Chapter 702 | Congee-Stained Jacket

Chapter 702: 702 | Congee-Stained Jacket

I knocked three times, firm and evenly spaced.

Nothing for four seconds. Then the deadbolt clacked, the door opened six inches, and there she was.

Petra Lang at two-thirty in the morning looked like a Vogue editorial somebody had left out in the rain. Her geometric black waves, usually arranged with the obsessive care of a museum installation, hung loose and a little tangled past her shoulders, and the hallway light made even the shadows in them look expensive. She wore a cream silk camisole with thin straps that had slid toward her collarbones on both sides, and matching shorts that were technically sleepwear and technically an act of war against my concentration. Her legs were bare all the way down, and the cold hallway air had raised goosebumps along her thighs.

Her leather planner was in her left hand, open to a page marked with an emerald sticky tab. Her pen was behind her ear.

Those green eyes found mine and changed twice in under a second. First came surprise. Then something colder and harder, which she assembled out of parts I’d been pretending didn’t exist.

"It is two-thirty-four in the morning."

"I know."

"You have not spoken to me outside of a coordination meeting in twenty-two days."

"I know that too."

"You are standing at my door in a field jacket that smells like pork buns and bus exhaust, with what appears to be dried congee on your left cuff, at an hour when every corridor camera in this building is recording."

I looked down at my cuff. She was right about the congee.

"I need your help."

Her mouth pressed into a line flat enough to have been drawn with a ruler. Her eyes dropped from my face to the congee and came back up. The strap on her left shoulder slipped another centimeter. She didn’t fix it.

"You need my help."

"Your family runs one of the three biggest hero-tech manufacturers on the West Coast. Lang Industries holds eleven government equipment contracts. Your mother’s analysts can cross-reference Aspect classification data against biological output signatures at a level that makes the IHC’s own database look like it runs on a Fisher-Price laptop."

"Continue."

I took the business card from my jacket and held it up between two fingers, the way Lamia had held up her own card on a rooftop a lifetime ago. The cheap pulp caught the hallway light.

"There’s a signature on this card that I can see and can’t identify. Black-violet. Thin. It’s on every layer of residue across a six-to-eight-month window. It belongs to whoever keeps the storage container for biological material that’s being harvested from Branded kids in the Eastside. I need someone who can tell me what kind of Aspect gives off a black-violet passive signature, and I need it run against every registered Branded and Channeler in the Verano metro area."

Petra stared at the card for a long time. The pen stayed behind her ear and the planner stayed open in her hand. At the end of the hall the corridor camera hummed on its mount, and its little red light showed twice in her pupils.

"You came to my room." Her voice had the careful neutrality of a woman reading terms she meant to negotiate. "At two-thirty in the morning. After twenty-two days of nothing. Because you need my family’s database."

I deserved that. I’d known I deserved it before I climbed the stairs.

"I came to your room because you’re the only person in this building with access to the analysis I need, and because you’re smart enough to understand what this card means without me spending forty minutes on context."

"And because you felt guilty about the twenty-two days."

"No." I held her eyes. The green was bright enough to leave afterimages. "Because I should’ve come twenty-one days ago and brought the card then. The guilt isn’t about the silence. It’s about the waste."

Her jaw moved once. Her fingers tightened on the planner’s spine until her knuckles went white against the leather. Her head tipped back half an inch and the pen behind her ear shifted, which was Petra’s version of rocking back from a body blow.

Something happened behind her eyes that she would kill me for naming.

"Inside," she said. "Before some idiot with a phone photographs you at my door and I have to explain to my mother why Badge 138 is visiting my room in a congee-stained jacket."

She stepped back and opened the door wider.

I walked into Petra Lang’s room at two-thirty-six in the morning, and the first thing that hit me was the smell, botanical cleanser over a faint crystalline ozone that meant she’d been conjuring. A stack of emerald barriers stood in the corner by the window, six inches tall and set in a perfect descending spiral. It was the kind of construct you build when your hands need something to do and your brain won’t stop running scenarios about someone who hasn’t spoken to you in twenty-two days.

The second thing was the photograph.

On her nightstand, in a silver frame that probably cost more than Dralun’s monthly operating budget, was a picture of Petra at about twelve, standing between her parents at what looked like a charity gala. Margot Lang stood on the left in a black gown with her signature emerald brooch. Heinrich Lang stood on the right in a suit that could’ve fixed every stoop on Halverson Avenue twice over. Petra stood in the middle with shorter hair and a softer jaw, looking straight into the camera with the same expression she’d worn the first time she walked into homeroom and sat in the front row by herself.

She’d been building her walls since she was a kid.

I pulled my eyes off the photo and turned to her. The room felt small with both of us in it. The camisole and shorts left very little to the imagination, which was a phrase I’d promised myself I would never think in Petra Lang’s room, and I’d broken that promise four seconds past the threshold.

Petra shut the door. The lock engaged with a sound that carried more weight than a click had any right to.

She walked to her desk, set the planner down so its spine lined up parallel with the edge, and turned to face me with her arms crossed under her chest. The silk pulled tight over her breasts, and my hundred-point Intelligence turned out to be no help at all with ignoring it.

"Show me the card."