Chapter 17
JUNIA
The commissioner's pen clicks a second time. The sound bounces off the mud and the broken archway and the inside of my skull.
"I have questions."
My stomach drops through my boots. Flynn's hand tightens around mine, his thick fingers squeezing hard enough that I feel the bones shift. I squeeze back harder because if I'm going down, I'm taking his circulation with me.
"This trench." Voss points her pen at the golem crater. "Intentional?"
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
"Yes."
Flynn's head snaps toward me. I don't look at him. I look at Commissioner Voss, who is standing ankle-deep in an earth monster, and I lie with every cell in my body.
"It's a sunken garden bed. Orcish military tradition." The words are pouring out of me now, pulled from some deep well of panic-fueled creativity. "Flynn's warband used to dig fortification trenches and fill them with medicinal plants. We're paying homage to that heritage."
Voss writes. "And the structural debris embedded in the soil?"
"Aggregate drainage. Stone fragments improve water runoff in heavy clay soil. Standard practice."
Voss's eyebrow lifts a fraction of a millimeter. She turns back to the trench. Studies the chunks of golem arm and the golden rune fragments scattered through the mud like buried treasure. She writes for what might be an hour or might be four seconds.
"The archway."
She walks back to it. We follow, our boots making obscene sucking sounds in the mud. She taps the leaning post with her pen.
"This angle. Fifteen degrees off vertical."
Done. We're done. She's going to cite us for structural instability and Valerius is going to seize both properties and turn them into a parking lot for his collection of luxury sedans.
"It references wabi-sabi."
Flynn and I both look at each other.
Voss traces the damaged crossbeams where the golem debris punched through.
"The Japanese aesthetic of imperfect beauty.
The lean creates visual tension with the vertical trellis.
And these gaps in the lattice, where the wood splintered, they frame the climbing roses.
" She steps back. Tilts her head the other direction.
"The effect is striking. Controlled decay alongside aggressive growth. "
My mouth is hanging open. I can feel mud drying on my lower lip.
"The, uh." I swallow. "That's exactly what we were going for."
Flynn makes a deep sound. Not quite a word. More like the noise a man makes when reality stops making sense and he's choosing to just ride it out.
Voss moves to the flower beds. She crouches again beside the snapdragons, the ones that survived the golem's rampage through sheer stubborn refusal to die.
Their stems are bent at wild angles. Mud coats half the petals.
But the colors, God, the colors. Fuchsia and tangerine and electric violet, all blazing against the brown devastation like signal flares.
"These weren't staked."
"No. They grow where they want."
"And the structural edging here." She points to the stone border Flynn laid three days ago.
Precise. Level. Each piece cut at identical angles and set with military spacing.
Half the stones are cracked from the golem's foot.
But the line holds. The border stands. And the wild snapdragons are cascading over it, spilling color across the rigid geometry like paint running over a ruler's edge.
Voss stands. Brushes mud from her knee. Opens her clipboard to a fresh page.
"In twenty-three years of residential assessments, I have never seen this particular integration."
Flynn's hand goes slack around mine. His fingers loosen. His whole arm drops six inches like someone cut the tension wire holding it up.
"The structural foundation is unmistakably Orcish military engineering. Clean lines. Functional drainage. Load-bearing walls incorporated into raised beds." She gestures at Flynn's stonework. "But the botanical elements reject the structure entirely. They grow through it. Over it. Around it."
She turns to face us. Her expression hasn't changed once during this entire assessment. The same flat, clinical neutrality. But her pen taps the clipboard twice. Fast. Almost eager.
"The result is a garden that appears to be at war with itself. And it's the most visually compelling residential landscape I've assessed in my career."
Flynn's mouth opens. No sound comes out. His tusks catch the morning light. His moss-green skin is caked in drying mud and his tee shirt is nothing but ribbons hanging from his shoulders and he's staring at Commissioner Voss like she just told him the earth is flat and he needs a minute.
"You're saying you like it."
"I'm saying it scores." She flips her clipboard shut. "I'll factor in the remaining properties this afternoon. Results posted by five."
She walks back to her car. Each step leaves a perfect mud print on the sidewalk. She doesn't wipe her shoes before getting in. The door closes. The engine starts. She pulls away.
