Chapter 16 Clara

Chapter 16 Clara


The parking structure had five levels and the anomaly had been on all of them.

Leo had been following it for twenty minutes through the Financial District structure, which was empty at this hour except for a few cars that belonged to people working late in the buildings above, and the anomaly was fast and it could bend light — not disappear, just distort, a shimmer at the edges of where it was that made tracking it in the low fluorescent lighting of a parking garage a specific kind of annoying that he didn't have a good word for yet.

B-grades near stress points were a priority clear, which was system language for deal with this before it becomes something worse. The Weave — the layer between what Leo operated in and everything else — was thinner in certain places, geographic quirks that had nothing to do with how the location looked from the outside, and parking structures in the Financial District at eleven at night apparently sat on one of them. B-grades near stress points had a habit of leaning into the thin spots, accelerating what was already there, and Leo had learned not to leave those ones alone.

He wasn't injured.

He was irritated, which was different, and the irritation had a very specific source.

"Level four, northeast corner," Foxy said, from somewhere above him, having taken up a position on the roof of a parked SUV on level three and apparently not planning to move from it. "It doubled back past the stairwell. You went the wrong way."

"I know I went the wrong way."

"I said northeast."

"I heard you say northeast."

"You went northwest."

Leo took the stairwell back up.

"It's moving again," Foxy said, with the energy of a sports commentator who was having a significantly better time than the athlete they were covering. "East now. Past the blue sedan. No — past the next one, the grey one. You're close."

He was close.

★

He cornered it on level three, which was where he'd started, which was not something he was going to think about.

The anomaly had the particular quality they all had when cornered — not fear exactly, more like a recalibration, the distortion field tightening as it ran out of space to use it in. Leo activated Dead Touch on the blade, felt the silver go cold and certain, and moved in clean and fast and it was over in the way that B-grades were over when you had the right approach and enough irritation behind it to stop overthinking it.

He crouched to harvest the core.

The footsteps came from his left, two car rows over, and he had the sword up before the decision to raise it had consciously arrived.

The footsteps were human.

He knew the difference — anomaly movement had a quality to it, a slight wrongness in the rhythm that you either noticed or you didn't — and these were human, the specific cadence of someone who knew how to move quietly and was almost achieving it.

The woman who came around the front of a parked car with both hands visible was in her thirties, sharp-featured, wearing business clothes that had started the day better than they were ending it. She looked at the sword, at the dissolving core on the ground, at Leo, and then back at the sword, and her expression was the expression of someone who had just watched something happen that their brain was in the middle of filing under a new category it hadn't needed before tonight.

She didn't run.

That was the first thing he noted.

"Clara Vance," she said. "I'm not a threat. I've been looking for you for three weeks."

Leo looked at her for a long moment.

"How did you find me," he said.

"I didn't find you. I found one of these things," she said, with a gesture toward the dissolving core that was admirably matter-of-fact given the circumstances, "and I followed it, and you were already here."

"And the sword doesn't bother you."

"I've seen weirder," she said, and said it in a way that suggested she meant it literally rather than as a figure of speech.

Leo looked at her for another moment.

Then he crouched back down and finished harvesting the core, because it wasn't going to wait.

★

She wasn't nervous.

That was the thing. Most people who ended up in the wrong part of the anomaly layer by accident came out of it shaky, running on adrenaline, needing a minute to find their footing in normal reality again. Clara Vance was standing in a parking garage at eleven at night having just watched something that shouldn't exist get killed by a sword, and she was calm in the way of someone who had been running on a specific purpose for long enough that almost nothing derailed it anymore.

That interested him more than anything she said for the first two minutes of the conversation.

She gave him the short version, which he appreciated — her father, a business partnership with Zhang Enterprises in the early 2010s, a decade of documented financial misconduct that had ended with her father's company dissolved, his reputation destroyed, and Clara spending the years since building a case that she had no resources to deploy.

"I've tried to get a meeting with you through every legitimate channel I could find," she said. "Three weeks. Everything gets blocked, redirected, or dropped. So I started watching your other activities instead."

"How much did you find?"

"Enough to put together a partial picture." She said it without satisfaction, just information. "The regulatory flag on the green energy subsidiary. The building management change on Park Avenue. Some of the Aethelgard Trust's recent activity. I can't see all of it — your structure is good — but I can see the shape of it."

"And?"

"And I think we want the same thing," she said.

Leo looked at her.

"Go home, Ms. Vance."

"I have seventeen boxes of documented financial crimes. Primary sources. The kind that don't rely on regulatory inference or shell company paper trails — direct records, communications, transaction evidence. My father kept everything."

"Go home."

He walked past her toward the exit ramp, the sword sheathed, the core logged, the mission notification already processing at the edge of his vision.

"They destroyed my father."

He stopped.

He didn't turn around.

The parking structure was quiet around them, a distant car somewhere on the street above, the fluorescent hum of lights that needed replacing.

"A lot of people's fathers," he said.

He kept walking.

★

Foxy was already in the car.

Leo got in, the door closed, the driver pulled out of the structure into the street, and the city was doing its thing outside the windows, which it did regardless of what was happening in parking garages at midnight.

"You're going to call her," Foxy said.

"No."

"Seventeen boxes."

"I have everything I need."

"You have financial leverage and a regulatory audit," Foxy said, in the patient tone it used when it was making a distinction it considered important. "She has documentation of actual crimes. Those are different things."

Leo looked out the window.

The Financial District gave way to Tribeca, the streets quieter now, the city thinning out the way it did after midnight without ever fully emptying.

"You don't have to like her," Foxy said.

"I don't like anyone."

"That's not entirely true anymore."

"Don't start."

"I'm just saying."

"You're just saying a lot of things tonight," Leo said, and there was something in his voice that wasn't quite an edge, more like a boundary marker, and Foxy registered it and went quiet in the way it went quiet when it had made its point and was willing to let it sit.

Leo pulled out his phone.

He looked at the name Maya had flagged three weeks ago when the access attempts had first started coming in — Clara Vance, run through his intelligence network, the results coming back in two days. Disgraced attorney. Vendetta against Zhang Enterprises going back a decade. Father's company dissolved under circumstances that had never been formally investigated. No criminal record. No current firm. Operating alone.

He looked at the name for a moment.

Then he put the phone away.

He didn't call her.

The car moved uptown through the quiet streets and Foxy sat in its usual position and said nothing else, and the mission map showed the same dots it had been showing all week, and the document from Yale was still o
n the back seat from two days ago because he hadn't moved it yet.

Not tonight, he thought.

He didn't examine what that meant for any other night.