Chapter 712 | Be Stupid With Information

Chapter 712: 712 | Be Stupid With Information

Her mouth pressed into a line thin enough to have been drawn with her own emerald pen. For three seconds she said nothing. The fountain filled the gap with its mindless burbling while students walked past and the world kept running as if a twelve-foot monster built from children’s bones didn’t exist at the end of a supply chain that went through a pawnshop on Rourke Street.

Petra set her latte on the bench. She opened her planner and took out a second page, this one on heavier stock, with a watermark I recognized from Heinrich’s personal stationery. She held it flat against her chest with one hand and looked at me with something in her eyes I’d never seen in Petra Lang.

It was fear, and it had nothing to do with compliance reviews or career trajectories. This was the raw, human kind that shows up at three in the morning after you’ve done something you can’t take back.

"Take this." She held out the page. "If you are going to be stupid, be stupid with information."

I took it. The weight surprised me. Heinrich Lang’s stationery had the heft of a small legal document and the texture of money.

It was a logistics map. Distribution routes ran out of the Eastside along three corridors, each ending at a different commercial address in the industrial district by the waterfront. Pickup windows were marked. So were vehicle descriptions, down to plate formats. None of it lived in any public database. Only someone with access to traffic camera archives and commercial shipping manifests could have put it together, someone with the institutional paranoia Heinrich Lang kept as a core business competency.

"Your father’s servers."

"My father’s servers track equipment distribution for eleven government contracts. Every shipment that enters or leaves the Eastside passes through monitoring infrastructure Lang Industries installed six years ago under a homeland security initiative. It was designed to detect unauthorized Aspect discharge. It also captures commercial vehicle traffic, with timestamps and route data."

"You pulled logistics data off a federal security installation."

"I pulled aggregate traffic analysis from a dataset my father’s company owns and maintains under contract. The analysis does not identify specific vehicles. It identifies patterns. What you do with those patterns is your decision and not my responsibility."

Petra picked her latte back up. It hadn’t lost any heat in the thirty seconds on the bench, or if it had, November on the ridge was cold enough that nobody could tell.

"Seven-fifty-two." She checked her phone with the air of someone confirming the universe hadn’t strayed from the approved schedule. "I have a call with the Commission liaison office at eight. You have a Hero Law reading you have not done. We are both running late."

"We’re both seven minutes early."

"Seven minutes early is the minimum acceptable margin. Anything less is cutting it close."

I looked at Petra Lang standing in the November sun with her latte and her planner and her geometric hair, the blazer buttoned so tight she looked like she’d never had a feeling in her life. Never mind fourteen repetitions of one particular word in a room lit by a single lamp, with her camisole hanging off one shoulder and her emerald lace crumpled on a floor that still held the residue of whatever we’d become.

The page in my hand weighed almost nothing. What was on it could break a distribution network open and set off a Commission investigation that would follow the chain from Rourke Street to wherever the boxes went on Friday mornings.

Dralun had told me not to do anything stupid before Thursday.

It was Thursday.

"Petra."

She stopped walking. Her back stayed straight and the latte stayed at the forty-five-degree angle that kept it from sloshing. She didn’t turn around. The morning light caught the emerald trim at her collar and turned it the exact shade of the barriers she built at night when her hands needed work.

"The archive run. The map." I stopped. The words I wanted weren’t the words to say in a courtyard where WARDEN pillars recorded every conversation within twenty meters. "Thank you."

Her shoulders moved. It was smaller than a shrug and more expensive, and it used muscles she’d trained since childhood to stay invisible.

"I did not do it for you."

She walked toward the Athena Wing without looking back, heels clicking on the stone path in a rhythm I’d memorized over months of coordination meetings and could have tapped out in my sleep. The latte didn’t slosh. The planner didn’t shift. Petra Lang vanished into the academic building the way she entered every room, convinced the room had been waiting for her and ought to be grateful she’d bothered.

I stood by the fountain with two pages in my jacket. One confirmed that the man who ran Eastside Pawn had been handling children’s shed material with his bare hands for years, his suppressive Aspect soaking into every card and container until the whole operation carried his signature like a confession written in wavelengths only I could read.

The other was a map of his distribution routes, built from federal security infrastructure by a girl who’d said please for the first time in her life while I held her wrists to the pillow.

Tomorrow was Friday.

Kask moved the boxes on Fridays.

The second heartbeat under my sternum pressed out once, warm and patient, and it hummed with something that tasted like a lit fuse. Under that was the five-spice smell of a neighborhood that had waited eleven years for someone to show up and break things the right way.

My phone lit up. Sloane, from somewhere across the quad, close enough that the bond had gone sharp.

Sloane: your heart just did the thing. the loud thing. whatever you’re planning, i want in.

Lukas: filing a report.

Sloane: liar.

Lukas: love you.

Sloane: that’s not a denial, belmont.

I pocketed the phone and headed for Building C. Hero Law with Mercy after homeroom, and Dravid’s Combat Theory in the afternoon, where he’d lean on his pale-wood loaner cane and let his gold eyes track anomalies in students who kept their collars buttoned.

The vans were twenty-two hours away.

I could work with that.