"That’s correct," Petra said, slowly.
"Obviously it’s correct."
"I hadn’t mapped the faculty voting bloc."
"Yeah, well." Sloane shrugged. "I’ve been watching my mom do that at dinner since I was six."
Something in Petra’s face went briefly, catastrophically young.
Then she put it away and pulled her pen back into her hand and said, "I’ll amend the framing to a joint recommendation. Adler, if you can secure Hale’s signature after the fact rather than before, that removes the veto vector entirely."
"That’s manipulative," Quinn said.
"It’s sequencing."
"It’s manipulative sequencing." Quinn made a note. "I’ll do it."
Item two took eighteen minutes and involved communications discipline during combat operations. Quinn cared about this with a passion that bordered on the spiritual, citing protocol after protocol while Petra took notes with the focused precision of someone who had never considered that comms could be a point of failure until right now.
Item three was trauma sensor thresholds, the orange-flag range where careers died quietly and without ceremony. I contributed here because I’d read the sensor spec twice during one of the sleepless nights where reading technical documentation felt safer than thinking about anything else.
I knew the exact parameters where the academy’s monitoring system would flag a student as high-risk, and I knew that high-risk meant mandatory reassessment panels and medical holds and all the institutional machinery that turned potential into paperwork.
Item four was the flooded lower levels. That’s where Rina came up. I said her name before Petra could get there first, put the pacing data I’d been holding onto the table between us, and watched Quinn Adler write down the words wool displaces water with the expression of someone who had just discovered a new fundamental law of physics and was already calculating how to weaponize it.
The whole time, Sloane sat across from me. Arms folded. Ponytail catching the window light in that specific way that made her look like she’d walked out of a training montage. She did not look away for longer than the agenda required, which meant she looked away approximately never.
Sloane Fitzgerald’s combat IQ is high as hell. Her Lukas-adjacent IQ is somewhere in the low four hundreds and it only activates when it’s going to ruin my week.
At four eleven, Quinn closed her tablet.
"That’s the agenda. I’ll file the joint recommendation tonight and route it through Dravid first." She stood, gathered her copy, and squared it with the same reflex Petra had, which I found genuinely funny in a way I chose not to mention out loud. "Lang. This was good work."
"Thank you."
"Belmont." Grey eyes. Flat. Not unkind. "Don’t move the next one."
"I won’t."
"You will. Don’t." She was at the door before she added, without turning around, "Reyes coached three of the top twenty. If she’s on the floor for you, that’s not an audit, that’s an investment, and you should behave like someone who knows the difference."
The door closed.
"I love her," Sloane said to the ceiling. "She’s insufferable and I love her."
Petra was already stacking her pages. She stacked them faster than she needed to, which was its own kind of announcement, and she stood up with her blazer buttoned and her chin exactly where she wanted it.
"Wednesday," she said to me. "After sixteen hundred. Fourth floor. I’ll have the amended draft."
"Wednesday."
"Bring the docket numbers."
"I said I would."
"You say a great deal." She got two steps toward the door and stopped, because Sloane had not moved out of the space between her and the exit, and because Sloane was smiling at her with her head tilted very slightly.
"Hey, Lang."
"Fitzgerald."
"Your collar’s crooked."
Petra’s hand went up before she could stop it, checked the left side, found nothing, and came down.
"It isn’t."
"No," Sloane agreed pleasantly. "It isn’t."
The pause that followed was maybe two seconds long and had the structural integrity of wet drywall.
"Good afternoon," Petra said, and left, and her heels went down the corridor at a pace approximately eleven percent faster than she’d arrived at.
Then it was the two of us and eleven pages and a room that had held two separate versions of my day.
Sloane crossed to the table, hooked one hip onto the edge, and looked down at me.
She smelled like vanilla shampoo and the lavender dryer sheets she used on her training gear and underneath that the specific warm-metal thing her Aspect left in the air when she was holding something in and not detonating it, which is a sentence I never expected to have opinions about and now have several.
"So," she said.
"So."
"Meeting ran long."
"Which one."
Her eyes narrowed to slits and I watched her decide not to take the bait, which was new, and honestly kind of terrifying.
"The one with the agency woman," Sloane said. "You were in this room from two to three. You were in this room at three twenty-seven. There’s twenty-seven minutes in there that you didn’t spend eating, because you don’t eat when you’re wound up, and you didn’t spend walking, because I checked and Reyes’s car was out of the north lot at fourteen fifty-two."
"You checked the lot."
"I checked the lot."
"Because you were worried about me."
"Because I’m nosy and possessive and you smell weird."
"I smell like a conference room."
"Yeah." Her jaw shifted. "You smell like her conference room."
The bond did not spike. That’s what got me. It went flat and steady and very, very warm, which is what Sloane feels like right before she says the honest thing instead of the loud thing, and I have learned to prefer the loud thing.
She reached out and straightened my collar, two fingers, exactly the way Diane had done it four hours earlier, and I sat there and let her, because there was no version of pulling away that ended better.
Her thumb passed over the line of my throat and stopped where the fabric sat.
She didn’t unbutton it.