7:22 AM.
Hannah stood before her bedroom mirror and made a decision about collar styles in under four seconds. The black choker with the small red bow. Same as yesterday. Same as most days. There was a kind of quiet efficiency in having rituals — the fewer choices that required genuine thought before 8 AM, the more thought she could save for the ones that actually mattered.
Her reflection looked back at her. Hair maintained. Glasses adjusted. Everything in place.
She looked like a woman who ran things. Which she did. Just not in any direction she'd chosen herself.
The penthouse was already bright with morning light coming off the city. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A view that had cost someone a great deal of money and which she had never asked for. The art on the walls was chosen by a designer she'd never met, approved by a committee she'd never sat on. The furniture was beautiful and felt like someone else's.
She grabbed her tablet and bag and headed for the door.
Kira was already in the hallway, composed as always.
"Morning," she said.
"Miss Gipson." He fell into step beside her. "Security briefing: primary route to Central Tower has been pre-cleared. Secondary motorcade is deployed. Miguel and Liam are positioned at the tower entrance. Toby has overwatch from the third intersection."
"And King?"
"With Charlotte in the lead vehicle. Personal detail as assigned."
The elevator descended smoothly. Hannah pulled up her messages. Twenty-three new since she'd last checked an hour ago. Three from Devlin's campaign manager, subject lines escalating in urgency. Two from the Azure League's senior coordinator, markedly calmer — Takeshi's team had learned that panic in writing created records nobody wanted. One from a number she didn't recognise, which Charlotte had already flagged, quarantined, and was presumably already dissecting.
And one from Enoch, sent at 6:47 AM, which simply read: Venue situation for next week. Handled or nearly handled. Coffee's on your desk. Come in ready to approve.
She almost smiled.
The parking garage was cool and quiet. Charlotte stood beside the armoured SUV, phone to her ear, expression flat in the way it got when she was actively tracking something. Lucius leaned against the vehicle with his arms crossed and his attention on the entrance — not looking at it, exactly. More like holding it in his awareness the way a person keeps track of a door they expect to open.
He'd been like that since the first day. She'd noticed.
"Morning," Charlotte said, lowering the phone. "Devlin's manager has called the main office line twice. The venue for next week's rally has a structural issue — engineers condemned the building this morning."
"Before 8 AM," Hannah said.
"Before 7:30. He's been calling since the news came in."
"Of course he has." She moved toward the vehicle. Lucius opened the rear door without being asked. "Where are we on it?"
"Enoch has three alternatives. Says he'll brief you in detail when you're in."
"Good." She climbed in, settled against the leather. Charlotte took the front. Kira drove. Lucius took the seat beside Hannah, maintaining professional distance with the particular stillness he carried everywhere. Not silence exactly — more like the absence of unnecessary noise.
The motorcade moved out. Morning traffic was already building, the financial district arteries filling with the slow crawl of people heading to work, heading to meetings, heading somewhere with the general low-grade urgency of city life.
Hannah pulled up her full schedule on the tablet.
9 AM — Campaign strategy meeting, Crimson Vanguard. Messaging review ahead of first debate.
10:30 AM — Design review, Azure League promotional lineup. Valentina would have opinions.
Noon — Sponsorship negotiations, Vertex Corp.
2 PM — Azure League publicity team. Response strategy for Devlin's aggression messaging.
4 PM — Independent candidate situation. Standing slot, added three weeks ago when Sol had declared at a community hall in the Reclaimed Zone and upended a calendar that had otherwise been perfectly managed.
Evening — Debate prep materials for both major candidates. Alignment review.
She looked at the 4 PM slot for a moment longer than the others.
Sol. The neighbourhood hero from the Reclaimed Zone who had walked to a podium in front of two hundred people and spoken for eleven minutes without a single talking point her division had approved, and who had since accumulated polling numbers that were genuinely alarming.
Three candidates was the problem. The machine was built for two. Two factions, two narratives, one scripted rivalry that, generated engagement, produced a predetermined result, and kept the public oriented toward a drama they could follow without it meaning anything dangerous. Takeshi versus Devlin was a clean system. The incumbent's measured stability against the challenger's passionate energy. Both manageable. Both hers, in the specific sense that she understood what they were and what they were for.
Sol was not hers. His campaign had no talking points she'd drafted. His image had not been shaped by her team — or rather, they had scrambled to shape it after the fact, reactive instead of proactive, catching up to something that was already moving. He had agreed, eventually, to a partial arrangement on his costume design. She'd brokered it herself. He'd looked at her across the conference table with the kind of direct eye contact that most people in her world had learned not to use and said: I don't need you to make me look like something I'm not. Just make sure the suit doesn't fall apart.
