Chapter 16 #2
I laugh. A real one. Deep and startling, but rolling out of me easier than before, because I cannot remember the last time I looked at destruction and felt joy instead of mourning.
The mud squelches under my boots as I close the distance between us.
She's grinning up at me, filthy and radiant and completely unhinged, and my hand finds the side of her face, smearing fresh mud across her cheekbone.
Across the street, a car door slams.
"That was hardly a registered HOA enforcement construct."
His voice is shaking. His coffee cup lies shattered on the asphalt. His hands shake at his sides.
Behind him, the neighborhood judging van pulls around the corner.
The judging van isn't a van at all.
It's a black town car with tinted windows and municipal plates, the kind of vehicle that carries people who have never touched soil in their lives. It glides to a stop at the curb with the quiet authority of a predator that doesn't need to hurry. The engine cuts. The driver's door stays shut.
The rear door opens.
A woman steps out. Five foot nothing. Charcoal pantsuit pressed so sharp the creases could cut glass.
Silver hair pulled into a bun so tight it looks structural, load-bearing, the kind of hairstyle that holds together not just hair but entire bureaucratic systems. She carries a clipboard.
Not a tablet. Not a phone. A physical clipboard with physical paper and a pen clipped to the top with a chain, like she's worried someone might steal it, like the pen is evidence in an ongoing case against the entire concept of fun.
The brass nameplate on her lapel reads: COMMISSIONER ELAINA VOSS, CITY ZONING & RESIDENTIAL STANDARDS.
She surveys the street.
Her gaze moves from Valerius, still trembling by his car, to the lake of golem mud that has now spread across both properties and into the gutter, to the crumpled remains of my garage door lying on the driveway like a shed skin, to the shredded remnants of my mailbox scattered across the road.
Then she looks at us.
Junia and me. Standing in the epicenter. Dripping.
I'm holding a twelve-pound sledgehammer in one hand and twenty feet of tow chain in the other. My shirt hangs off my torso in three separate pieces. Golem mud is drying in the grooves of my runic tattoos, turning the green glow a sickly brown.
Junia has the industrial hose at her feet like a spent weapon. My flannel shirt clings to her frame in ways that would be distracting if I weren't currently watching a city official step out of a town car with the expression of someone cataloging crimes.
Commissioner Voss clicks her pen.
The sound carries across the ruined yard like a gunshot.
"Plot seventeen and plot eighteen. Combined property assessment for the annual residential standards review." She checks her clipboard. "I'm early."
Early. She's early. The competition judging doesn't start for another forty-five minutes and the woman showed up to a war zone like she's walking into a board meeting.
"Commissioner," Valerius scrambles forward, his leather shoes splashing through the mud river currently flowing down the gutter, "I can explain the, ah, the situation. These two have been in flagrant violation of residential codes since-"
"Mr. Thornwood." She doesn't look at him. "I'll assess each property in order. Yours is plot twelve. I'll get to you."
Valerius's mouth opens. Closes. His jaw works silently. A vein pulses at his temple. He retreats to his car like a dog called off a chase.
Commissioner Voss steps off the sidewalk.
Her polished black shoe sinks two inches into the mud.
She pauses. Looks down. Her expression doesn't change.
She lifts her foot, mud sucking at the heel, and takes another step.
Then another. Walking directly through the battlefield with the deliberate pace of a crime scene investigator who bills by the hour.
The clipboard comes up.
She writes something. Her pen moves in small, aggressive strokes. Not flowing cursive. Not casual print. Each letter is a separate act of violence against the paper.
She stops at the trench. The golem's empty husk fills it, stone fragments and dead root matter and pooling brown water. She looks down into it for three full seconds. The pen moves.
More writing.
She steps over a chunk of the golem's severed arm. Her shoe crunches on a fragment of golden rune. She bends, picks it up, holds it to the light. Turns it. Sets it back down on the ground with deliberate care, as though marking its position for a future excavation team.
The pen scratches paper.
Junia's hand finds mine. Her fingers are slick with mud and her grip is iron. I squeeze back. My pulse hammers in my ears, and it has nothing to do with the golem fight. That was physical. Simple. This is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has no weak points, no joints to target, no core to dissolve.
Commissioner Voss reaches the garden archway.
The one Valerius tried to demolish. The one Junia saved with bylaw recitations.
It's still standing, though the left post is leaning fifteen degrees and a piece of golem debris has punched through two of the crossbeams. Junia's climbing roses hang from it in mud-soaked tangles, petals brown and battered.
Voss tilts her head. Studies the joinery where wood meets wood. Her finger traces the dovetail connection I cut by hand.
She writes.
She moves to the flower bed. What's left of it.
Junia's orchids are half-buried in sludge.
The marigold border has been crushed under a stone foot.
But along the far edge, where the golem's path missed by inches, a row of Junia's wild snapdragons still stands.
Defiant. Colors screaming against the mud like paint splashed on a gray wall.
Voss crouches. Examines a bloom. Writes something that takes eleven full seconds.
"Flynn. She's writing a lot."
The commissioner straightens. Turns to face us. Mud to her ankles. Clipboard in her hands.
Her pen clicks.