Chapter 637 | The Paperwork Comes After

Chapter 637: 637 | The Paperwork Comes After

"Your heart rate spiked twenty minutes ago and then went steady at a level I associate with you doing something I would disapprove of. Explain."

I typed back: "Went for a run."

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

"At 10 PM. On the Eastside. Alone."

"The air is nice out here."

"Lukas Belmont, if you are on a rooftop right now I am going to come across the river and detonate you personally."

"I’m on the ground. Heading back to Lin’s."

The bond hummed between us across fourteen kilometers of city, carrying her frustration and her concern and underneath both of those things, the specific warm frequency that meant she had been lying in bed thinking about me before the heart rate spike pulled her out of it. I felt guilty about the spike. I did not feel guilty about the run.

"Text me when you’re inside. I mean inside the building. Not on a roof. Not in an alley. INSIDE."

"Yes ma’am."

"Don’t ma’am me. That’s Diane’s thing."

"Noted."

I pocketed the phone and dropped from the terminal roof to the sidewalk, a twelve-foot fall that my knees absorbed without comment. The concrete was still warm from the day, and the impact traveled up through my shins and stopped somewhere around my hips.

A year ago that drop would have put this body in an urgent care waiting room. Now it registered about the same as stepping off a curb.

The walk back to Halverson took nine minutes at a pace that did not attract attention from the two civilians I passed. One of them was walking a three-legged pit bull that hopped along with total confidence, as if the fourth leg had been optional from the start.

The other was carrying a bag from the corner store that clinked with the unmistakable sound of someone who had decided Tuesday night was close enough to Friday. Neither of them looked at me twice. A guy in a dark hoodie on the Eastside at ten o’clock was furniture. I liked being furniture. Furniture never had to explain its heart rate.

Halverson Street had the particular quiet of a block where everyone knew everyone and nobody wanted to be outside when the streetlights started buzzing. Two of the four lamps were working.

The third flickered. The fourth had been dead long enough that someone had zip-tied a plastic flower to its base.

Lin’s was dark when I arrived. The restaurant closed at nine, and Grandma Lin’s apartment above it showed only the blue flicker of a television through gauze curtains. Some Korean drama, judging by the swell of strings leaking through the glass.

I took the side entrance, the steel door with the oiled hinges, and it opened without a sound because Dralun oiled them himself every Sunday and would deny it if asked.

I climbed the black stairs to the office. The pressed-tin ceiling threw my footsteps back at me in metallic echoes, and the scanner on the filing cabinet sat silent, its red light blinking in a slow rhythm that matched my breathing.

Ophelia’s bat stickers caught the glow from the street, a little colony of black paper wings spreading across the window frame. She added two more every week. Dralun had stopped fighting it somewhere around April.

Inside, I pulled out the phone and typed: "Inside. Actual building. Four walls and a roof I am underneath."

Sloane’s reply came before I could put the phone down. "Good. Go to sleep."

"Paperwork first."

"You are the only person in California who goes for a mysterious midnight run and then does PAPERWORK."

I left that one on read, which I knew she would hate, and which I also knew would make her feel better than any answer I could have typed.

I sat at my desk and opened the laptop. The dead pixel stared at me from the upper left corner of the screen. Boris the cat’s incident report sat unfinished at one hundred and sixty-four words, waiting for the final thirty-six that would bring it into compliance with IHL standards. The Accord had a lot of opinions about documentation. Apparently those opinions extended to housecats.

I typed: "Subject Boris, orange domestic shorthair, male, approximately nine pounds, demonstrated consistent aggression toward responding Hero Dralun during extraction. No charges filed. Cat returned to owner Mrs. Petrosyan without further incident. Recommend future responders wear gloves."

Two hundred and one words. Close enough.

I read it back once. Somewhere in a Commission office, a reviewer was going to open this file, see the word "aggression" next to a nine-pound cat, and wonder what exactly the Eastside was paying its Hero for. The answer was a lot less than he deserved. Nobody was going to write that part down.

I saved the file and leaned back in the chair until the springs complained in the specific way that meant I was one bad decision away from testing whether Demigod recovery could fix a broken tailbone.

Wednesday. Midnight. The bodega.

I was going to show up in the Faceless Veil and run across rooftops with a nineteen-year-old snake girl who could not be grabbed and who left lipstick on everything she touched. We were going to steal a jade hairpin from a man who stole it first, and we were going to give it back to a family that had been missing it for three months.

And nobody, not Dralun or Diane or the Commission or the fourteen cameras between here and the Strand, would know that the bone-white face on the Eastside rooftops belonged to Lukas Belmont, Badge 138, third-ranked entrance exam scorer, currently operating at negative one hundred thirty-nine on Ophelia Lin’s proprietary point system.

My phone buzzed again.

Not Sloane this time. Felicity.

"Can’t sleep. Thinking about you. Not in a gross way. Okay maybe a little in a gross way. Are you still on the Eastside? Send me a picture of something interesting."

I aimed the phone camera at the incident report on screen and took a photo of the word RACCOON in Dralun’s blocky handwriting.

Felicity responded in four seconds.

"I said interesting, not unhinged. Also your thumb is in the frame. Also it’s 10:30 and you’re still at work. Also I miss your face. Goodnight, hero."