Chapter 20: I Walked Into The Bureau Investigator’s Office And Offered Her Everything She Wanted?!

Chapter 20: I Walked Into The Bureau Investigator’s Office And Offered Her Everything She Wanted?!

Soren made the decision at two in the morning because that was when the math stopped working.

He’d been sitting on the floor with his back against the bed running numbers in his head for three hours straight and every version ended the same way. Joan files her report in seventy-two hours. The Bureau escalates. The investigation locks him down in administrative review while the Fracture eats the building.

Waiting was the wrong play.

He stood up and pulled on his boots.

Selah rolled over and looked at him with the half-awake face she used when she was pretending she hadn’t been listening to every sound he made for the last hour.

"Stay here," he said. "Don’t let Grimm follow me."

"What are you going to do?"

"Something stupid."

She sat up. "That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only one I’ve got."

He was already at the door before she could say anything else and Grimm lifted her head from the foot of the bed and her sealed eyes tracked him and her tail went still.

He looked at the wolf and the wolf looked at him and the whole conversation happened without words because it had to.

Stay.

Grimm put her chin back down on her paws but her ears stayed up and her body stayed rigid and Soren knew she would hold it for about twenty minutes before she came looking.

He had twenty minutes.

◆◆◆◆

Joan’s temporary office was on the second floor of the admin block, third door on the left, the one with the Bureau seal taped to the outside because Joan Sawyer didn’t bother with permanent signage for a seventy-two-hour review.

Light was coming through the gap under the door at two in the morning.

He knocked.

The door opened in four seconds, which meant she had been standing close to it, which meant she had heard him coming up the stairs, which meant the surveillance nodes she’d planted in the corridors were tracking more than temperature.

She was still dressed. Still working.

She looked at him and he looked at her and she stepped aside without saying a word.

Her office was a single desk, two chairs, a stack of tablet screens showing corridor readings, and a coffee cup that was full, which meant she’d just poured it, which meant she’d been planning to stay up.

He sat in the chair across from the desk.

She sat in hers.

"I know what’s coming," he said.

Joan picked up her pen. "Go on."

"A Fracture. Dimensional boundary collapse. This academy, this building, approximately sixteen days from now."

She wrote something on the tablet and didn’t look up. "The Bureau has a model for Fracture prediction. Our projection for this site puts the earliest window at ninety days."

"Your model is wrong."

She looked up.

"The timeline deviation at this academy is at forty-one percent and accelerating. The variable your model doesn’t account for is me."

Joan set the pen down.

That was the first time she had stopped writing since he walked in and he knew it meant he had about thirty seconds of real attention before she picked the pen back up and started building the case against him instead.

"Why would your presence accelerate a Fracture," she said.

He told her the partial truth because the full truth would get him killed and the partial truth was bad enough.

"I have a trait called the Primordial Tamer’s Heart. It creates resonance events that destabilize dimensional boundaries. The two bonds I have right now, the wolf and Selah Young, have already produced two unclassified events on your logs. Those events are boundary stress indicators. Your model reads them as anomalies because it doesn’t have a category for what I am."

He kept his voice flat. "If the Fracture arrives before I’m strong enough to stabilize the boundary, everyone in this building dies. Including you."

Joan was quiet.

He counted to ten in his head and she still hadn’t moved.

"Show me," she said.

"Show you what?"

"The resonance. If your trait produces measurable boundary stress, your scanner profile will confirm it. I have the equipment in this room."

"Fine." He leaned back in the chair.

"Before you turn it on. Soul integrity will read seventy-four percent. Decay pattern will show dual-bond configuration. The frequency won’t match anything in the standard database because the database doesn’t have a category for what I am."

She pulled a handheld scanner from the desk drawer and pointed it at his chest and he watched her eyes move across the readout and he watched them stop.

She lowered the scanner slowly.

She looked at the screen and then she looked at him and he could see her working through the fact that he had just called every number on her readout before she turned the thing on.

"How did you know what it would show," she said.

"Because I know what I am, Ms. Sawyer. The question is whether you’re going to let me fix it or whether you’re going to write a report about it while the building comes down."

"You’re asking me to delay a report that protects this institution based on the word of an F-rank student whose wolf reads higher than my scanner can classify."

"I’m asking you to choose between a clean report that arrives after the Fracture kills everyone, or a messy one that arrives after I’ve fixed the problem."

"Those aren’t the only two options, Mr. Kane."

"Name a third."

She looked at him and he held it because he’d been holding hard stares all week and at this point it was just another job.

Joan turned the scanner off and put it back in the drawer and closed the drawer and folded her hands on the desk.

"I’ll delay the preliminary report," she said.

His chest loosened about half an inch.

"But not for free."

It tightened back up.

"I’m deploying a monitoring seal on your soul signature," she said. "Real-time tracking. Continuous. If your soul integrity drops below fifty percent, I file everything automatically. No warning, no courtesy knock, no conversation. Everything I have goes to the Bureau and the Council simultaneously."

"Everything?"

"The shadow trace, the fusion event, the accelerated evolution, the corridor anomalies. All of it, with my assessment attached."

Soren looked at her and ran the math fast.

"I’ll take the seal," he said. "And you give me Cole Harver’s case files on the other two academies."

Joan’s pen stopped.

"Those are classified Bureau documents."

"And I’m an F-rank student who just told you the exact numbers on your scanner before you turned it on. You already know I have access to information your classification system can’t account for." He kept his voice even.

"Give me the files. If I’m right about the Fracture, those two cases will confirm my model and you get your proof without waiting for people to die. If I’m wrong, the seal trips and you file everything anyway."

She looked at him for a long time and the pen didn’t move.

"Summaries only," she said. "Redacted names."

"Done."

Joan stood up and walked around the desk and put her hand flat on his chest.

The seal was cold going in. Not Selah-cold, not ice-cold, just the cold of something official and permanent attaching itself to something that was already cracking.

He felt it settle into his soul signature and lock.

[DING! — Bureau Monitoring Seal applied. Soul integrity: 74%. Threshold: 50%. If breached, automatic report submission. You have 24% of margin.]

[DING! — Your current soul drain rate will consume that margin in approximately 12 days.]

Soren read the notification twice.

Not twenty-seven days.

Twelve.

Joan took her hand off his chest and walked back around the desk and sat down and picked up her pen.

"Is there anything else, Mr. Kane?"

He stood up and pushed the chair in.

"One thing," he said. "Your seal triggers at fifty percent. You should ask yourself what happens if I hit forty-nine and hold it there."

Joan’s pen went still.

He left before she could answer because the answer was the point and the point worked better if she had to sit with it alone at two in the morning.

He walked out.

The hallway was empty and cold and the surveillance nodes in the ceiling pulsed once as he passed under them and he felt the seal on his chest pulse back.

[DING! — Quest timer: 16 days to Fracture. 12 days to seal breach.]

[DING! — Obsession Index: Yara 49/50. Selah 18/50.]

Twelve days.

He needed to rank up in twelve days or Joan’s report would bury him, and the Fracture would arrive four days after that with nobody in position to hold the boundary.

He started walking back to the dorm and he was halfway down the stairs when he felt the shadow behind him move.

Not Grimm.

The other one.

"You let her win this time" said Yara’s voice from everywhere and nowhere.

"I let her think she did," Soren said.

The shadow went quiet for a second.

"Master," Yara said. "You’re getting better at this."