Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 946: Outbid

At four in the morning the command tent still had every lamp burning, and nobody inside it had made a serious attempt at sleep.

Nyx had the routing sheet under the lamp where it had lived since midnight, annotated out to the margins. Doug worked beside her with the Bureau’s published procedures open on his tablet. Kira had a timeline dashboard she was too tired to look at anymore. Luna had been pretending to work on her cot for the better part of an hour, having run out of ideas on what to do.

The Storm Valkyrie did not enjoy being outshone by the pink bimbo one bit, thus she had to look the part.

Kaiden and Vespera were at the map table with the intake numbers, because the compound still had a first week to get through and none of tonight’s problems were going to pour concrete or deal with their hundreds of new recruits and all the issues that came with it.

The rest of the family was scattered around them in various states of uselessness, awake because he was awake, contributing nothing and refusing to go to bed about it.

Doug’s phone buzzed at 4:12, and he stared at it, because phones had no business making noise at four in the morning.

The name on it belonged to one of the favors he’d spent the previous afternoon calling in. There was no message attached to it, only a forwarded document, which was a message of its own.

He read it once, then put it up on the family’s shared feed so nobody had to lean over his shoulder for it.

A Bureau staff notice. The resignation of a scheduling clerk in the compliance division, effective immediately, health reasons cited.

”That’s my clerk.” Nyx was already moving. ”The one who moved a six-week queue in an afternoon. If they took him they took all of it.”

The shell company’s registration came up withdrawn, filed at 2:50 that morning through an overnight portal by the registered agent of record, who had terminated his own appointment sixty seconds after that. State filing systems don’t sleep and don’t care who’s using them.

She looked at the timestamp. 2:50. She’d been sitting four feet from the sheet at 2:50, arguing with Doug about whether a review desk could be lazy instead of bought.

”Son of a bitch.” She was already dialing.

The agent’s number rang eleven times and invited her to leave a message for a name that wasn’t his. The consultancy’s office line rang into a suite she was fairly sure no longer contained furniture. The state’s business division had a recorded voice that cheerfully offered her its hours, which began at eight, and the Bureau had one that offered its own, which began at eight thirty.

Everything she needed was behind a door some stranger would unlock in four hours, and there was not one thing she could do before then.

Doug reached exactly one living human being, because commercial buildings keep somebody awake all night whether anything happens in them or not.

The night manager at the consultancy’s address was awake, unhappy about it, and pleased to finally have someone to be unhappy at. The movers had come at three. Professional and prepaid, and nobody had needed to show them where the freight elevator was.

”Three erasures inside four hours.” Doug worked through it at his one speed. ”Dissolutions and resignations have lead times, sir. Filings, notice periods, pension processing. Either this was planned before we ever started pulling, or whoever executed it keeps such packages ready the way airlines keep spare crews.”

Luna rolled onto her back with her head hanging off the edge of the cot and frowned at the ceiling. ”So the trail’s just... gone? We’re the scariest guild on the damn planet and some suit out-paperworked us?”

”We got outspent.” Nyx dropped into a chair and stole Luna’s untouched lemonade in the same motion, with none of her usual ceremony about it. ”Somebody bought every receipt in the drawer before I got to read them. So much for my awesome debut as a detective.”

She had asked for a day, and she had been proud enough of the ask to check Doug’s face before she made it.

Nobody cleverer than her had taken it away, and that was the part that actually stung. It had been purchased out from under her by a man with a checkbook and a phone list.

”For what it’s worth, the read was correct, Miss Cosmos.” Doug said it to the top of her head, which was as close to gentle as he was built to get. ”The trail was cheap. The cleanup was not. Those are two different opponents.”

...

The sun came up anyway, and the compound went to work around them.

Concrete trucks queued at the perimeter gate by six. The whole intake was out on the gravel by seven, and whatever was being done to them out there involved a great deal of whistling and a steady undercurrent of complaint.

Then the offices opened, and the morning finished the job one desk at a time.

The Bureau posted the clerk’s notice publicly at 8:15, matching Doug’s forwarded copy word for word. His pension paperwork was already complete, which nobody at that table found comforting, because somebody had done him the courtesy of preparing it in advance.

The consultancy’s leasing agent confirmed the surrender a little after nine. Prepaid through the end of the term, which meant they had spent money they were never getting back for the privilege of not existing by morning.

Nyx thanked the woman on the other end, because she had been raised properly, and then set her interface down and didn’t pick anything else up.

That was the last door in the building, and it had closed politely.

The lamps were all still burning at ten in the morning because nobody had thought to go around and kill them, and the tent had the particular flatness of a place where everybody had quietly stopped believing something at slightly different points in the night.

Luna had given up on pretending to work, and Kira’s dashboard sat closed, unsaved. Doug was still writing, but he had stopped reading any of it back.

And Nyx sat with her cheek flat on the routing sheet she had been in love with the night before.

Kaiden knew a defeated group when he saw one.

Sighing inwardly, he crossed the tent and put his hand on top of her head.

He didn’t say anything first, just combed his fingers back through the pink, slow, and let them settle at her crown, the way he did when one of them needed it and had no intention of asking for it.

It took her about two seconds.

She turned in the chair and got both arms around his middle, burying her face in his shirt. The composed operator who had spent the entire night taking a federal routing order apart stopped existing somewhere between the turn and the landing. She burrowed in until her nose was flat against him, breathed him in once, and made a sound that had absolutely nothing to do with detective work.

”It’s not fair,” she whined into his chest.

”No, it’s not.”

”It’s really, genuinely not fair!” The words came out fully muffled and she made no effort to fix that. ”I found the clerk and I found the review desk and I found the stupid little rented company. And then someone made three phone calls in the middle of the night and deleted the whole thing.”

She adjusted her grip, which required a certain amount of cooperation from both of them, and then stayed exactly where she was.

Alexandra had been hovering off to the side with a fresh pot for a while, and she came around the table to put a careful hand on Nyx’s shoulder, patting it in slow circles.

”There, there,” she tried.

Nyx’s left arm came off Kaiden, hooked around Alexandra’s waist, and hauled her into the middle of it.

”Ah- Nyx-!” Alexandra gave up on the principle of the thing somewhere in the next three seconds and, being who she was, used the position to deliver her morning report into the side of Nyx’s hair.

”Forty-one recruits have questions about contracts they’ve already signed. The concrete supplier moved Thursday’s pour up to Tuesday and would like an answer before noon. Brittany and Trisha have both filed complaints about each other, both handwritten. And somebody’s mother has called the main line six times.”

”...Six?”