Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 971: Questioned

The team took a pair of empty offices on the second floor for the interviews, good-sized rooms with a view of the lot, a folding table and three chairs apiece, and nothing else, because Meridian Contract Interiors had promised delivery for the end of the month.

Whitlock stood in the middle of the nearer one, turning slowly.

”No furnishings.”

”Ordered,” Doug said from the doorway. ”Three floors’ worth. There’s a confirmation number.”

”Members housed and employed in an unfurnished facility.” The pen moved. ”Noted.”

Doug opened his mouth, remembered his own briefing, and closed it.

Yuna Park went in first, because she had posted herself at the door at eight forty and held the position.

She took the folding chair across from Whitlock, back straight, hands on her knees, and gave the room one flat sweep out of professional habit. One door, one window, one man, one pen. Nothing in it she couldn’t handle.

”Miss Park. You transferred from Skyline Guild this week, under expedited procedures.” Whitlock turned a page in a folder that was thicker than one week ought to produce. ”An unusual acceleration. Were you offered inducements to leave your previous employer?”

”I was offered a job.”

”A job.” He wrote. ”You filed a security report at nine forty last night. Are you compensated for hours worked after your shift ends?”

”The report took eleven minutes.”

”That isn’t what I asked.”

”I wanted it filed, so I filed it,” Yuna said. ”At Skyline they paid me for three years to sit in briefings and smile at sponsors. Here I work. That is all.”

She could read upside down, a leftover from her old line of work, and it let her watch the pen lay down the words uncompensated overtime, normalized in tidy federal shorthand.

Her face did nothing at all.

”A former member of this guild states under oath,” Whitlock went on, ”and I quote, that personnel are expected to remain available at all hours, and that refusal is understood to carry consequences.” He turned the folder toward her for exactly as long as it took to not read it, then turned it back. ”Comment?”

”Which former member?”

”That’s confidential.”

”Then your source is lying. Somebody paid for it,” Yuna said, and offered him nothing else.

The pen took its time with that one. Subject disputes complainant credibility, it wrote, then, on the line below, hostile to process, and then it went back and underlined whatever it had written earlier.

”Do you feel safe here, Miss Park?” Whitlock asked it kindly, which was the most hostile thing he’d done since sitting down.

Yuna thought about the comms bead, and the man on the other end of it who trusted her work enough never to check it.

”Safer than anywhere I’ve ever been employed.”

The pen wrote exhibits strong identification with employer. Yuna Park watched it happen with her hands folded, doing the math on how many seconds it would take her to reach the folder, and filing the number away unused.

...

The corridor outside had grown a queue by ten, guild members on folding chairs along the wall, waiting their turn with churned faces, under orders to be boring and finding it difficult.

A cook came out of the door halfway down the line and stood there holding her badge in both hands, looking back at it.

”She wrote something down when I said I liked it here,” she said. ”Why would she write that down?”

Alexandra had urns sent up at half past and then stayed, which had nothing to do with the coffee.

She went along the wall crouching at knees, holding a hand here, telling a nineteen-year-old scaffolder there that ”I don’t know” was a complete and legal answer. By the time she reached the far end, the queue was sitting straighter than it had all morning.

The second assessor had posted herself outside the interview door.

”There’s coffee,” Alexandra offered her. ”And the lemonade is fresh, if you’d rather have that.”

”Federal personnel don’t accept gratuities.” The assessor didn’t look up.

”It’s... it’s lemonade.”

”Attempted provision of gratuities.” The pen moved. ”Noted.”

Alexandra stood there a moment, working out what had just happened to her morning, then went back down the line to her people with the glass still in her hand and sat with them, one seat from the federal elbow.

From behind the interview door, muffled but unmistakable, came the voice of Eugene Wexler, who had drawn the short straw of being interviewed by Whitlock himself.

”I WILL NOT WASTE THIS INTERVIEW!”

The queue’s composure died quietly along the wall.

...

Vanessa Sloan drew the second assessor, a gray woman named Marsh with a voice like a form being filled out.

”Miss Sloan. During your candidacy you were physically struck by a guild officer.” Marsh laid a printed still on the folding table between them, Luna mid-swing, Vanessa’s head halfway around. ”A sworn statement from a former member describes, I quote, a culture of physical retaliation condoned by leadership. The footage is public. We’d like your account.”

Vanessa looked at the photograph. They had printed the exact frame where the slap landed, and cropped out the thirty seconds of killing intent that had earned it.

So that was the kind of morning this was going to be.

”My account is public too.” Vanessa sat squared away, same as she did everything.

”I released it with the tape. I flexed killing intent at a Z-tier support in her own home because she asked me a question I didn’t like. Luna slapped me for it, and the guild gave me a second chance anyway. My statement’s in your folder. I signed it at my own kitchen table.”

”You were struck, and then you signed with the guild whose officer struck you.” Marsh’s pen hovered. ”Were you pressured to sign your statement?”

She considered Marsh.

”You’re going to write down that I was pressured.”

”I’m going to write down what I observe.”

”Then here’s what there is to observe.” Vanessa leaned forward and tapped the printed still, on Luna, without heat.

”I took hits for money for ten years, from things whose names I never learned. That slap is the only one that ever made me better.”

Marsh wrote subject minimizes incident, holding the folder at an angle that made no effort to hide it.

”Anything to add, Miss Sloan?”

”Yeah.” Vanessa stood, and pushed the folding chair in with one foot, precise. ”The lemonade lady you cited in the hall. Write down that I’d take a gate collapse for her.”

The door closed behind her with terrible politeness.

Marsh wrote it down, though not the sentence. Underneath the last line she added subject demonstrates conditioned self-sacrifice toward guild personnel, and drew a small box around it for the analyst.

...

Kaiden spent the morning on the ops floor, at the glass, where he could see the corridor and hear none of it.

That was the design, and he understood it. Every door that opened and closed gave him back one of his people wearing a face he had to read cold.

The process was built to make trust look like naivety, to sit a stranger between him and four hundred people, asking, politely, are you sure?

He was sure.

”You’re grinding your teeth,” Nyx observed from her desk, without looking up.

”I’m smiling.”

”You’re grinding your teeth in the shape of a smile.”

”Well. Yeah. I’m livid. I struck a deal with the President himself and his corrupt dogs are sniffing in my home.”

”Shall we make the call?”

”I’ll wait and see for now. But yes. We’ll have some serious talking to do.”

...

Vaelira had been in the building since ten, called up with the rest of the A-tier roster, and she sat down opposite Whitlock braced for sentencing.

”Miss Vaelira. A-tier, designation Puppeteer.” Whitlock read her file for a moment too long, and it worked better on her than it had on anyone all morning. ”Describe your relationship to Guild Master Grey.”

Vaelira’s spine arrived at full extension one vertebra at a time.

’You are a wall,’ she instructed herself, from somewhere behind her own sternum. ’Walls are professional. Walls answer the question that was asked and not one word past it.’

”Professional,” the wall said, to a point slightly above Whitlock’s head.

”Professional.” The pen recorded it. ”Your file says you arrived as part of an acquisition. Your previous guild dissolved mid-competition, Eclipse absorbed its roster, and you came with the assets. You now serve under Guild Master Grey’s direct authority. Miss Vaelira, I’ll ask plainly.”

Whitlock folded his hands. ”Are you at this guild against your will? Has Guild Master Grey ever mistreated you, threatened you, or taken advantage of his position over you?”