Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 942: Minus Points

”Inspector.” Kaiden read the ID properly and handed it back to Hobbes, and that one word was the entire reception.

”I’ll take you through it myself,” he added, and left the reasons where they were.

The family, watching the exchange through Aria’s feed, recognized the stillness on him at once, because a higher-altitude version of it was aimed down at the lot from the scaffolding’s top crossbeam. Kaiden’s yandere had never held a monopoly on territory.

The gate below their feet, the palace beyond it, the hundreds of newcomers who had chosen them that morning, all of it was his, and a stranger had been paid to walk through it with a pen.

So he would be at the man’s shoulder for every step of it, the way you stay in the room while a stranger reads your family’s mail.

He hated it, thoroughly and personally, and the only reason the hate never reached his face was that a visible flash of it, caught on camera, was exactly what whoever bought the inspection had paid to see.

If Hobbes had an opinion about drawing the guild leader himself as an escort, he kept it filed in the clipboard with everything else. ”Witnesses protect the record, Mister Grey.” He uncapped his pen. ”And the record protects me just as much as it protects you. Shall we start with the contracts?”

...

Hobbes started with the contracts.

Rook had the intake binders on the table before Hobbes finished the request, tabbed by squad and cross-indexed by tier, and he pulled six at random and found six countersigned contracts with the ink fully dry.

He asked for the liability schedule. It existed. He read the rider covering candidate injuries sustained during evaluation, including those administered by evaluators, and looked up exactly once.

”This clause has been used?”

”Yes,” Rook said.

”The incident from the interviews.” Hobbes initialed the schedule. ”My office has seen the footage your producers released.”

He measured walkway clearances. He checked the taped-off construction zones against the posted signage. He tugged the scaffolding netting once, professionally, like a man testing a melon, and logged his findings at a pace that suggested the pen had never been rushed in its life.

From the highest crossbeam of the scaffolding, Aria watched the escort crawl through her boyfriend’s first day, and the wind moved her hair while nothing else about her moved at all.

Her serenity had frozen on her face, as it always did when a stranger’s hands came near what was hers, and behind her still eyes the moonlight sat composed, aimed, and waiting for a reason.

Somebody had sent this drab little clerk to put his hands on her Kai’s home on the one morning that belonged to him, and she could not vaporize him, because he was only the delivery mechanism. She had made her peace with that. Approximately.

Alice found the escort somewhere around the equipment tent, and she arrived already hostile.

She fell into step a pace behind the inspector with her clipboard raised like a shield wall, and she wrote continuously as they walked, in long, vengeful strokes that were audible.

When Hobbes paused at the generator manifest, she paused. When he made a note, she made a longer one, glaring at the back of his head the whole time.

”Minus,” she announced, to no one and to everyone. ”Tracking government mud onto our construction site. Minus. Handling our manifest with disgusting, fat fingers. Minus. Existing.”

”Alice.” Kaiden reached back without breaking stride and settled his hand on her head, which rewired her expression against her will. ”I know. But this is not helping.”

”...I’m documenting grounds for removal,” she muttered, but she fell in at Kaiden’s side instead of behind the inspector, and the strokes eased from vengeful to merely thorough.

Hobbes, to his credit, asked no questions about the audit happening behind him. Some forms of oversight even the Bureau knew better than to contest.

At the refreshment table he stopped, produced an actual tape measure, and knelt at the table’s legs. The lot fell quiet enough to hear the tape retract.

”Table encroaches forty centimeters into the marked fire lane,” Hobbes said, to the table and to his paperwork, and cited the occupancy code from memory, including subsection.

Nyx, who had been drinking lemonade beside that exact table, did not move. The table did.

It slid forty centimeters sideways with its pitchers unrippled and its ice unclinked, and settled outside the painted line with a small, satisfied scrape.

”It was only there because I brought it closer so I could drink without moving my tired legs,” Nyx said.

Hobbes looked at the table. He looked at his notes. He wrote.

”I understand the reasoning, but whether it’s acceptable is not mine to decide,” he reported, without inflection, while the whole lot pretended this was normal.

...

Hobbes and his escort reached the gate at half past noon, and reaching it meant going down.

Vespera was waiting for them at the main building’s entrance with her folio under one arm, and none of them had seen her arrive. Doug and Ms. Rook had left their tables with runners and caught up at the door.

The gate sat at the center of the compound, in a reinforced sublevel Vespera’s crews had poured before the walls above it had windows. Concrete and rune-laced steel encased it on every side, and one guarded corridor ran to it from the main building’s ground floor. The headquarters rose on top of the whole arrangement so that no stray attack and no curious outsider would ever reach the doorway without going through Eclipse first.

Hobbes assessed the corridor, the wards, the access log, and the reinforcement ratings, and his pen moved with what passed, in him, for enthusiasm. Containment was clearly a subject close to his heart.

At the bottom they opened the vault door for him, and he stood at the painted line on the floor and considered the gate itself, the air above its threshold folded into somewhere else entirely.

”The registry lists the far side as sovereign territory,” he said.

”Recognized and filed,” Doug said.

Ms. Rook then added, ”You’re welcome to assess everything on this side of the threshold, and we’ll have the full treaty file sent to your office tonight. But the threshold itself is a border, Inspector. If you crossed that line, you would be leaving the United States, and I doubt your order covers international travel.”

Or that you’d return at all. Everyone understood that part; no one said it out loud.

Hobbes wrote outside federal purview in letters small and even, and did not test the line. Borders, at least, were something his career had taught him to respect.

...

They came back up into the early afternoon, and Pebble was waiting for them.

He had not slept since the sedan arrived. He stood beside the north scaffolding in full sun, head level with the third story, completely still, and all six amber eyes were open, moving independently in their staggered crown to track the inspector, the inspector’s clipboard, the escort, and every route between them.

Nothing about him resembled the drowsy landmark the recruits had been coached past all morning. He looked like what he was: a natural disaster on four legs, holding itself in check as a courtesy.

Hobbes stopped at what he judged to be a professional distance, consulted the six eyes, and doubled it.

”Asset classification,” he said. ”Species.”