She had said: That's the one thing I can definitely guarantee.
He'd almost smiled. She'd understood, in that moment, exactly why the public had decided he was different.
He was different. That was the problem.
"You're quiet," Charlotte said from the front, not turning around.
"I'm always quiet in the mornings."
"You're quieter than usual."
Hannah didn't answer. Outside, New Kong scrolled past. The financial district rose ahead — steel and glass catching early light, the Gipson Brand logo visible from four blocks out near the top of Central Tower. Her name was in that building, in the sense that her father's name was in it, which meant the family's name, which meant everything the family was connected to, all the way down.
She was very good at not thinking about how far down that went.
Central Tower's private garage swallowed the motorcade smoothly. Security waved them through. They parked in the executive section.
Miguel was already at the elevator bank, grinning at them before they were fully out of the vehicle. Liam stood nearby, hands clasped, his massive frame utterly relaxed.
"Morning, boss. Quiet night. No incidents."
"Good." Hannah managed a slight smile. "Let's keep the trend going."
"Statistically we're overdue for something," Lucius said, not particularly quietly.
Miguel opened his mouth.
"He's right," Liam said, which seemed to deflate whatever Miguel was building toward.
They took the executive elevator to the thirty-third floor. The doors opened onto the Hero Design and Branding division in full morning operation — the open workspace already populated, designers at their stations, the large monitors along the far wall cycling through campaign materials in review rotation. Costume renders. Brand colour studies. Candidate visual profiles. The machine waking up.
Hannah moved through it the way she always did — not quickly, not slowly. Present. Acknowledging people without slowing to be acknowledged. She knew most of their names. She knew which ones were genuinely talented and which ones coasted on the division's resources. She knew who reported to Enoch and who reported around him and who reported to people she had never officially met but who existed nonetheless in the structure her father had built and she had inherited.
She knew what this place was.
That was the part that nobody outside this building fully understood. People looked at the Hero Design and Branding division and saw exactly what it was called. Costumes. Campaigns. Public relations. The glossy professional face of New Kong's hero industry.
What they were actually running was the narrative. The whole thing. Not just the visual identity but the story — who the heroes were, what the factions meant, why the rivalry mattered, what a viewer at home was supposed to feel when Crimson Vanguard's Devlin squared up against Azure League's senior roster in the quarterly broadcast. The emotion was real. The stakes were scripted. Hannah's division was the mechanism that made manufactured drama feel like something worth caring about.
She was very good at her job. She had decided, that being good at it was at least preferable to being bad at it. If the machine ran regardless, she might as well be the one at the controls.
Enoch was waiting near her office door. Early thirties, lean, cashmere sweater in earth tones, pressed slacks. Glasses that suited his face. The calm that he carried wasn't performed — she had known him long enough to understand the difference — it was structural, built into the way he moved through problems. He saw systems and he managed them. It was why she'd relied on him for eight years.
"Morning," he said. "Coffee's inside. I've flagged everything urgent in the inbox — red tags, easy to sort."
"The venue."
"Managed. Almost." He held out his tablet as she unlocked her office. "Three alternatives. Pavilion has perfect capacity but it'll cost us double the original budget. Sterling Center is affordable but the acoustics will require additional equipment. Harbor Arena is ideal across every metric except that the owner, Ren Calloway, has Azure League sympathies and won't want to rent to Devlin's campaign without something in return."
Hannah stepped inside. The office was already organised — Enoch had been in before her, which was not unusual. The campaign boards along one wall showed all three candidate profiles in parallel. The coffee was exactly the right temperature.
"Harbor Arena," she said, sitting down. "Offer Calloway a design contract. His private security team — custom uniforms, full branding package. Make the value clear."
"Personal vanity offer. He'll respond to that." Enoch made a note. "I'll contact him directly. Should be done by noon."
"Good." She pulled up the morning's schedule on the wall display, three columns side by side. Takeshi. Devlin. Sol. "Walk me through the 9 AM before I walk into it."
Enoch settled into the chair across from her, the posture of someone who had done this a thousand times and found it genuinely useful rather than performative.
"Devlin's team wants to go aggressive in the first debate. Corruption focus — systemic failures, incumbent complacency, the machinery of the established order." He delivered this with his usual careful neutrality. "His campaign manager believes hard-left messaging differentiates him from Takeshi."
"And actually?"
