Chapter 9 Nex #2
I did not add: I would enjoy spending every cent of it on a very nice grudge and keeping it in a glass case I polish when I’m bored.
“And how long would his funds last against a protracted legal battle for interfering in Voss’s business?”
“Ten weeks at white-shoe burn rates.”
“And the retribution crater past that?” Royce pressed—he wanted numbers.
“Modeled outcomes if we move openly against Demetrius Voss without airtight probable cause: insurance exposure; carrier flags ‘heightened risk’; premiums plus forty-one percent, possible non-renewal; vendor blacklists; venue and security contractors tied to Voss’s network would decline work; lead times would triple.
Regulatory friction: surprise audits and permit delays would increase by a factor of three; average injunction time to hearing seventeen days.
PR degradation: negative-sentiment share would climb to 0.
62 in forty-eight hours; headline framing would shift to ‘attack on philanthropy.’ Client churn: eleven to nineteen percent of current clientele in Voss’s circles would disengage ‘for optics.’”
Royce nodded as each of these beats landed. “So.”
“Are you saying we just give up?”
“Local authorities exist for a reason. Nex can pull everything into a file and send it to all of the letter agencies, plus the port authority and the Coast Guard.”
“And what the fuck are they going to do once his yacht reaches international waters?” Sirena asked, then looked around the table.
By Cassia’s temple, Susan’s tongue flickered. The gorgon gave a soft grunt. “We could . . . make things look accidental.”
“And yachts are in the water, right?” Ellum said, grin going daredevil.
Royce’s nostrils flared wide. “This is why I am in charge and not any of you.”
“But it has been a long time since I visited my mom,” Sirena said, bowing her head deeply, encouraged by the mood shift at the table. “It’s Moon’s Second Swell right now. It’d be rude not to go see her.”
“I don’t know why I’m surprised that there’s different holidays under the ocean, but I am,” Lung muttered, while shifting to scratch his back on his chair, setting tufts of fur flying.
“There are,” Royce said dryly, “but I happen to know that she made that one up.”
“So what if I just go down there and happen to hear a cargo box full of women in distress?” Sirena asked, with a shrug.
“I’m not averse to making bad decisions here.” Aceon jumped in. “But you said it yourself—they might be so blank they don’t register, and then where’s your probable cause?”
I decided to intervene. “You’re right. But they also may not be hollow yet. And even if they are, no one but the people at this table, and Thorne, know that Hollows exist. Technically, any quantity of women, alive or dead, thinking or not, inside a cargo box is a reportable event.”
Sirena made another face up at the ceiling, where multiples of my cameras caught it. “Is that what we’re calling them?”
“It fits. Unfortunately. And,” I added, “we are running up against a clock.”
Sirena’s eyes widened by the same fraction as Royce’s lips turned down.
Ellum tapped the table with a thick finger. “How long do we have?”
“Today, 16:40,” I said. “Harbormaster cleared Helepolis for the afternoon ebb. Last tug window 16:25 to 16:35. Cargo finishes by 15:50 if they stay on pace.”
Lung leaned forward, putting somewhat scaly elbows on the table. “How tight is that?”
“Dock loop is about fifty-eight minutes end to end. Pallets pause in the room before the loading bay for six to eight minutes. We’re on the second-to-last cycle now. Your workable window is the next pass: ETA 15:02 to 15:10 at the hand-off. You could, however, just go now.”
It was currently 09:35.
It was the option I hoped she would take.
The one that I prayed I had cornered her into.
“And the downside of that?” Cassia asked, her eyes squinting, sly.
“Deniability. Pre-hand-off, Voss can shrug and say the crate isn’t his. But the moment their man scans it and takes it with the pallet jack, the chain of custody flips, and it’s Voss’s problem. The women, however, will still be saved.”
“This is the answer,” Royce announced, blowing air through pursed lips. “We say we got an anonymous tip, we crack the cargo box open early, we grant Voss a graceful, non-litigious exit, and then we all go home.”
Sirena gave her father a disparaging look. “Until he does it again, somewhere else, where no one’s watching.”
“Sweetheart,” Royce began as Sirena stared him down. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. Sometimes your only option is ‘good enough.’”
“Good enough for who?” she asked, and the words hung above the table.
Lung broke the silence by cracking a handful of knuckles and wagging his tail. “I mean—I do like violence.”
“No,” Royce said, flat. “We can’t afford the heat.”
The silence after that was longer.
Then, quietly, Royce added, not to her, but to the room: “Six years ago, we extracted a precognitive from a syndicate in Jersey City. Thought she was a hostage. Thought we were saving her. Turned out, she’d built the system.
The bets, the outcomes, the rhythms—she wanted to be there.
Said it was the only place where what she saw made sense.
” His pupils unfocused as he read from his past. “We gave her options. A clean slate. She took none of them. Final one was over a balcony.”
He focused again and looked around the room. “Sometimes what you think is a rescue is actually a projection. And I’m not losing anyone in this room on the promise of a maybe. Which means we’ll go today at noon. We’ll find what we find, and that’s that.”
Before Sirena could regroup to try a different tack, a new agent burst into the room. Kelly, a Dullahan-variant—a headless man who usually traveled by e-bike and kept his head in a front-facing, porthole-windowed backpack.
“Sorry! Traffic!” he announced as his body set him down upon the table.
His body was wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled low where the head should have been.
Inside the backpack on the table he chewed gum, and the barely visible tail end of his earbud wiggled with each chomp.
“I was listening in, but lost the tail end in the elevator on the way up. Are we blowing up a yacht?”
“Absolutely not,” Royce intoned, then demanded, “Someone catch him up,” and left the room, before anyone could try to change his plan.