Chapter 590 | It’s a Placement [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 590: 590 | It’s a Placement [CASTLE BONUS]

Isabelle’s head came around.

"I have read the Commission advisory," Radiant said, and the boom had left his voice now, which meant the performance layer had dropped away and they were hearing the man underneath.

The voice that remained was still enormous because everything about him was enormous, but it carried weight instead of volume. "Director Park flagged him for observation. Not restriction. There is a distinction the Commission takes seriously and I want to make sure we all understand which side of it we are currently standing on."

He shifted slightly in the chair, which was not built for someone of his proportions. "Which means if we place that young man at a major agency on a Tuesday afternoon, there will be an analyst in the room inside of two weeks. She will have a very good reason to be there that has nothing to do with coffee runs or orientation logistics, and she will be reading his output against a file I am told does not survive arithmetic. Someone is going to be watching him. The question is who that someone reports to and how much latitude they have to ask follow-up questions."

"His file is Charles Weber’s problem," Isabelle said. She had picked up her phone, turned it over once, set it back down. The gesture conveyed she had better places to be and was making time for this conversation as a courtesy rather than a requirement. "We do not run IHL compliance for other agencies and I don’t intend to start because a Year One has a pretty Aspect and good optics."

"His file is going to be this institution’s problem," Radiant said, and he did not raise his voice but the certainty in it filled the space the same way volume would have. "Sooner than any of us would prefer. Possibly sooner than some of us are prepared for."

Isabelle looked at him for three full seconds.

"Then let it be the problem, Arthur." She said the civilian name and nobody in the room reacted, which told Imara something about how many years these two had been having conversations in administrative offices and how much of the performance each of them dropped when the door was closed.

"The boy stood in gold light in front of a creature that put two A-ranks on the floor, and four million people watched him do it. There is no version of the next ten weeks where he is not looked at by someone.

That ship sailed the moment the first news helicopter got the shot and I don’t care how many times we say Unmarked in the press release, the optics do not support that file anymore.

So the only question actually on the table right now is whether he is looked at inside a structure we built, where we control the room he’s standing in and the supervisor signing off on his hours, or outside one we didn’t, where someone else decides what questions get asked and how loud the asking gets."

"She’s right," Cole said.

Imara turned. "You’ve got an opinion on Belmont?"

"I have eleven." He did not elaborate on the number. "He performed at approximately sixty percent of demonstrated capability for three weeks and I documented every instance, and then he stopped, because Steele was about to have her skull opened. That is the entire man. He will hold a line at cost and lie about the cost afterward."

Cole looked at Ashby. "Put him on a shift where the cost is paperwork and a supervisor who says no to him. He has never once in his life been told no by someone he couldn’t charm or outthink. I’d like to watch that happen in a building I don’t have to repair."

Grant laughed, one short bark. "That’s the most affectionate thing I’ve ever heard you say about a student."

"It wasn’t affection. It was a curriculum recommendation."

Ashby turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"Legal parameters," he said. "Sable."

"Provisional license is Year Two." Four words, and then she stopped, and then she went on because the room needed the rest of it.

"First-years have no field authorization. Any Aspect deployment off campus is a criminal offense under the Accord regardless of outcome or intent. So these placements are observational. Intake, dispatch shadowing, case file review, equipment logistics. They watch a long shift and they learn what nine hours of it does to a body."

Her dark eyes went to Imara. "They do not deploy. If an incident occurs while your student is in that building, your student’s job is to go to the back room and stay there."

"And if they don’t," Garrison said.

"Then they’re a vigilante and we expel them." Sable did not blink. "I’d expel them. That’s the lesson. Speed isn’t how fast you move. It’s how fast you decide, and the decision they need to practice is the one where they decide not to."

Imara looked at that small woman with the insignia on her shoulder instead of her lapel and thought, not for the first time, that Sable Mercy was the most frightening person on this campus and that nobody under twenty had figured it out yet.

"Then that’s my answer," Imara said. "Observational. Two days. Same as 1-A. My class is not going to sit in a common room for ten weeks watching the other cohort put agency names on their transcripts while ours says survivor."

"Nobody’s transcript says survivor," Eli said.

"Every transcript in that building says survivor, Eli. It’s just written in the part nobody prints."

The room sat with that.

Ashby drank his tea, and let it go on a beat longer than was comfortable, and Imara understood somewhere in the back of her skull that he had been doing this for fourteen years and that comfort had never once been an input.

"Garrison. Your objection stands as filed?"

"It stands. I’ll implement whatever you decide and I’ll do it correctly. I’d like the record to show I said it."

"The record shows it." Ashby set the cup down. "1-B begins Tuesday and Thursday placements the week after next, one week behind 1-A. Observational status, no exceptions, written to Mercy’s language. Every supervisor receives a briefing from Eli on cohort-specific welfare flags before a single student walks in. Isabelle handles agency communications, and I want no agency told which students were in the dome, because every one of them was, and I will not have scouts building a hierarchy out of who bled where."

Isabelle’s mouth moved. "That’ll leak in a day."

"Then it leaks in a day, and we will have refused to be the ones who leaked it." He turned the pocket square out with one finger and put it back. "Soleil is placed with Eli’s dispatch partnership, not a combat-facing agency. Mendoza goes wherever the paperwork is thickest. Ortega goes somewhere with a supervisor who has never been impressed by anyone."

"And Belmont," Radiant said.

Ashby’s amber eyes came up, and there was something behind them that Imara had seen exactly twice in three years and had never been able to name.

"Belmont goes to Fitzgerald Media Group."

Isabelle sat up so fast her chair moved. "Absolutely not."

"He has lived in that woman’s house for nine years. He has never once worked a shift in her building. There is a difference between the two and he is about to learn what it is." Ashby picked up his cup. "Diane Fitzgerald has made a career out of handling boys with better footage than judgment. Let her handle one on a Tuesday, in her own office, with her name on the door and her staff watching."

Imara stared at him.

"That’s a trap," she said.

"It’s a placement."