Chapter 575 | We’ll Speak Again

Chapter 575: 575 | We’ll Speak Again

"That’s what Dr. Weber flagged when I registered."

"Dr. Weber flagged a great many convenient things." She turned a page in the folio without looking down, the same move Odette had pulled, information wielded like a threat. "Charles Weber has an unpublicized relationship with Fitzgerald Media Group. Your guardian, Ms. Fitzgerald, co-authored your manifestation declaration. And there is an eleven-day gap on the public docket where a mandatory secondary verification request should have appeared and did not."

Diane didn’t move. Diane, who I had watched reach into the IHL’s administrative machinery and vanish that verification request with two decades of practice and one of three favors she wasn’t going to explain, sat with the pleasant neutrality of someone who had nothing to hide because she’d already hidden it.

"I’m aware Director Reyes reviewed the file," Diane said, and her drawl came out slow, unhurried, the specific tempo that put people just slightly behind the content. "The Lang Agency countersigned a Letter of Developmental Interest last week. Ms. Lang is here as class representative, but she’s also, as I understand it, familiar with the terms."

Park’s attention swung to Petra, and I felt the whole room recalibrate. Diane had just fired the shot. She’d invoked the Lang name, put it directly into the space between Park and the file, and made the file into something you couldn’t investigate without investigating the Langs.

Petra sat up a fraction straighter, ears going faintly pink but voice completely level. "The Lang Agency considers Mr. Belmont’s current classification consistent with observed developmental variance," she said, reciting the exact sentence Odette had drafted, the one built to shield me from regional disagreement because no office would contradict Margot Lang in writing. "My mother’s office reviewed the registration and found no cause for concern. I signed as agency of record."

"You signed," Park repeated.

"I did." Petra held her gaze. She’d won an election by one vote and been told her whole life her judgment was correct, and right now she wore both those facts like armor. "My name is attached to the assessment. Personally."

The room went quiet in a different way. Park had come to investigate a boy with an impossible file. She’d walked into a boy with an impossible file whose paperwork was now welded to a hero-tech dynasty with eleven federal contracts and a legal department built to make problems disappear. She could keep pulling the thread. But the thread was tied to Margot Lang’s name, and pulling it meant a fight with the Langs on top of a fight with Fitzgerald Media, over an eighteen-year-old whose only documented crime was surviving.

I watched her do the arithmetic. I recognized it because it was the same arithmetic I ran a hundred times a day. Cost, benefit, exposure, upside. What she gained by breaking the story against what it cost her to break it.

"I’m not accusing anyone of fraud," Park said finally, and closed the folio. "I’m establishing a baseline. The Commission needs to understand what walked out of that dome. If Mr. Belmont’s Aspect is genuinely still developing, that has implications for his licensure track and for the Commission’s threat assessment of the Twilight Society, given that they clearly identified him as significant enough to send a briefed operative after."

"They knew my name," I said, and let the fear back into my voice because that part didn’t require acting. "The one in the flood zone. He knew my file. He knew everyone’s files. That’s not public. That came from inside."

Park’s pen stopped. Percy’s did too. I felt Sloane’s attention sharpen at the far end of the table, and Felicity went very still beside me.

"Explain," Park said.

"The operators who came for us weren’t guessing. They had our names, our classifications, our threat ratings. The internal packets. Someone at Halloran sold that." I didn’t mention Wes Prentiss. That was Sloane’s information, and Camille’s, extracted in a substation while a man in a soaked polo shirt explained about his daughter’s medical bills. Whether it made it into the record was a decision above my pay grade. "I don’t know who. But somebody handed a terrorist organization the roster of forty kids and told them where to find us."

Park wrote something down, and for the first time since she’d walked in, she wrote it fast, the way you write down a thing you didn’t know and needed to know. The story had shifted under her. She’d come to audit me. Now she had a security breach at the most prestigious hero academy in the western hemisphere, and that was a much bigger, much more useful problem than whether a first-year’s stats were higher than his paperwork.

Diane caught my eye. Just for a second. Something moved behind it that might have been approval, or might have been the specific alarm of a woman watching her ward improvise past the script and land the improvisation.

"That’s a serious allegation," Park said.

"It’s not an allegation. It’s the reason I almost died." I held steady. "I’m not trying to be difficult, Director. I told you I don’t know how my body works. That’s true. But I know they came for us with information they shouldn’t have had, and I know two of my instructors are in a hospital because of it, and if you’re going to spend your time here figuring out anything, I’d rather it be that than whether my file has a typo."

The silence after that had weight to it. Park looked at me for a long moment, and I couldn’t tell what she found, which meant she was good, because usually I could tell. Then she nodded, once, and slid the folio to the side of the table like she was setting it aside for later.

"Mr. Belmont," she said. "Your instructor Dravid predicted you’d be a problem in ways he hadn’t calculated yet. Instructor Steele filed something adjacent. I’m beginning to understand what they meant."

"People keep telling me that."

"I imagine they do." She stood, smoothing her jacket, and the room stood with her out of reflex. "I have what I need for today. I’ll want individual statements from each of you before I leave, and Mr. Mendoza, I’ll take that headcount record. Mr. Belmont, we’ll speak again."

Not a threat. Not quite a promise either. Something in between, the kind of thing you said to someone you’d decided to be wrong about later rather than right about now.

She left. The door clicked shut behind her, and the entire room exhaled at once, seven people releasing breath they hadn’t announced they were holding.

Diane’s hand found my wrist under the table and squeezed once, hard. Sloane’s relief flooded through the bond so fast it made me dizzy. Felicity leaned into my shoulder and murmured something that sounded like deceased under her breath.

"You went off script," Diane said quietly, for me alone, and there was no smile in it.

"The script wasn’t going to hold. She was going to open the folio."

"You could have handed her a security breach and watched her make it worse."

"But I didn’t." I looked at her. "I handed her a better problem than me. She took it."

Diane held my gaze for a long second, and whatever she’d been about to say she put away, filing it into whatever drawer she kept for the growing list of things about me that didn’t add up. "You’re going to give me a heart attack before you graduate."

"That’s the plan. Keeps you invested."