Three minutes early, collar buttoned over a bruise that Petra Lang had put under it on purpose, one shirt button short of regulation and running on a lunch I’d eaten standing up.
The fourth floor conference room still smelled like fresh paint and Odette Reyes’s perfume, which meant the room had now hosted two separate events I was going to be lying about for the rest of my life.
Petra had reset the table. Chairs squared, water glasses at each place setting, her brief in four collated copies with the corners aligned.
She sat in the same seat she’d occupied at two, blazer buttoned, hair rearranged into geometry that had not survived the last hour and had been forced back into it anyway.
"Belmont." She did not look up from her page. "You’re late."
"It’s three twenty-seven."
"You said you would review the brief before the meeting. The meeting begins in three minutes. The brief is eleven pages."
I sat down two seats away and pulled a copy toward me.
Somewhere under the paper her pen tapped once against the table and stopped.
"You’re doing the thing," I said.
"I am not doing a thing."
"You’ve squared that page four times."
She squared it a fifth time, which I chose to accept as a rebuttal.
I had, in the last four hours, sat through a federal-adjacent interrogation conducted by a woman who knew my dead mother better than I did. I had watched my guardian trade favors like ammunition while I signed forms. I had been handed six pages of paper that were currently the only thing keeping my entire existence legally breathable. And then I had made Petra Lang say something in French she absolutely did not authorize, which was its own category of tactical error.
And all I wanted was seven o’clock.
Seven o’clock was the co-ed window in the Prometheus bathhouse. Three temperature-controlled pools cut from natural stone. A cedar sauna that seated twelve. Towel service, all of it institutionally justified as muscle recovery and team cohesion because twelve years ago Halloran ran an exchange program with Shinshu Academy and came back with opinions about communal bathing that had somehow survived committee review and budget allocation. Steele had put us through hill sprints at six in the morning. My quads were filing complaints in triplicate. Caden had been evangelizing about the forty-one degree pool since Tuesday like a man who’d found religion in a basement and wanted to share the good news with everyone in range.
So yes. My immediate life goal, after surviving the day and the Fitzgerald household and whatever the System was going to decide I owed it for the Osei mission, was to sit in very hot water and think about nothing for approximately forty-five minutes.
Which meant this meeting had to go smoothly.
Which meant this meeting had two women in it who had never once in their lives let anything go smoothly, and I was about to find out whether the third person in the door was going to improve that ratio or make it statistically worse.
The door opened at three twenty-nine.
Quinn Adler came in first, and Quinn Adler did not enter a room so much as arrive at it with documentation. Blonde hair braided tight, blazer buttoned to the throat, steel-grey eyes doing a sweep of the seating arrangement before she took a single step further.
Her tablet was already open. Her posture said she’d been standing outside the door since three twenty-four, waiting for the appropriate moment to be exactly on time.
"Belmont. Lang." She set the tablet down with a click that felt like a gavel. "Before we begin, I’d like to raise a procedural concern."
Petra’s chin lifted a quarter inch.
"By all means," Petra said.
Quinn sat. She did not relax into the chair. She occupied it.
"This meeting was originally scheduled for eleven hundred hours. It was moved to fifteen-thirty by request from 1-B at nine forty last night. That’s a seventeen hour notice window on a joint inter-cohort coordination session." Quinn’s grey eyes came to me, and they were not hostile, which was somehow worse. "I restructured my afternoon around a schedule that had already been approved by both homeroom instructors. Fitzgerald restructured hers. My Aspect Theory review group moved twice."
"That’s on me," I said.
"I’m aware it’s on you."
"I had a conflicting obligation with an outside agency."
"Yes." She tapped the tablet once, and the display turned toward me, and there it was, an internal visitor log I had no idea students could access. "Reyes, O. Lang Agency. Fourteen hundred to fifteen hundred, faculty conference space, fourth floor, sponsored by Fitzgerald Media Group."
Petra’s pen had stopped moving entirely.
"You pulled the visitor log," I said.
"The visitor log is public to elected representatives under the cohort governance provisions. Section four point seven, subsection C." Quinn folded her hands. "I’m not questioning the legitimacy of the meeting. I’m questioning the precedent."
"Which is."
"That in fourteen days we are running a joint field exercise where twenty of your people and twenty of mine will be inside the same collapsed structures with live trauma sensors and a two hundred and forty second civilian mortality window. Coordination in that environment depends entirely on both cohorts trusting that when the other side commits to a time, they hold the time." Her voice never rose. It just got more specific, which from Quinn Adler was the equivalent of shouting.
"A Hero who reschedules an operational briefing on seventeen hours notice is a Hero whose partner agency starts building redundancy into every plan they make with her. That redundancy costs seconds. Seconds cost civilians. I would like it noted that I found the change improper, and I would like it noted once, and then I would like to move on to the actual agenda."
"Noted," I said. "Once. You’re right, and it won’t happen again, and if it does, you should build the redundancy."