Chapter 573 | We Have A Great Deal to Discuss

Chapter 573: 573 | We Have A Great Deal to Discuss

"Good." The doors opened onto the administrative floor, and the smell hit me before the light did. Fresh paint layered over something sharper, printer toner and industrial cleaning solution and underneath all of it the specific chill of a building that had recently held something it wasn’t built to hold.

The hallway stretched ahead in polished stone and recessed lighting, everything gleaming and institutional and slightly wrong in the way places got when they’d been scrubbed too fast after something nobody wanted to talk about.

Diane’s heels struck the floor in a rhythm I’d heard for nine years, that steady click that meant business was happening and she was the one conducting it. I fell into step beside her without thinking about it, muscle memory from a thousand agency events and client meetings and quiet conversations in hallways just like this one. Sloane trailed behind with the coiled quiet of someone deciding not to detonate, her presence a pressure at my back that I didn’t need to turn around to feel.

Percy was already outside the conference room when we arrived.

He stood with his notebook against his chest, blue hair combed flat against his skull in a way that suggested significant product and significant effort, collar pins aligned to the millimeter.

His posture had that particular quality of someone who’d gotten there early specifically to have time to stand correctly before anyone else showed up. He looked at me the way he’d looked at me across the plaza after the breach, not with rivalry, not with suspicion, just recognition. One person who knew too much clocking another.

His Analyze was probably running right now, cataloging my vital signs and my stress markers and whatever other data his brain processed faster than he could articulate. I wondered what the readout said. I wondered if he’d tell me if I asked.

Theo stood beside him, broad and calm, radiating the kind of steadiness that made rooms easier simply by virtue of his presence. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

His shoulders were relaxed in a way that suggested he’d already decided this was going to be fine and was now just waiting for reality to catch up with his assessment. The warmth coming off him was almost physical, the specific quality of someone who’d decided to be the most uncomplicated thing in any given space.

Felicity leaned against the wall in her uniform, blonde hair pulled back in a braid that kept it out of her face, and when she caught my eye she smiled. Small and real. None of the performance she wore for everyone else, none of the dialect or the calculated warmth or the Smoke and Mirrors running at its usual ambient level. Just Felicity, looking at me like she was genuinely glad I was vertical.

"Bestie," she said quietly, pitching it low enough that only I could hear. "You look like death took the day off and left you in charge."

"I feel great, actually."

"You’re lying." Her blue eyes did the read, the one that stripped past whatever I put up, whatever performance I was running, and settled on whatever she found underneath. I’d stopped trying to figure out how much of that was Mirage and how much was just her. The distinction had started to feel academic. "But you’re good at it. You’ll be fine in there."

"You sound sure."

"I watched you talk a reporter into building your brand for you while smelling like chemical fire and blood," she said, and something in her voice suggested she’d been thinking about that moment more than once since it happened. "One director from Geneva isn’t going to break the streak. You’ve got this whole..."

She made a vague gesture with one hand, indicating my general existence. "Thing. Where you make impossible situations work for you. It’s lowkey terrifying and I mean that as a compliment."

I didn’t have a good response to that. I settled for not having one.

Camille came around the corner with the walk of someone spoiling for a fight she couldn’t have, two-tone hair loose and falling past her shoulders, hands empty and not glowing with Rivet constructs, which for her was genuine restraint. She stopped when she saw me, and something complicated moved across her face.

I watched her catalog the details. The gauze that wasn’t there anymore, stripped away by Boundless Stamina doing its work overnight. The color that had come back to my skin. The way I stood without favoring the ribs that had been screaming at me less than forty-eight hours ago.

"You’re upright," she said.

"Try not to sound so disappointed."

"I’m not disappointed. I’m annoyed." Her voice had that particular edge it got when she was being honest about something she’d rather not be honest about. "You almost died being stupid and now everyone thinks you’re some kind of gold-lightning hero and I have to sit in a room and pretend I don’t have opinions about that."

"You have opinions about everything."

"I have correct opinions about everything." She looked at me a beat too long, her Precision Read probably running its own assessment of whatever she was seeing, and then she closed it off before it became something she’d have to address. She turned and leaned against the wall next to Felicity, crossing her arms in a way that suggested the conversation was over whether I agreed or not.

The two of them exchanged a glance I couldn’t read, the specific coded thing women did that men were never invited into, and I decided I didn’t want to know what was being communicated. Some information was better left unprocessed. Some doors were better left closed.

Petra arrived last.

Of course she did.

Cream sweater and dark skirt, planner under her arm, geometric waves fixed in place with the kind of precision that suggested professional intervention. She stopped at the door and her emerald eyes swept the room, taking in the hallway and the waiting students and the conference room beyond, and landed on me and held.

Through no bond at all I felt exactly what she was thinking.

Her name was on a federal document now. A federal document attached to a boy the whole internet had watched wrap himself in electricity and fight something that shouldn’t have been fightable.

Her parents had resources and connections and institutional leverage that had gotten her through Halloran’s doors on recommendation instead of examination.

That same leverage was now structurally connected to whatever I was, whatever I was becoming, whatever story the next few hours decided to tell about both of us. If this room went wrong the Lang name went down with it.

"You’ll present yourself as still developing," she said, quiet, pitched only for me, her voice carrying that particular authority of someone who’d been told her entire life that her judgment was correct and had never found compelling evidence to the contrary.

"Progressive manifestation. Compound expression. You do not know how any of it works. You reproduce nothing on demand. If Park asks you to demonstrate, you say you cannot control it and that trying frightens you. You express appropriate uncertainty about your own capabilities. You express gratitude for institutional support. You express nothing that suggests you understand what you did or how you did it."

"Diane already ran the script."

"I’m running it again." Her chin lifted a fraction, that particular angle she held when she was making a point she considered non-negotiable. "My name is on the paperwork now. My family’s reputation is attached to your file in ways that cannot be easily severed. Do not make me regret extending that protection."

I didn’t point out that the protection had been her idea. I didn’t point out that she’d extended it for reasons that probably had more to do with positioning herself as someone who’d identified my potential early than with any genuine concern for my wellbeing.

Those observations wouldn’t help. Petra operated in a framework where institutional positioning and genuine concern weren’t mutually exclusive. For her they were probably the same thing.

The conference room door opened.

Director Yun-Seo Park stood in the frame, small and straight in a suit that fit the way expensive things fit, dark hair pulled into a knot without a single strand out of place.

She couldn’t have been more than five-two but she carried herself like someone who’d never once found that dimension relevant to her authority. She held a thin folio, six pages maybe, the same power move Odette had pulled outside the breach site. Show me you’re holding information.

Let me wonder what’s in it. Wait for me to fill the silence with something you can use.

Her eyes moved across all of us and did whatever calculation people like her did, assessing threat levels and institutional positions and the specific configuration of students gathered in a Halloran hallway outside a room that had been reserved for her specifically. The gaze landed on Percy and dismissed him. Landed on Theo and noted him. Landed on Felicity and cataloged her. Landed on Camille and assessed her. Landed on Petra and paused, recognizing the name behind the face, the Lang resources behind the sweater and the planner.

Landed on me last and longest.

"Mr. Belmont," she said, and her voice had no warmth in it at all. Just the flat professional interest of someone who’d flown nine hours from Geneva to find out exactly how wrong my file was.

"Come in. We have a great deal to discuss."