s longer."
"Your suit’s newer." Diane’s drawl came out warm and slow, molasses over a razor. "Nobody wears Fournier to a first-year candidate meeting, sugar. That’s a jacket you wear when you’ve already decided something."
"I’ve already decided several things. Whether they’re the things you’re worried about is what we’re here to establish." Odette’s eyes came to me and stayed. "Lukas Belmont."
"Ms. Reyes."
"Odette. I dislike the other one." She opened the folio and did not look at it. "Your mother taught me how to fall."
Diane had run me through eleven probable openings on the phone last night and none of them started with my dead mother, which meant Odette had built her first move by reading exactly what Diane would prepare for and going around it.
"Reina Belmont ran the falls module at the Verano regional intensive for two summers." Odette’s voice had no warmth in it and no cruelty either, which made it worse. "I was seventeen and convinced I would never need to know how to hit the ground, because my Aspect meant I would never be on it. She put me on my back forty times in one afternoon. Number forty-one she let me stay standing, and then she told me the point was not the falling. The point was that I stopped being afraid of the floor."
The room went still in a manner I did not enjoy.
I had eleven memories of my mother that belonged to a boy who had lived in this body before I did, and none of them included that. Grief showed up in me the same way rumors of weather show up in a locked basement, secondhand and useless, and I hated it every single time.
"That sounds like her," I said.
"You wouldn’t know."
"No."
Diane’s hand did not move. Her coffee did not move. But something in the space beside me went taut, and Petra Lang’s emerald pen stopped one millimeter above her planner for the second time in ten minutes.
"That’s an interesting place to start a courtesy meeting," Diane said pleasantly.
"It’s an honest place to start. I liked his mother a great deal and I’m about to be unkind to her son’s paperwork, and I’d rather he know both facts at the same time." Odette turned one page in her folio, still without looking down. "Nine years ago Marcus and Reina Belmont died in the Eastside. Six weeks later you removed their son from state temporary housing with paperwork that had already been signed. Two months ago you co-authored his manifestation declaration with Charles Weber at the IHL office on Whitmore, a man who owes you favors he has never publicly accounted for. Three weeks ago he sat third out of fourteen hundred on the entrance examination. Last week he explained the concept of symbolic public trust on Channel Seven with better message discipline than most Rank A talent I have personally coached."
"He’s a bright boy."