6. Camille
Camille
My suite in the Tower is dim, the only real light coming from the screens.
I sit at the desk with three monitors active, tablet open, incident logs compiling in real time.
The Council is handling the actual investigation.
That is not my role.
My role is perception and containment. Making sure Midnight Halo’s numbers stay stable enough that no one above me starts panicking in a way that creates more problems than the demon attack already has.
The system is already rebuilding itself.
It always does.
Broken equipment reports scroll on the left screen: three cameras destroyed, two audio boards compromised, and more. Cost estimates populate beneath them. High, but not catastrophic. Eon will absorb the cost without difficulty.
Center screen: incident timeline reconstruction.
Right: footage fragments. Glitching. Incomplete.
The official incident report pops up on my screen: Technical malfunction. Localized system failure. No serious injuries reported.
I read it once. Then again.
The language is efficient. Controlled. Usable.
It is also incomplete. I know that objectively. The footage fragments alone are enough to indicate that what occurred exceeded a standard technical failure classification. The system knows that. The report does not reflect it.
I don’t correct it. The report is not designed to reflect reality. It is designed to manage perception, and keep executives such as Alaric Voss happy.
And the narrative is sufficient. I approve the draft and move on.
There’s a knock at my door.
“Come in.”
“Hey,” Kevin says.
His voice lands differently than everything else in this room. Less procedural. Less sharpened. Human, in a way that feels oddly out of place against the dim monitors.
I continue typing. “Yes?”
“You okay?”
The question doesn’t belong here. It isn’t procedural. It has no metric attached to it. There is no useful response category for it.
“Yes,” I say.
I still don’t look up.
He steps closer anyway. “You’ve been in here for a while.”
“I’ve been working,” I say.
“I can see that.”
Another pause. He doesn’t leave, which is unexpected.
I stop typing, briefly, to look at him. “What do you need?”
He studies me. Not clinically. Not like he’s evaluating output or waiting for me to perform composure. Just looking, which is less comfortable than it should be.
“I don’t need anything,” he says. “Just checking on you.”
“I don’t require checking on.”
He exhales, quiet, and for a second I think he might push. He doesn’t. Instead, he sets a cup down beside my tablet.
“Drink that,” he says. “At least.”
“I will.”
His gaze flicks once to the side of my neck, then back to my face. The bruise there is already forming. I can feel it when I swallow. I can also feel my pulse still running slightly too high beneath the skin, which is inconvenient.
Biology is inconvenient. Useful in crisis. Irritating afterward.
I adjust my watch. A small motion. Precise. Familiar. Resetting the clasp. Realigning the pressure at my wrist. Reasserting order over one measurable thing.
“You don’t have to work tonight,” he says.
“Yes,” I reply, “I do.”
There’s something in his expression then. Not pity. He knows better than that. Something closer to concern, though he’s tactful enough not to name it.
He nods once, then leaves. The door closes. The room resets, controlled again.
I return to the report. The numbers align. The timeline holds. The narrative is stable.
Still…
Something doesn’t align. Something about the entire incident is off.
I isolate the corridor footage. The footage is incomplete, and the audio is fragmented. I play it anyway, watching the cables wrap around me. Constraint. Loss of mobility.
Loss of—control.
My hand stills on the keyboard before I pull up a secondary feed. Partial capture from a damaged corridor camera. Low resolution. Unstable.
The frame stutters, then holds. On it is… Jules. Mid-movement. Not the version I observed earlier. Not the one in the meeting room, leaning into proximity and deflection, using humor as a shield and flirtation as misdirection.
This version of Jules is different.
Her file documents exceptional precision under rehearsed conditions and severe variance everywhere else.
This is not choreography.
There are no marks, no counts, no established sequence. Yet she moves as though she knows where every strike will land before it happens. Fast. Direct. No hesitation.
And no visible fear.
Fear is a natural biological response.
I felt it. Not in a dramatic way, but present all the same: elevated pulse, muscular tension, temporary disruption in fine motor control, the cold spike of recognition when the thing in the corridor pressed against the wards and did not stop.
I am not immune to biology. Not completely.
Jules, on screen, looks as though she might be. The blades in her hands track cleanly through the space. Her positioning—
I rewind and watch again.
Before the first cable changes direction, Jules has already shifted into its path. Before the second begins to recoil, she is moving toward the point where it will strike next.
She is not reacting.
She is anticipating.
There’s no lag between stimulus and response. No recalibration. No visible effort to recover equilibrium. The movement is exact, decisive, repeated with a consistency her existing data does not support.
That is not what her file indicates.
Her file indicates fluctuation. Volatility. Deviation.
This is none of those things.
I replay the moment where she intercepts the strikes meant for me. Not once. Multiple times. Each instance: same positioning, same choice, same outcome.
The footage tears on the next replay, Jules’s body breaking into horizontal bands of light before the image corrects itself.
The distortion catches on something in my memory. For less than a second, the corridor becomes Valencia.
A camera crushed beneath a fallen lighting rig, its red indicator still blinking despite the dead feed. Open dressing-room doors. Five empty marks on a stage that had been designed around five bodies.
I reviewed every surviving angle that night… None of them showed where Glass Anthem went.
The internal files classified the women as ‘temporarily unaccounted for.’
The public statement classified all five of them as ‘on hiatus.’
I accepted the distinction because the alternative would have required me to acknowledge that I had helped erase five missing women from public view.
I shouldn’t be thinking of Valencia now.
I refocus on the frame as it stabilizes. Jules moves through it again. She places herself between the threat and—
Me.
I pause the frame.
Her shoulder is angled forward. Defensive. Deliberate.
I look at Jules frozen on the screen. The footage does not align with her data…
I catalog it as an anomaly, an unaccounted variable. Her classification may be incomplete, but that is fixable. That is useful.
I update her Eon file.
Jules: Elevated volatility. Protective intervention under active threat. Response accuracy exceeds existing model. Priority classification increased.
My finger hovers over the next field for one second longer than necessary.
Then input: Requires direct observation.
That is the correct response. Unpredictable variables must be observed directly. Anything less introduces risk.
I save the update, then I sit there for a moment longer than the task requires, watching the frozen frame.
Jules in motion.
Jules unafraid.
Jules placing herself between danger and something that was not, by any rational calculation, her responsibility.
That is not behavior the current model can explain. Yet.
For the first time since I took this assignment, I understand in a way I did not from reports, metrics, or cleanup logs alone that Midnight Halo is not simply involved in these incidents.
They stand in front of them. Repeatedly.
I close the file. The screens dim slightly as the system shifts toward standby. Everything looks contained again. Organized. Controlled.
It should feel stable.
It does. Mostly.
I adjust my watch once more.