Chapter 570 | Let Me Do My Job

Chapter 570: 570 | Let Me Do My Job

"That’s basically true," I said.

"That’s why it’ll hold. The best lies are the ones you barely have to invent." Diane picked up her thin crust slice and studied it like it had personally disappointed her. "Park will push. She’ll ask the same question four different ways to see if your answer shifts. It won’t shift, because you’re not going to answer with details. You’re going to answer with fear. You’re going to be an eighteen-year-old who almost died and doesn’t know what his own body did. Do you understand the difference?"

I did. It was the same trick I’d pulled on Odette, the same read that had gotten me through Dravid’s classroom. You didn’t beat the smart ones by being smarter. You beat them by giving them a version of the truth that was so uncomfortable to disbelieve that they filed it away and moved on.

"I understand," I said.

"Good." Diane took a bite, chewed, swallowed. "Sloane, you were in the plaza. You’ll be in the debrief as a representative. You saw him take the fire. You felt him decide to take it. That’s all you say. You don’t editorialize, you don’t defend him, you don’t get angry when Park pokes at his file. You saw a boy jump in front of a monster to save you. That’s the whole story."

Sloane’s jaw tightened. "And if she calls him a liar?"

"Then you sit there and let her, because getting angry proves there’s something to protect." Diane’s voice gentled a fraction. "I know that’s hard for you, sugar. You don’t do quiet. But this is the room where quiet keeps him safe, and I need you to trust me on that."

Sloane looked at me. Something passed through the bond, a spike of frustration and fear and the deep, grinding hatred she had for any situation where she couldn’t just hit the problem until it stopped being a problem. Then it settled, folded down into something she could carry.

"Fine," she said. "But if she’s cruel about his parents, I’m walking out."

"That’s acceptable," Diane said. "Walking out reads as grief. Grief is fine. Anger is what we’re avoiding."

"You’ve thought about this a lot," I said.

"I’ve been thinking about it for eleven days in a hospital chair. I had nothing else to do but count your breaths and plan how to keep you out of a laboratory." She set down her slice and looked at me, and for a second the CEO slipped and I saw the woman underneath, the one who’d called a dead friend’s voicemail because she didn’t know if I’d survive. "I am very good at my job, Lukas. Let me do it."

"I always let you do it."

"You throw yourself in front of fire when I’m not in the room to stop you. That is the opposite of letting me do it."

"That was one time."

"It was one time too many."

The bond hummed with Sloane’s quiet agreement, and I decided not to point out that if a situation like that happened again I would absolutely do the same thing, because some fights weren’t worth having twice in one night.

Instead I ate my pizza and listened to Diane walk through the debrief logistics, the seating, the order of questions, the specific phrases she wanted me to use and the ones she wanted me to avoid. She’d built a whole architecture around a lie, layer over layer over layer, and somewhere underneath all of it was a boy who’d woken up in a dead kid’s body with a gacha wheel and a mission to make women fall in love with him.

I wondered what Park would think if she knew the real story. Probably that would break her methodical little brain in half.

"There’s one more thing," Diane said, when the logistics were done and the pizza was mostly gone and Sloane was picking cheese off the empty box with her fingers. "Juno Mak."

I stopped. "What about her?"

"She examined you every day you were unconscious. She knows your recovery numbers don’t match your file. She flagged a tissue signature in your burns that she couldn’t identify." Diane folded her hands on the counter. "She’s not a problem yet. But she’s a very smart young woman who now knows more about your body than anyone at Halloran, and she is not the kind of person I can charm, buy, or intimidate. I checked."

"I noticed," I said. "She rated a zero."

"A zero what?"

Right. Diane didn’t know about the Temptation Gauge. Neither of them did, not really, not the mechanics of it. I’d told Sloane about the transmigration and the memories from another life, but the System itself, the gauges and the missions and the way it monetized every attachment in my orbit, that stayed with me.

"Nothing," I said. "She just doesn’t react to me. Everyone reacts to me a little. She doesn’t."

"That’s because she has better things to do than react to you." Diane’s mouth curved. "It’s refreshing. I almost like her, which is inconvenient, because she’s the second most dangerous person to your file after me."

"Second," I said. "You have to be first."

"I built the file, Lukas. Of course I’m first."

Sloane snorted. "You two are so weird about this."

"Your mother is weird about being the best at everything," I said. "It’s genetic. You do the same thing about combat scores."

"I am the best at combat scores."

"Second-highest in your field."

The cheese slice hit me in the face before I saw her hand move.

"Overclock’s off," Sloane said sweetly. "I could do that at full speed. Imagine how it’d feel then."

"Terrifying. Genuinely."

Diane watched us throw cheese at each other across her kitchen island and shook her head, and there was something in her expression I’d never quite seen before all this. Not quite happiness. Something older and more careful, like a woman who’d promised a dead friend she’d fill a lonely boy’s life with something good and was watching that promise come true in the strangest possible shape.

She caught me looking. I expected a joke, a deflection, some crisp comment about my table manners.

Instead she reached across the counter and squeezed my wrist, one quick press of her fingers, and let go before Sloane could see it as anything other than passing a napkin.

"Eat," she said. "You’re still healing. And you’re going to need your strength Monday."

"For the debrief?"

"For the debrief." Her eyes glinted. "And for whatever my daughter has planned for the rest of the week, which by the looks of it is going to be more taxing than any Commission director."

"MOM."

"I’m just observing, sugar."