Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 926: Exit Interview

He smiled at Yuna the way he’d smiled through three years of quarterly reviews. ”My office is one floor up. Twenty minutes, and then she’s all yours for the paperwork.”

Ms. Rook did not look up from her tablet.

”The exit clause in Miss Park’s contract requires her attendance before guild leadership prior to transfer clearance. It does not require privacy. It does not specify a location. Miss Park is in attendance. As far as Eclipse is concerned, the interview began when she sat down.”

”We find consolidation efficient,” Doug added pleasantly.

Mercer held his smile. ”It’s meant to be a private conversation between a guild leader and a departing member. Three years with this organization deserves better than lawyers in the room.”

”Then speak to her personally,” Ms. Rook said. ”Pretend we’re not here.”

Yuna sat with her hands pressed flat against her thighs and felt an entire car ride’s rehearsal quietly die. The office upstairs, the drawn blinds, the twenty minutes alone.

She had run that room in her head since yesterday, every version of it, and it had just been cancelled by a woman reading one sentence off a tablet without raising her voice.

Nobody in the building could make her go up those stairs. The realization arrived with weight, like the click of a lock she’d been leaning on for two years finally turning from her side of the door.

Mercer looked at the three of them for a moment, recalculated, and reached for the binders stacked at his elbow.

”Then let’s talk numbers.” He slid a copy across the table, thick as a phone book, tabbed in Skyline blue.

”The development ledger. Training, certifications, gear allowances, gate insurance, medical. The total is at the bottom, and I’ll save you the suspense: it has nine digits. On top of which the board expects a premium. We’re losing our only S-tier abruptly with zero prior signs of dissatisfaction from Miss Park. Our campaign was built around her, and continuity like that has a price. Call it a brand adjustment. Eclipse, of all guilds, understands the value of a brand.”

”We’ve read the ledger,” Doug said.

”Closely,” Ms. Rook said, and turned her tablet around. ”It’s a well-built document. Every line is defensible on its own, which is why we will be discussing the lines it doesn’t have. The contract never states whether development costs amortize across years of service, and Miss Park has served three of the five. It books every commercial gate she cleared as her training expense, while the revenue those same clears earned Skyline appears nowhere as an offset. A court could read this ledger and conclude that Miss Park was never a cost center at all, but this building’s most profitable department, billed for the privilege.”

”None of which makes your ledger improper per se,” Doug added, agreeable. ”But it sure makes it arguable. And as we both know, arguable is expensive.”

The man in the gray suit leaned toward Mercer’s ear. Mercer waved him off without looking.

”Creative accounting theories are lovely,” he said, ”but the contract says what it says. She signed the ledger terms as a grown adult. We’ve paid her very handsomely. Isn’t that true, Yuna? Remember the luxury car you bought for your father even before you killed a single monster?”

Yuna hugged herself and looked away, then gathered her thoughts to respond. But Doug was faster.

”She signed them at eighteen, unrepresented, in a document her own confidentiality clause forbade her from showing to even her own parents.” Doug’s tone stayed conversational.

”Whether that architecture survives contact with a labor board is a fascinating question, and we’re content to litigate it for the next two years if the alternative is paying your unreasonable ransom. Though I’d advise brevity in general, Mr. Mercer. The enforceable figure has gotten smaller every time you’ve spoken.”

Mercer laughed at that, and it was the phone laugh, warm and easy, but thinner in person, like a recording of itself.

”You’re assuming this closes at all, gentlemen. Transfers clear through our personnel committee. The committee convenes quarterly.” He turned to Yuna for the first time since the binders came out, and the warmth he aimed at her had teeth in it. ”And until it convenes, sweetheart, you’re on my roster. The gate warehouse is short-staffed. Very safe work.”

Yuna held his gaze and said nothing. Under the table, her thumbnail found the seam of her phone case and pressed.

”Before you commit her to a quarter of warehouse duty,” Doug said, ”walk through the math with me one more time. Your asset peaked yesterday. Five hundred people watched her audition for us in a government training hall. The industry already knows, Mr. Mercer. A campaign cannot be built around a face that is publicly halfway out the door, and your sponsors will reprice you accordingly at renewal. Every week your committee fails to convene, the asset in your warehouse is worth less to you, and our figure follows it down. Warehouse her, and you are a man holding ice in a warm room.”

”And once it melts,” Ms. Rook said, ”every single recruit Skyline tries to sign will ask their agents why your only S-tier had to be litigated. Guilds run on intake. ’The guild you cannot leave’ is not a slogan that survives its first S-tier member.”

Mercer heard all of it with his fingers steepled under his chin, and when he answered, the bluster was gone, and what remained was better at this.

”You think I haven’t run those numbers.” He straightened one cuff. ”Every contract in this building is priced on the understanding that the door is heavy. The day my gem walks out a discounted door the same week she asks, I am not out one S-tier. I am out the weight of every door I own. My B-tiers start doing math, their agents start calling, and in five years I’m running a training academy for other people’s rosters. So yes. I will eat the depreciation, and I will book it as advertising.”

He pushed back his chair and stood, buttoning his jacket. ”You rolled in here with a kaiju on your letterhead, expecting arithmetic to stop applying to you. It doesn’t. The committee convenes in the next quarter. Skyline thanks Eclipse for its interest.”

The man in the gray suit began gathering his legal pad, visibly relieved to be done.

Ms. Rook closed her tablet.

It made a small sound, a magnet clicking home, and Doug took his hands off the table and sat back, clearing the stage. The choreography of it registered in her skin before her mind caught up.

”Then we are finished with the part of this meeting I hoped would be enough,” Ms. Rook said, in the same level voice with nothing warm left in it. ”Miss Ashborn read Miss Park’s file this morning. All of it. The ledger. The call log from last night. Three years of feedback sessions scheduled through your own calendar system, after close of business, blinds drawn. When she finished, she asked us a single question.”

The gray suit’s pen stopped moving.

”’Is there any chance he’s another Maximilian?’”

The room went ice cold.