Chapter 557 | The Commission Is Coming

Chapter 557: 557 | The Commission Is Coming

I stared at that message for a long time.

Commission. The International Hero Commission. The governing body that regulated everything from licensing to equipment to the specific shade of blue a Hero could use in their costume if they wanted to avoid trademark disputes with existing brands.

They were sending someone. To talk to students who had survived an attack that never should have happened. To ask questions about what we saw and what we did and probably to figure out who was responsible for the security failures that let thirty-one masked combatants and one twelve-foot monster walk onto a campus that was supposed to be the most secure training facility in the western hemisphere.

who’s the Commission rep?

unknown. Ashby didn’t say. either he doesn’t know or he knows and doesn’t want us to know which means it’s someone important.

great. looking forward to it.

that was sarcasm.

yes percy. that was sarcasm.

just checking. your text voice is hard to read sometimes. you use the same tone for sincerity and mockery.

feature not a bug.

Percy sent a single emoji in response. A small figure with its head in its hands. I interpreted this as agreement.

I put the phone down and looked around the room again.

Monday. Two days from now. Forty-eight hours to figure out what I was going to tell a Commission representative about the things I’d done in that dome. The gold light. The speed. The staff that appeared from nowhere and vanished when I was done with it.

The System notifications had given me four thousand points and a new passive trait. They had not given me a convenient explanation for why a Rare-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot range had been moving like a top-ten Hero while wrapped in electricity that didn’t exist on any registry.

I was going to need a story.

A good one.

The kind of story that answered questions without actually answering them. The kind that gave people something to believe in while keeping the truth safely buried under layers of plausible deniability.

Diane would help. She was probably already working on it, sitting in the passenger seat of whatever car Sloane was driving, typing messages to lawyers and PR specialists and whoever else she kept on retainer for situations exactly like this. Her Read the Room would be running the whole time, calibrating every word choice against what a Commission analyst would be looking for. She’d have three versions ready by the time they arrived.

But Diane couldn’t be in the room with me. When the Commission rep asked me directly, when they looked me in the eye and wanted to know how I did what I did, I was going to have to sell the lie myself. No interface prompts to guide me through it. No Oracle Feed to tell me what the other person wanted to hear. Just me and whatever explanation I’d practiced enough to deliver without flinching.

I was going to have to be convincing.

The thought should have scared me. It didn’t. It just felt like another problem that needed solving, another obstacle between where I was and where I wanted to be. Another performance in a story built on performances. I’d been doing this since the day I woke up in this body. One more wouldn’t kill me.

Where I wanted to be was simple. Graduate. Go pro. Build something real with Sloane. Keep the people who mattered safe. Make it through another day without the Unmarked file becoming completely unsustainable.

Everything else was just details.

I walked back to the window and watched the workers on the scaffolding. They were moving slowly, deliberately, like they had all the time in the world. Like the hole in the dome was a puzzle to be solved rather than a wound to be healed. One beam at a time. One weld at a time. No rushing. No panic.

Maybe they had the right idea.

Rushing never fixed anything. It just made you tired faster.

My phone buzzed again. This time it was Sloane.

twenty minutes

i’ll be outside

don’t go anywhere

where would i go? there’s nobody here.

exactly. that’s what worries me.

I smiled at the screen. The afternoon light had shifted, the sun dropping lower toward the western hills and painting the Crucible in shades of gold that made it look almost peaceful. Almost.

I grabbed my jacket from the closet and headed for the door.

The hallway was as empty as I’d expected. Same white concrete walls. Same fluorescent lighting. Same institutional smell of cleaning solution and recycled air. I walked past the doors of rooms that should have been occupied by students who were currently scattered across Verano, sleeping in their childhood beds and trying to process the fact that they’d almost died in a place that was supposed to be safe.

The stairwell echoed with my footsteps. Three floors down, each landing identical to the last. Someone had left a water bottle on the second-floor windowsill. It sat there in the fading light like an artifact from a civilization that had vanished overnight.

I pushed through the ground floor exit and stepped into the courtyard.

The air was different outside. Cleaner. The afternoon had that particular quality of light that happened in the hour before sunset, everything outlined in gold and orange like the world was putting on a show for whoever bothered to watch.

I found a bench near the main entrance and sat down.

Twenty minutes.

Nineteen now, actually. Sloane drove fast when she had somewhere to be, and she definitely had somewhere to be.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the notifications I’d been ignoring. News alerts about the Twilight Society. Speculation about the golden figure in the footage. A message from Theo asking if I was okay that I hadn’t responded to yet because I didn’t know what okay meant anymore.

The internet had been busy while I was unconscious. Four million posts about GoldCloak. Theories about time travel and government experiments and secret bloodlines that granted powers beyond anything the IHL had documented.

Nobody had figured out the truth.

Nobody was even close.