Chapter 580 | A Public Relations Liability

Chapter 580: 580 | A Public Relations Liability

Tuesday started with Sloane’s knee in my ribs at five-forty in the morning, which was either affection or attempted murder, and with her I’ve honestly stopped trying to distinguish.

"Up," she said into my shoulder blade.

"It’s dark out."

"It’s always dark when we train. That’s the point." She shoved me with her foot. "Steele’s arm is wrecked and Dravid’s chest is held together with surgical staples and nobody’s running conditioning until Thursday. You think that means we stop?"

"I think it means I get one morning where my spine doesn’t file a complaint."

"Your spine grew back in four days." She sat up, hair a catastrophe, choker still on because she slept in the thing like it was load-bearing. "Juno told my mom. Four days, Lukas. Normal people get grafts."

So we trained. Down in the gym Diane had renovated with money from a client who’d punched a reporter, on mats that still had the impact crater from a Wednesday three months ago where I’d sent a heavy bag through drywall and then spent seventeen hundred dollars learning how to patch it.

Sloane ran me through footwork drills with her burned forearm wrapped in fresh mesh, refusing to favor it, refusing to let me favor it either, which meant she hit me in the chest with an open palm every time my guard drifted and her open palm carried mid-A rank output even at ten percent.

"Your hands drop when you’re thinking," she said. "You’ve done it since day one."

"I’m processing."

"You’re showing off. There’s a difference and you know exactly which one you’re doing."

By seven we were both soaked and my ribs had reintroduced themselves. Diane came down at eight in a silk camisole, hair still pinned, coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, and stood in the doorway watching her daughter drive her elbow into my sternum.

"Breakfast in twenty," she said. "Sloane, stop hitting him in the chest cavity. He was in a medical bed on Sunday."

"He’s fine."

"He’s fine because his body is doing something the IHL doesn’t have a category for. That’s not the same as fine."

Sloane hit me in the chest cavity.

Wednesday was quieter. Diane worked from the kitchen island with three monitors set up on her dining table like a war room, and I learned more about crisis communications by osmosis in six hours than I had in three weeks of Crane’s lectures.

She fielded Margot Lang twice. She gutted a puff piece a Sacramento outlet wanted to run about GoldCloak and replaced it with something so boring the writer thanked her for the access. She told Victor Sterling, out loud, in her kitchen, at eleven in the morning, that if he posted one more unvetted photograph she would personally confiscate his phone and mail it to his mother.

"You enjoy this," I said.

She didn’t look up. "I’m extremely good at it, sugar. Those aren’t the same thing, but they live on the same street."

Thursday I made pancakes because Sloane demanded them and because cooking was the only domestic skill the System had ever given me that didn’t come with a footnote about penis reduction. Diane ate two standing at the counter and told me my technique had improved.

Sloane ate six and told me they were fine, which from her was a standing ovation.

Friday the internet found a new angle. Someone had pulled the Channel Seven interview and cut it against the plaza footage, my voice about symbols and service laid over nineteen seconds of me wrapped in electricity, and it moved four hundred thousand times in a day.

Diane watched it once, said "that’s actually a good edit," and then spent forty minutes making sure it stayed up because it framed me better than anything she could have commissioned.

Felicity texted twelve times. Camille texted twice, both times about training schedules and both times not actually about training schedules. Petra sent a single message at eleven at night that read: Reyes wants a call Monday. Do not be clever with her. I responded: no promises, and got back three dots that appeared and vanished twice before nothing came at all.

Percy sent a forty-one page document.

Saturday, Diane took us both shopping because my hero suit had been destroyed and the replacement needed fitting, and because she’d decided my civilian wardrobe was a public relations liability. Sloane came along and vetoed eleven things. Diane overruled her on six.

I ended up with four shirts with collars and one jacket that Sloane stared at for long enough that Diane started laughing at her in the middle of the store.

Saturday night was the last one. I’m not going to pretend I don’t remember the details, because I do, in the kind of high definition that makes a person useless the next morning.

Diane came to Sloane’s room instead of the reverse for once, and what happened after that involved the three of us, the words "one more time before the building gets locked down," and a set of sheets that Sloane threw directly in the trash at four in the morning rather than attempt to explain to anyone.

I slept two hours and woke up feeling like I’d been recharged by a god who was mildly annoyed about it.

Sunday we went back.

The drive up into Creston Hills had a different texture. The highway was full of agency vehicles and news vans, and the closer we got to the ridge the more checkpoints appeared where there hadn’t been checkpoints before.

Diane slowed at the first one, two miles out from the main gate, and a man in a black tactical uniform with a Network patch on the shoulder waved a wand-shaped scanner over the hood of the car.

"That’s new," Sloane said.

"That’s a mobile signature reader," Diane said. "They’re screening for spatial anomalies. Looking for anything that matches the portal residue from the dome."

"There wasn’t any residue."

Diane’s hands stayed on the wheel. "They know that. They’re doing it anyway because doing nothing looks like doing nothing, and after last month the Commission cannot afford to look like it’s doing nothing."ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