Chapter 597 | Two Caskets Under a Gray Sky

Chapter 597: 597 | Two Caskets Under a Gray Sky

Diane Fitzgerald had built her agency on knowing what she wanted before she walked through the door.

It had carried her through two decades of managing Heroes who could put holes through buildings when their tempers failed them, through contract talks that would have destroyed anyone with thinner skin, through the unforgettable nightmare of representing a client who had punched a reporter mid-broadcast and somehow keeping that man’s approval numbers from falling below sixty. The principle had held every single time she needed it.

It did not hold now.

Four-forty on a Wednesday afternoon. Her office on the eighteenth floor of a building she owned outright, overlooking a city that had made her the most successful brand strategist west of Chicago. The phone in her hand was ringing, and she had not asked it to.

She answered anyway.

"Say that again."

The voice belonged to Cynthia, the receptionist at the IHL regional office who had known Lukas since he was eight years old and small enough to sit in the waiting area with his feet swinging above the tile. Cynthia had called her six days ago about something else. She was calling now about something Diane had not planned for in any version of the future she had constructed while sitting beside a hospital bed for eleven consecutive days.

"The placement paperwork came through interoffice this morning," Cynthia said. Her tone was careful in the way people used when they knew the information was going to land poorly. "I flagged it because I figured you’d want to see it before it went public. Belmont, L. Provisional community service contract. Eastside assignment. Metro District Seven. Eight weeks under a Rank C agency. Licensed Hero on record is someone named Dralun."

Diane set down her pen with the kind of control that required thinking about it.

She looked at the window. The afternoon was pouring gold light across downtown Verano, turning glass towers into something out of a postcard nobody actually sent.

She thought about a day nine years ago that she did not allow herself to revisit, because revisiting it meant thinking about the phone call from an IHL dispatcher whose voice had been too steady, about a funeral where two caskets sat side by side under gray sky, about a boy standing beside them with his shoulders locked and his eyes older than any eight-year-old’s should have been.

The Eastside.

Metro Seven.

The same district that had taken Marcus and Reina Belmont off a joint patrol response and sent them back in body bags while the news cameras filmed recovery teams pulling debris off what used to be a mid-rise residential block.

Diane had the file memorized. She had read it enough times to have it down to the paragraph breaks. S-class incident. Uncontained Devourer-type entity. Six Heroes deployed. Four came back. The incident report had been sixty-three pages long and every single one of them had been a professionally formatted way of saying that sometimes people died doing this work and the system kept moving anyway.

Lukas had been in third grade. He had been at a friend’s house for a sleepover when it happened, which meant he had not been home when the IHL officers showed up at the door. Diane had picked him up herself two days later. She remembered exactly what he had looked like standing in that doorway, holding a backpack someone else had packed for him, staring at her like he was waiting for her to say it was a mistake.

She had not said that. She had said get in the car, sugar, and driven him to Creston Hills without asking him a single question about whether he wanted to go.

Nine years. Long enough for a guest room to stop being a guest room. Long enough for a boy to grow into someone who could look her in the eye when he lied about where he was going and what he was doing. Long enough for her to stop expecting the house to feel like something temporary.

Not long enough to forget what the Eastside had cost them.

"Who signed it," she said.

"Ashby."

Not Steele. Not a scheduling algorithm. Not a bureaucrat working through a roster. The principal of Halloran had personally put his name on paperwork that sent the son of Marcus and Reina Belmont back to the district that had made him an orphan, and he had done it three weeks after the entire country watched that same boy stand wrapped in gold light against a thing that had put two A-ranks in medical.

Diane understood what that meant. She had spent her career learning to read the shape of institutional decisions, and this one had a shape she recognized. It was a test. Someone had looked at Lukas, looked at the gap between what his file said and what four million people had watched him do, and decided that the fastest way to find out who he actually was involved sending him back to the exact place his whole story started.

"Thank you, Cynthia," Diane said. "I mean that. Send me the full packet. And do me a favor. Don’t mention you called."

"Wouldn’t dream of it."

Diane ended the call and sat in the quiet of her office and let herself feel, for exactly four seconds, the thing she did not let clients see. It moved through her chest like cold water, and it had teeth, and it was not fear exactly, because Diane Fitzgerald had stopped being afraid of most things around the same time she stopped answering the question about her age.

It was closer to the feeling she’d had in the hospital, watching a green light and a rising chest and wondering whether the boy she’d raised would keep breathing. It was the feeling of something she loved being placed, deliberately, in a location she could not fully control.

She turned her chair back to the desk. Her phone showed forty-one unread messages, six of them from Margot Lang, three from a Commission liaison, and one from Victor Sterling that she deleted without reading because Victor Sterling could wait until the world stopped ending.

She opened her calendar and looked at the six o’clock she had already scheduled with Lukas. A placement briefing. That was what she had called it that morning, before she knew what the placement was.

Her phone rang again. She almost let it go to voicemail. Then she saw the name.

Isabelle Crane.