"He’s a bright boy whose registration says fifteen feet and twenty pounds, and I have footage of him putting an amber construct through a Legendary-classification crystalline barrier at a distance the paperwork says is impossible." Odette finally looked down, one flick of her eyes, and closed the folio again. "So my question is not whether the file is wrong. My question is which kind of wrong it is, and how expensive that kind becomes eighteen months from now when he’s a licensed asset with a sponsorship attached."
There it was. Ninety seconds, not four minutes. She had compressed Diane’s projected timeline by two thirds and hadn’t broken a sweat doing it.
I want to be very clear about something, because self-awareness is the only virtue I actually own. Left alone in that room I would have been consumed. Not out-argued. Consumed. I am fast, I am strong, I have triple-digit numbers in five categories and a staff in my inventory that can relocate load-bearing structures, and none of that has any application whatsoever against a woman who has already read your file, your mother’s file, and the eleven-day gap in a federal docket, and who came in with six pages because she only needed six.
Diane leaned back one inch. Just one. On her it was a door closing.
"Category Seven," she said.
"I know what Category Seven says."
"Then you know what it doesn’t say, honey, which is the part that matters." Diane’s smile arrived and it was gorgeous and it was not friendly. "Progressive manifestation covers Aspects that continue developing past initial activation. The IHL wrote that language in 2019 after the Kaminski case, and they wrote it vague on purpose, because they had a nineteen-year-old in Michigan whose output tripled in a hospital bed and no framework that could hold it. Vague is the whole product. You are not sitting here because his file is inconsistent. You’re sitting here because his file is inconsistent in a category the regulator built specifically so it would not have to explain inconsistencies."
"That argument holds for eleven more months," Odette said. "It stops holding the first time a licensed Hero standing next to him in the field writes an incident report that puts a number on what he actually did."
"Then we’ll have a lovely conversation in eleven months."
"You won’t have it with me. You’ll have it with an IHL compliance officer, and they don’t drink sweet tea, Diane, they don’t take meetings, and they don’t care that he was eight years old at a state funeral." Odette’s chin tipped a degree. "I came here so that when the number gets written down, someone in this industry already has a version of the story they prefer. That’s not a threat. That’s the only functional definition of protection anyone in our business has ever offered."
They looked at each other across the table for four full seconds, and I sat in the middle of it and understood that this had stopped being about me somewhere in the second sentence and had become about two apex predators establishing which of them got to be the one holding my leash while pretending the leash was a courtesy.
"You still have those three favors on the liaison desk," Odette added. "Whatever you spent one of them on eleven days ago."
Diane did not flinch. I watched for it, because I was the one whose entire life was inside that sentence, and I had learned to read her micro-expressions across nine years of shared breakfasts. Nothing moved.
"I have no idea what you’re referring to, sugar."
"I know. That’s why it worked." Odette almost smiled, and the almost was more unsettling than a full one would have been. "Well done, incidentally."
"Thank you."
"I’d have used the second favor as well."
"I’m saving it."
And that, I realized, was how these two women said they respected each other. Two professionals confirming, out loud, in front of a federal-adjacent record, that one of them had committed a documentation crime on my behalf and the other had checked her work and found it satisfactory.
The heat in my chest was not fear. That was the disorienting part. I sat there watching Diane Fitzgerald fight for me against a woman built out of nothing but sharp edges and patience, and what I felt was something closer to being twelve years old and safe in a kitchen I did not deserve to be standing in.
Odette turned to me.
"Lukas. When did you know you weren’t Unmarked."
The trap was so clean I nearly walked into it out of admiration. Every version of an honest answer put a date on it, and every date could be cross-referenced against a scan, a school record, a house full of people who would remember. Diane’s hand shifted a fraction on the table, the smallest tell she owned, and it meant let me.
I did not let her.
"I still don’t know," I said.
Odette’s eyes narrowed a millimeter.
"Nine years of negative results teaches you not to trust good news. When it started I assumed I was imagining it, and I kept assuming that until Sloane knocked me down enough times that the assumption became inconvenient." I kept my voice flat, because the truest sentence I had was also the safest one and that happens roughly once a decade. "I still expect to wake up and have it be gone. I train like it’s leaving. That’s not humility. That’s the only calibration I’ve got."
Silence.
Then Odette Reyes pulled her glasses out of her breast pocket, unfolded them, put them on, and wrote something on the third page of her folio. It was the first time she had used her pen since sitting down.
"That’s a very good answer," she said, "and it’s going to be a problem for me later."
"Why."
"Because it’s true, and I came in prepared for you to be charming." She looked at Diane over the wire frames. "Who trained him."
"He came like that."
"No he didn’t."
"No," Diane agreed, "he didn’t."
〘 Odette Reyes: 1% → 4% 〙
〘 Note: Subject has revised her assessment upward. She is now considering whether you are worth being wrong about. 〙