Chapter 74:

Barracks 4 was colder than the hallway. The vent over Rina’s bunk was still cycling on a maintenance loop nobody had bothered to fix because the bunk was empty and the work order would just sit. Her sheets were folded the way the medics had folded them. Nobody had touched it since.

He dropped his bag beside his footlocker.

The envelope was sitting in the middle of his pillow.

It was thick. Heavier than paper had any business being. The wax seal was silver, pressed with the First Division crest, and the whole thing smelled faintly of vanilla, which was a smell that didn’t exist in this building.

He cracked the seal with his thumb.

A card slid out. Gold foil along the edge, black ink pressed deep into the stock. He read it once.

The First Division Sponsor Appreciation Gala. Three nights from now. Formal attire required.

He turned it over. The back was blank. No green code, no handwritten note, no ribbon, nothing. Just official.

He was still holding it when the door pushed open.

Kikaru.

She was in standard First Division gray. Not the prototype plate, not the white. Just the uniform. Her brace clicked once on the threshold, twice as she crossed the floor, and she stopped a few feet from his bunk with her hands behind her back.

She’d showered. The mud was gone. The soot was gone. She was put together the way people put themselves together when the alternative is falling apart in a hallway, and Caleb knew the look because he’d worn it.

She saw the card in his hand.

"Mine came an hour ago," she said.

"Yeah."

"Have you decided whether you’re going."

"Haven’t decided I have a choice."

She didn’t answer that. Her eyes tracked across the empty bunk on the far wall, came back, didn’t comment. She took one breath that was a little too careful, and let it out.

"I filed a request this afternoon," she said. "Through my family’s compliance office."

He set the card on the footlocker.

"For what."

"An audit. Of the routing entities behind your sponsorship contracts." She kept her voice level. "I’m not the one looking. I asked the family’s legal analysts to pull anything that’s already public. Filings. Lease agreements. Bank signatures on transfer documents. Those things sit in records. You don’t have to break anything to find them."

"You think they’ll find anything."

"I think someone moving money at this volume leaves marks even when they’re careful."

"And when she notices."

"She’ll notice the request was filed by Mitsurugi Compliance, not by me. Compliance audits aren’t unusual. Family corporations run them on every external sponsor that touches a contract employee. It’s paperwork. Standard."

"You sure about that."

"I’m sure that’s what it’ll look like on the surface." She paused. The careful breath she took before the next sentence did most of the talking. "I’m not touching her servers, Caleb. I won’t. That’s not the kind of fight I can win, and it’s not the kind of fight I’m trying to start."

"Okay."

"I just need to know what shell she’s using."

"Why."

She looked at him then. Her jaw was tight. The composure was real but it was being held with both hands.

"Because she’s scripting our deployments. And the next time we drop into something the algorithm wants to be entertaining, I’d like to know the name of the person picking the angle."

He set the card down on the footlocker.

"You haven’t slept," he said.

She didn’t deny it.

"I keep going over the moment I picked it up." Her voice didn’t change pitch. It just thinned a little. "The body. I keep going over the weight of it. Because I should have known. The weight was wrong. It was too light, and I knew it the second I lifted, and I kept lifting anyway."

"Kikaru."

"I’m not asking you to make me feel better about it. I’m telling you so you know I’m not running an audit because I’m angry. I’m running it because I missed something I shouldn’t have missed, and I’d rather not miss the next one."

He didn’t answer right away. There wasn’t a clean thing to say to that.

"You didn’t miss it," he said finally. "You picked up exactly what she wanted you to pick up. That’s not the same."

"It is the same. From a tactical position, it’s the same."

"Then we’re both bad at our jobs."

The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile. Closer to acknowledgment.

She gave him a short nod, turned, the brace clicked, and the door latched behind her.

He sat down on the edge of the mattress.

The vent kept moving cold air across his shoulders. The card sat on the footlocker where he’d put it, gold edge catching the bulb. He looked at it for a while. Then he picked it up again, ran his thumb along the embossed letters, and put it back.

He knew what to do in a room with a thing in it that wanted to bite him. He knew what a joint sounded like before it gave. He knew the weight of a wrench coming down on the right plate of armor at the right second. None of that helped with a ballroom.

No knife. No suit. Just a tailored jacket and a glass of something in his hand and a stalker in the same room watching him from inside another woman’s eyes. Maybe Hassek. Maybe somebody he hadn’t clocked yet. Maybe both.

He pulled the bag out from under the bed and started unpacking.

His undersuit went on the hanger. The medical tape from his knuckles came off and went in the bin. He found the small foil packet of ration calories Tali had pressed into his hand last night and set it on the locker next to the card, and the card looked smaller next to it.

The thing under his ribs gave a slow, deliberate warmth. Not pain. Closer to a stretch. He pressed his palm flat against the spot through his shirt and held it there until the warmth went still again. He’d stopped expecting it to ask permission.

He sat back down on the mattress, picked the card up one more time, and tilted it under the bulb so the foil caught.

Three nights.

He wasn’t tired yet. He would be.