Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 944: Sniffing Around

Midnight passed over the compound without anyone noticing, and in the command tent beside the half-built main building, the counter-investigation stopped being an evening activity and became a night shift.

Nyx had the routing sheet spread under the lamp with her annotations spidering off every desk the order had crossed. It was the first federal document she had ever dissected in her life, a fact she was managing by treating it like a puzzle somebody had been rude enough to publish unsolved.

”Okay, professionals. Check my homework.” She turned the sheet around and slid it across to Doug.

”Two people touched this who shouldn’t have. I think. A scheduling clerk who moved a six-week queue in one afternoon, and the review desk that waved it past without a single question. Everyone else just did their jobs. Right, or am I seeing ghosts?”

Doug read down her annotations once, then read them again, slower, which from him was applause.

”Right on both counts. The clerk earns a government salary, and the review desk belongs to a man four years from a government pension. Neither profile takes risk for free.”

”So somebody paid retail~”

”Twenty bucks still says it’s the sperm donor,” Luna offered from her cot, eyes closed, arms crossed like a mummy with opinions.

”That’s the part I can’t check.” Nyx pulled the sheet back and tapped the shell company’s name.

”This thing that paid the clerk rents by the month. Single officer, no history, no other footprint anywhere. It reads disposable to me, but I’ve never bought one.”

She looked over at the map table. ”Shadow Mommy. Who rents something like this?”

”Someone cheap,” Vespera said.

The word cheap, in her mouth, sounded like a sentence being passed.

Behind Nyx, Kira had quietly abandoned her own timeline dashboard and was reading over the pink head’s shoulder instead, mouthing timestamps as fast as they were being annotated.

”May I ask something, Miss Cosmos?” Doug’s tone stayed professional, and curiosity got into it anyway. ”Where did you learn to read such things? This is trade work.”

”Detective novels.” Nyx didn’t look up from the sheet. ”I read every one in the library growing up. Twice.”

”Novels.” Doug considered the routing sheet under her hand, buried in annotations. ”I don’t recall the genre spending many pages on federal queue procedure.”

”Sure it does. There’s always a Chapter where the boring paper comes out, the ledgers, the land registry, the shipping manifests, and the author knows you’ll skip it, so that’s where he hides the answer.”

Doug grinned, wry, and went back to his tablet.

’So this is what being born talented looks like,’ he mused, and no resentment managed to find room in it.

He had spent his years mastering this trade one filing cabinet and one ruined weekend at a time, and the pink-haired girl across the table was strolling through the same country like a tourist who happened to speak the language.

”How long until the receipts talk?” Kaiden asked.

Nyx glanced at Doug first and collected a small nod from him before answering.

”Give me a day.”

”A day is realistic, so long as we call in a few favors,” Doug agreed. ”Amateurs leave fingerprints on their fingerprints.”

...

Twelve floors up in Skyline’s tower on the other side of the city, that same midnight found Mercer reading the same message for the fourth time, his tie coiled on the desk beside an empty glass.

’Report filed this evening. Zero actionable findings. Compound ruled compliant. Balance due regardless, per terms.’

Per terms. He mouthed the words and poured himself another finger of scotch, which had stopped tasting like anything two hours ago.

The inspection had cost him dearly, and the cost had been the point. The consultant had guaranteed the arrangement personally, in the confident way of a trade whose entire purpose was that the client never met the product.

He had asked for one bad headline. Cameras on a violation during their circus of an intake day, a finding with teeth, anything a news desk could chew on.

Instead, a less-than-a-week-old guild run out of a tent had hosted a comprehensive federal sweep on its first morning and come out shining.

Compliant.

He was three drinks past reasonable when he opened the old campaign folder, the one Legal had flagged for deletion after the transfer.

Yuna Park smiled down at him from a billboard mockup in Skyline colors, daggers crossed behind her head, the guild’s name printed under her collarbone like a brand he was still paying for.

”There she is,” he told the empty office. ”The golden goose.”

Three years of training costs, of recruitment banners nobody had asked her about, of gate rotations arranged around her shifts, of quarterly reviews where he had watched her learn to sit very still.

And the moment the market noticed her, she had walked across town to a circus tent and taken his entire top line with her.

”Traitor,” he told the mockup, working his belt open. ”Ungrateful little slut. I made you.”

What followed would not have flattered anyone. He went at himself with grim, bullying focus, determined to win something back on principle, sweating in his chair while the billboard smiled its contract smile, and his body declined the whole project.

”I built you,” he said, and his voice cracked on it, and he said it again anyway. ”I built you, you ungrateful...”

His grip slowed, then quit. Several minutes of labor had produced an ache in his forearm, a sad half-mast nothing between his legs, and no justice whatsoever.

He sat there with his belt open and his pulse loud in his ears, an aging man alone in a dark office, breathing hard over a picture of an employee who had gotten away, while somewhere below a floor waxer hummed through the empty building like the world’s smallest orchestra playing him off.

He had just decided the night could not insult him further when the phone buzzed again.

’Routing file on your item was requested internally one hour ago. The request did not come from us. Retain nothing. Delete this number.’

He read it twice before it landed, and then it landed all at once.

The conference room. The fresh sheet sliding across the table with the pen on top of it. The Rook woman reading his obituary off a tablet without raising her voice, and the pleasant HR man tipping him a two-finger salute at the door. ”Provided it stays no, Mr. Mercer.”

He had sworn it would stay no. He had also, within the day, gone shopping for the consultant, because paper was not evidence and a lawful federal inspection was not a lie, and none of it was ever supposed to be findable.

He was standing without having decided to stand.

His own reflection looked back at him from the dark window, belt open, shirt soaked at the collar, and behind it his memory offered up, with hideous clarity, a conference room where flat shadows had lain perfectly still under the table while he screamed at them.

The routing file did not have his name in it. It had the consultant’s shell in it, and the shell had a renter, and renters talked to exactly one kind of buyer when the alternative was being the last name on a list.

He knew how that trade ran. He had run it at other people his whole career.

Mercer spent the rest of the night with every light in his office burning, and did not once look at the window.

...

The woman in the gray suit was waiting in Skyline’s lobby when Mercer came down at eight, and every employee who crossed the marble found a reason to cross it faster.

He knew the breed on sight, having aimed enough process servers at other people to know what one in his own lobby meant.

She had asked for him by name at his own front desk. She put the envelope in his hand, recited the formula that made the delivery legally official, and left without waiting for a reaction.

He read it in the elevator, which was a mistake, because the elevator had mirrors.

Eclipse’s lawyers were announcing a lawsuit. Anticipated proceedings, the letter called it, concerning the procurement of federal administrative action, which in plain language meant somebody bought that inspection and they intended to drag him into court over it.