Silence.
Flynn drops the sledgehammer. Twelve pounds of steel hits the mud with a thud.
"She liked the trench."
"She liked the trench."
"The trench a golem made by trying to kill us."
"Art is subjective, Flynn."
A sound rips out of him. Half laugh, half roar. His head tips back and he shakes and the sound rolls across the destroyed yard like thunder. I start laughing too, bent double, hands on my mud-caked knees, wheezing because we're standing in a crime scene that just got a compliment.
Then a slow, deliberate clap echoes from the sidewalk.
Valerius leans against his car. Arms crossed. Smiling.
Valerius pushes off the car. His silver suit doesn't have a wrinkle. Not one speck of mud. No hair displaced from his immaculate platinum braid. He walks toward us across the ruined lawn like he owns it, which, if we lose, he literally will.
"Charming display." His smile is all teeth, no warmth. "I do hope the commissioner graded on a curve for... what's the polite term? Disaster chic?"
Flynn stops laughing. The shift is instant. One second he's shaking with that big, open-mouthed roar of relief, and the next his spine locks straight, his shoulders roll forward, and the laughter dies in his throat like someone stomped on it.
"Walk away, Elf."
"Or what? You'll throw mud at me?" Valerius gestures at the carnage.
The golem trench. The shattered archway.
The beds crushed flat under clay footprints.
"I've already seen the damage. The commissioner may have been generous, but generosity doesn't win competitions.
Precision wins. Magic wins." He brushes an invisible speck from his cuff. "My garden is flawless."
"Your garden is stolen."
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. Valerius's smile doesn't flicker. But his pupils contract. Just a fraction. Just enough.
"Excuse me?"
Flynn reaches into his shorts. The man has nine pockets on each leg and he uses every single one of them. His hand emerges holding his phone, screen already lit, already loaded. He holds it up so the sun catches the display.
Valerius's greenhouse. Timestamp 2:47 AM. The footage is crisp, beautifully framed by Flynn's paranoid military-grade security cameras. In the video, Valerius crouches over Flynn's rosebush with a glowing shovel, ripping roots from the earth while his guards stand watch.
"That's trespassing." Flynn swipes. New image.
Valerius hauling Mrs. Patterson's prize dahlias into a wheelbarrow.
"That's theft." Another swipe. Valerius grafting stolen root stock onto his own plants under grow lights.
"That's fraud." Swipe. The full interior of the greenhouse, rows upon rows of labeled, caged plants, each tag bearing a neighbor's address.
"And that's a felony agricultural hoarding charge under Section 14-B of the Municipal Botanical Code. "
I didn't even know there was a Municipal Botanical Code. Flynn has it memorized.
Valerius's jaw tightens. The mask cracks, just slightly, just around the edges. His nostrils flare.
"Those images are inadmissible. Obtained through illegal surveillance of private property."
"Your greenhouse sits on HOA common land. Paragraph nine of the neighborhood charter. All structures on common land are subject to resident inspection. You wrote that clause yourself."
The color drains from Valerius's face. Not slowly. All at once, like someone pulled a plug.
"You can't prove jurisdiction."
"I don't have to."
Flynn turns away from Valerius entirely. Dismisses him like a weed. He pulls up Commissioner Voss's contact card on his phone and dials. One ring. Two.
"Commissioner Voss. Flynn Danger, 4714 Cedarbrook Estates. I have photographic evidence of large-scale plant theft affecting twelve households in this subdivision. The stolen specimens are currently housed in the community greenhouse on HOA common land. I'm forwarding the documentation now."
He taps send. The phone makes a small whoosh sound. Valerius flinches at it like a gunshot.
Three minutes pass. Nobody moves. Flynn stands with his arms crossed, phone in one hand, still shirtless, still caked in dried mud and golem residue, looking like a statue someone carved out of anger and patience. Valerius checks his watch. Checks it again. His foot starts tapping.
Voss's sedan rounds the corner at exactly the speed limit. Behind it, a municipal enforcement van with tinted windows. Behind that, two more.
The convoy parks. Voss steps out holding her clipboard in one hand and Flynn's printed photos in the other. She's already arranged them in chronological order. Of course she has.
"Mr. Valerius."
"Commissioner, this is a misunderstanding."