Chapter 578 | Insufficiently Devastating

Chapter 578: 578 | Insufficiently Devastating

I stood in the hallway watching Felicity Hardy walk away like she hadn’t just casually informed me she was running a long-term seduction campaign approximately forty feet from a woman she’d been calling Mrs. F while establishing rapport for that exact purpose.

The universe had a sense of humor. I’d noticed this before. Usually right before it did something horrible to me.

My phone buzzed. Sloane, from inside the conference room I’d just escaped.

Explain.

Then, three seconds later, before I could type anything:

NOW.

Then, three seconds after that:

Actually don’t. My mom is doing the thing where she smiles and I can feel the temperature dropping. Get back in here before she starts strategizing.

I went back in.

Diane sat at the head of the table exactly where Park had been, which felt like a statement she was making to nobody in particular. Her charcoal suit was immaculate. Her gold earrings caught the fluorescent light. Her expression carried the specific calm of a woman who had already run through eleven possible responses to the situation and rejected all of them for being insufficiently devastating.

Sloane sat two seats down, arms crossed, ears pink.

"So," Diane said. "Felicity Hardy."

"She’s a classmate." I sat down across from her, because sitting felt safer than standing, and because standing meant Diane could look up at me with the particular expression that made grown Heroes reconsider their sponsorship demands. "We had a couple classes together. She’s harmless."

Sloane made a sound.

Diane heard it. Filed it. Continued. "That girl walked into a room she had never been in, identified the person with the most influence over your life inside of four seconds, and spent six minutes running a charm operation on me while establishing physical claim on your arm." She folded her hands on the table. "That is not harmless, honey. That is a professional. I would know. I hire professionals."

"She works in illusions."

"She works in people." Diane’s drawl went slow and appreciative in the way she used for competitors she respected. "The illusions are just the part that shows up on the licensing exam."

Sloane finally uncrossed her arms. "She has a thing for him. She told me. To my face. In the flooded sublevel while we were fighting for our lives." Her jaw worked. "She said she didn’t want to compete. She wanted to keep everyone. Whatever that means."

I knew exactly what that meant. I had a fairly detailed understanding of what that meant. I’d acquired that understanding in a movie theater with the lights off and a very convincing illusion of two people discussing cinematography running four feet away while the actual two people did something considerably less academic.

I did not say any of this.

"That’s a very specific thing to say during combat," Diane observed.

"She’s a very specific person." Sloane’s fingers drummed the table. "I don’t know if I hate her or if I like her. It keeps switching. She helped me during the incursion. Read a whole enemy position off her own illusion getting shot. That was actually impressive. And then she calls Lukas bestie and touches his arm and I want to detonate the nearest load-bearing wall."

"Don’t detonate the load-bearing walls," Diane said. "We’ve discussed this."

"I’m aware, Mom."

I watched the two of them, and something loosened in my chest that had nothing to do with the System and everything to do with the fact that I got to sit in a room with these two people arguing about my complicated love life like it was a household maintenance issue.

Which, technically, it was.

"Here is what is going to happen," Diane said, and the boardroom voice came out, the one that ended arguments before they started. "Miss Hardy is smart, ambitious, and clearly has decided she wants you. That is a problem I cannot solve by wanting it to go away, because wanting things to go away is not a strategy, it is a coping mechanism, and I did not build a thirty-one client agency on coping mechanisms."

She reached for her bag, pulled out her tablet, and set it face-down on the table without opening it, which was somehow more intimidating than if she’d started taking notes.

"So instead I am going to do what I always do. I am going to gather information, assess the threat, and decide whether Felicity Hardy is a complication I manage or a person I have to actually take seriously." She looked at me. "You are going to help me. By not doing anything stupid before I finish gathering."

"When have I ever done anything stupid."

Sloane laughed, sharp and immediate. "You died. Eleven days ago. You died."

"For three seconds. And I got better."

"You threw yourself in front of black fire with four percent stamina and a separated shoulder."

"That was heroic, not stupid. There’s a difference. Radiant said so on television."

Sloane opened her mouth. Closed it. Turned to her mother. "He watched the interview."

"Of course he watched the interview," Diane said. "He watches everything about himself. It’s the vainest thing about him and he thinks nobody’s noticed."

I had, in fact, watched the interview four times. I did not confirm this.

The bond hummed with Sloane’s amusement, warm and sharp, and I felt the thing she was suppressing underneath it, the leftover fear that hadn’t finished draining out of her nervous system in eleven days. She’d been counting my breaths. She was still, on some level, counting my breaths. The interview was funny because the alternative to funny was the version where I’d stopped breathing for real and she’d been three hundred meters away with her arm burning.

I reached over and took her hand under the table before Diane could tell me not to.

Diane saw. Of course she saw. She didn’t say anything.

"The Felicity situation," she said instead, "waits. There’s a bigger conversation we need to have and I would rather have it in a room I trust than a conference space that had a terrorist walk through the wall two weeks ago." She stood, smoothing her jacket. "We’re going home. All three of us. Sloane can be insufferable about the sleeping arrangements once we’re behind our own front door instead of in a building full of Commission agents taking statements."

"I’m not insufferable."

"You threatened to detonate my coffee mug this morning."

"I threatened to detonate his coffee mug." Sloane pointed at me. "He hid the good creamer."

"I didn’t hide it. I used it."

"You used all of it."

"It’s creamer, Sloane, it exists to be used."

Diane pinched the bridge of her nose in the specific way she did when she was reminding herself that she’d chosen this life, that she’d walked into a funeral home nine years ago and made a decision that led directly to two teenagers arguing about dairy products in a conference room where a director from Geneva had just spent forty minutes trying to figure out if I was a threat to national infrastructure.

"Cars," she said. "Now. Before I remember I’m a professional and start acting like one."