Chapter 588 | And Nobody Canceled Anything [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 588: 588 | And Nobody Canceled Anything [CASTLE BONUS]

He came in slowly, and that was the part that got her. Cole had never moved fast in his life, but he had always moved like the slowness was a choice. Now there was a hitch in it. He had a new cane, pale wood with a plain steel collar instead of silver, and he held it wrong, high on the shaft, because holding it low meant loading his left side and his left side was eleven days out from surgical stabilization of a flail segment.

He sat. It took him longer than it should have. Nobody offered to help, because they had all worked with him long enough to know what offering would cost.

"Vermont’s backordered," he said, before anyone could ask about the cane. "This one’s a loaner from facilities. It’s four centimeters short and I’ve decided to have feelings about that."

"You’ve decided to have feelings." Imara felt her mouth go crooked. "Should I alert the press."

"Crane is the press."

"I’m the industry," Isabelle said. "The press works for me."

The last chair filled at nine exactly, and the room went the temperature it always went when Radiant walked into it.

He filled the doorframe. Seven foot two, crimson and white, the gold emblem catching the window light and throwing it back across the table in a band that landed on Eli’s folders. Everyone straightened. Imara straightened, and she hated that she did, and she did it anyway, because thirty years of that man on billboards had wired something into her spine that no amount of faculty familiarity could unwire.

"Good morning, all." The voice shook the water in Sable’s bottle. "My apologies for the delay. Traffic on the ridge road is a living nightmare with the new checkpoints."

"You flew," Garrison said.

"The checkpoints have a no-fly overlay now. Your people are very thorough." He sat, and the chair complained. "I waited in line for nine minutes and signed a form."

"Good."

Radiant laughed, and it was the same laugh from the lunchboxes, and Imara watched him bring one enormous hand up to cover a cough he turned away from the table. It lasted two seconds. He folded the handkerchief before anyone could see anything and put it in a pocket that had no business existing in that costume, and his smile came back at full brightness.

She filed it. She did not know what she was filing it under yet.

Then Caelum Ashby came in with a cup of tea and did not offer any of it to a single person present.

He sat at the head of the table. Silver hair pushed back, linen blazer, no tie, that pocket square in a green Imara had not seen him wear before and which she suspected was significant to somebody in the room who hadn’t noticed yet. His amber eyes went around the table once, unhurried, and came to rest on her arm without any pretense of doing otherwise.

"Imara. You have more color than last week."

"I’ve been eating."

"You’ve been sleeping in the training annex office and eating protein bars out of Grant’s desk." He sipped his tea. "Cole. How is the cane."

"Short."

"I’ll have facilities order the Vermont one directly and expedite it." He set the cup down. "Garrison. Give us the number that matters."

Garrison did not need to look at the binder. "Twenty-two days of full perimeter coverage. Zero anomalies. Zero portal residue readings, which I will remind this room means nothing, because there was never residue, and the scanners are theater we are performing at the request of a Commission that needs to be seen performing it."

"It’s not nothing," Isabelle said. "It’s not security, but it isn’t nothing. Eight hundred students walked through those pillars and heard a machine say welcome back to them by name. Do you know what that does to a nervous system that spent three weeks deciding whether this campus is survivable?"

"It makes them feel watched."

"It makes them feel counted." She tapped one nail on the table. "Which is the same feeling with better lighting."

"Then we agree and I dislike it." Garrison sat back. "Doctor. The perimeter is sound. I’m prepared to sign off on normal operations. I am not prepared to sign off on what’s actually on this agenda, and I’d like that in the minutes before Crane starts talking about broadcast windows."

"Noted for the minutes," Ashby said. "Now say the thing you’re not saying."

"The Invitational."

Imara felt the room lean.

"Ten weeks out," Garrison went on. "Four departments. Public gallery. Agency scouts, media credentials, family passes, national feed. On a normal year that’s nine hundred outside bodies on these grounds across two days. You want me to open this campus to nine hundred strangers twenty-two days after a butler in a mask walked through a sealed wall and put two of my colleagues in a medical wing."

"Yes," Ashby said.

"I’d like a better answer than yes."

"You’ll get one. From her." The amber eyes moved. "Isabelle."

Isabelle did not sit up, because she was already sitting like someone who expected to be called on. "Cancel it and you’ve told the country the Twilight Society won. That is the entire sentence. There is no second half."

"That’s optics."

"That’s the war." She turned her head toward Garrison and the mask made it hard to find her eyes, which Imara had long suspected was the point. "You’re a security professional and a good one, so you think in terms of exposure. Fine. Consider a different exposure. Forty children fought grown men in a sealed dome and every one of them walked out. That is the best story the hero industry has generated in eleven years, and it has a ten week shelf life, and it dies the instant we announce that Halloran is too frightened to hold its own tournament."

"Children died in the Eastside and nobody canceled anything," Cole said.

The room went still. Radiant’s hands, flat on the table, did not move at all.