Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 980: Pratt’s Grand Arrival

Senior Auditor Merle Pratt of the Federal Bureau of Awakened Affairs arrived at the Eclipse checkpoint at half past one, riding in the middle sedan of three with the expanded order in his lap and a smile he had been rehearsing since the airport.

Financial Audit Division, lead signature: his. Entity classification task force: attached, and scheduled through his desk. He had read the order four times on the flight over, and it got better every time.

’Twenty-two years,’ he thought as the fence posts ticked past his window. ’Twenty-two years of basement offices and per-diem forms, and the biggest file in the country lands on me.’

Kaiden Grey. Twenty-something, a head taller than Pratt had ever been, richer than the Bureau’s annual budget, and famous enough that Pratt’s own daughter kept a poster of the man’s guild over her bed.

Pratt had studied the file photos at length and came away with the conclusion that nobody’s shoulders were that broad without help.

He had watched the streams too, same as the rest of the planet, and had reached his professional conclusion early: the universe had made an error in one man’s favor, and somebody ought to garnish it.

The rehearsals had specifics. Pratt was going to stand in the middle of that famous compound, hand the man a freeze order on his own accounts, and say, ”Mister Grey, as of this morning, your money is a federal matter.” He had practiced the pause that came after.

In the good version, the women were watching.

He snickered to himself in the quiet of the sedan, and the driver’s eyes stayed carefully on the road.

The retainer had cleared into his cousin’s consulting firm two days before anyone upstairs had even proposed an expanded review.

Pratt had looked the client up exactly once, found a holding company with no website, and closed the tab. Men who asked fewer questions cashed more checks.

The sedans came through the checkpoint without resistance, which disappointed him a little. He had budgeted twenty minutes for obstruction.

Figures stood posted along the fence at even intervals, straight-backed and silent. Pratt did not look at them. Men of his station did not inspect security staff; security staff inspected themselves.

Then what he had taken for a piece of the building turned its head and watched his sedan pass.

Six amber eyes tracked the window, one after another, unhurried. Pratt kept his gaze fixed forward with great authority, and his hand, on its own initiative, confirmed that the door was locked.

The cars stopped in front of the headquarters. He stepped out onto the gravel, found his balance around his own center of gravity, and buttoned his jacket on the second attempt.

Then he raised his chin to take inventory of his territory for the next week, and the inventory came back empty.

Dark glass rose three stories with nobody moving behind it, no drills ran, no crowds milled, and the hundreds of awakened he had prepared for were nowhere on the lot. Somewhere behind the building a kitchen vent hummed, and the wind crossed the lot unopposed.

Pratt had rehearsed against an audience. In every version of this day, the lot had been full of insolent superhumans watching their master get audited.

He turned in a slow half circle, and the half circle produced one middle-aged man with a clipboard and one woman with a tablet, coming down the front steps to meet him.

”Senior Auditor Pratt.” The woman inclined her head to him. ”Rook, counsel for Eclipse. Welcome. Your team’s room is ready, the records are boxed by category, and there is coffee.”

”Fresh pot,” the man added. ”Doug. Operations.”

Pratt looked from one to the other, then past them at the dead windows, and asked the question his entire visit had been built around.

”Where is your guild leader? I want him present from the first interview onward.”

”The audit is fully provisioned without him,” Rook said. ”Shall we begin?”

”Madam.” Pratt produced the smile he had practiced in the mirror.

”I don’t believe you appreciate what is happening here today. This is not a scheduling conversation. Wherever your guild leader is hiding, whatever wall he has put between himself and my order, you will produce him, or the first line of my report will read ’obstruction of a federal audit.’”

Rook and Doug traded a look, and Pratt noted it down with deep satisfaction as the first crack of the day.

”He’s not behind a wall,” Doug said.

”Then where is he?”

”Guild Leader Grey flew to Japan this morning,” Rook said. ”Joint training exercises with the Shogunate Circle, at the Circle’s invitation. Rest assured, Eclipse’s administrative staff is at your disposal for the audit, and the Guild Regent remains available, should her presence be required.”

The smile stayed on Pratt’s face a while after its owner had abandoned it.

”He- That is-” His voice reached for the junior-staff register and missed it. ”He received the notice. The order names him-”

”The order names Eclipse.” Rook turned her tablet toward him, the relevant line already enlarged. ”Nothing in it, and nothing in any statute on the books, requires the guild leader’s physical presence for your review.”

”You just missed him,” Doug added. ”Wheels up at nine this morning.”

Pratt heard every word. Japan arrived first. Then the Shogunate Circle, which even Pratt knew, because exactly one guild on the planet carried that name and a government behind it.

He turned his head and looked, properly this time, at the figures along the fence, at the straight backs, at the small silver crescents pinned to every shoulder.

Foreign awakened stood guard on American soil, over an American guild’s home, before Washington had even been told the man was gone.

Pratt’s stomach dropped, and kept dropping.

Kaiden Grey was not in the country.

The most watched man alive, the centerpiece of the President’s own accord, the single largest strategic asset the United States had produced since the gates opened, had packed up his entire guild and left, quietly, politely, on the exact morning the Bureau arrived to squeeze him.

And the nation he had flown to had already posted soldiers on his fence, because governments spent soldiers on one kind of thing only: the kind they meant to keep.

He took a step back from the shape of it. The gravel received his heel differently than his heel expected, and Senior Auditor Merle Pratt, lead signature on the largest federal file in the country, sat down hard on his ass in the middle of the Eclipse compound.

Nobody laughed, and that was somehow worse.

The woman with the tablet watched him with polite patience, the man with the clipboard checked something off, and across the lot the resident his file called unclassifiable exhaled once through its nose, loud enough to reach him.

”Would you like the coffee now?” Doug asked.

Pratt’s hands found his phone on the second try. The number he dialed was the one you did not call unless a building was on fire, and he sat where he was, listening to it ring, while three sedans’ worth of his own people pretended very hard not to watch.

”It’s Pratt,” he said when it connected, in a voice that had rehearsed nothing at all. ”Get me the Director. ...Then interrupt the lunch. He must hear this RIGHT NOW!”