"Actually, the polling shows voters want change but they're nervous about volatility. Aggressive corruption allegations without specifics will read as unstable. We need him passionate but not reckless." Enoch slid the polling data across. "My recommendation: let him attack the system broadly. 'The structure is broken, we need passion over bureaucracy.' Keep it thematic. Don't let him name individuals or make specific claims."
"Because specific claims create specific problems."
"Among other reasons."
Hannah looked at the polling numbers. Devlin was sitting at thirty-one percent among likely voters. Takeshi at thirty-four. Sol at twenty-eight, with an upward trend line that was three weeks old and showed no sign of flattening.
She set the tablet down.
"What does Devlin's team actually know about the Sol situation?"
"They know he's polling well. They know the independent vote is splitting what should be Devlin's base — young demographics, reform-minded voters, people who want the system to change." Enoch's expression remained measured. "They're choosing to run against Takeshi because attacking the incumbent is a clearer narrative. They don't quite know how to attack someone who isn't affiliated with either faction."
"Neither do we," Hannah said.
Enoch was quiet for a moment. "Not yet."
The door opened. Charlotte leaned in. "Your 9 AM is assembled in conference room two."
"Tell them two minutes."
Charlotte withdrew. Lucius remained in the hallway, visible through the glass, watching something down the office floor that Hannah couldn't see from her angle.
She stood, gathering her tablet.
"Enoch. The 4 PM slot."
"The Sol situation." He stood as well, smoothly. "I've been compiling a fuller profile since his declaration. I can have a complete document ready before the meeting."
"Do that." She paused at the door. "And I want an honest assessment of his numbers. Not what his campaign is saying. Not what Takeshi's team is claiming. What the actual trend line looks like."
"Understood."
She moved out into the office floor, Charlotte falling in beside her as she walked toward conference room two. The room was visible through the glass wall — seven people around the table, Devlin's campaign manager at the near end, a man named Rafe Morrow who communicated primarily through escalating urgency and had been calling before 7:30 AM.
He rose when she entered. Most of them did.
Hannah took the head of the table. Charlotte positioned herself near the wall. Through the glass behind her, she could see Lucius moving to take a position outside the conference room — present, watching, that same quality of attention directed outward at the office floor.
She looked at the people around the table. Devlin's people. True believers in a narrative she had partially written and which had been approved by people two floors above her and several structures of authority above them. They thought they were fighting for something. She had stopped being able to tell whether that made it better or worse.
"Let's talk about debate strategy," she said.
---
The design review ran over by twenty minutes.
Valentina had opinions about the Azure League's new promotional colour palette — she always had opinions, which was most of her value and all of her difficulty. She stood at the display wall in her studio, pointing at a shade of silver that she found "corporate in the worst possible sense, like a filing cabinet decided it wanted to be a hero," while Suki Cho held a fabric swatch nearby and waited with the patience of someone who had heard this specific argument in various forms for eight years.
"The client approved silver," Hannah said.
"The client approved the idea of silver. This—" Valentina gestured at the swatch with her custom Italian scissors, "—is what happens when silver gives up. I want a blue-silver. Steel at sunrise. There is a difference."
"Show me."
Valentina pulled up two samples on the digital comparator. Hannah looked at them for four seconds. The difference was real. Small, but real. The kind of thing that would register subconsciously with millions of viewers and contribute, fractionally, to the sense that Azure League's image was elevated rather than institutional.
"Submit the revised sample for approval," Hannah said. "I'll back it."
Valentina didn't say thank you. She returned to her work bench with the energy of someone who had won a significant victory and intended to behave as though it had simply been correct all along.
Hannah left before the next argument could begin.
The Vertex Corp negotiation was in a smaller conference room on thirty-four, three Vertex representatives who arrived with prepared positions and left without them. Hannah had come in with thirty percent above current rates. They'd countered at fifteen percent below. She'd stood up after twelve minutes, gathered her materials, and said: Vertex's competitors have been asking to meet with us for six months. I'll be in contact when your position changes.
They called back before she reached the elevator. The new rate was exactly where she'd opened.
Charlotte, beside her on the walk back, said nothing. Just nodded once.
---
2 PM. Azure League publicity team.
They wanted to talk about Sol.
Not directly — they were too careful for that. They couched it in the language of incumbent messaging strategy, in the rhetoric of "reinforcing stable leadership during uncertain periods," in carefully considered talking points about how consistency was a form of courage. But beneath all of it, the anxiety was visible: Takeshi's team had been watching the Sol's poll numbers for three weeks and they didn't know what to do with what they were seeing.
Hannah listened. She let them lay out the messaging proposals. She offered revisions where the language was clumsy or potentially inflammatory. She approved the overall campaign direction with three modifications noted.
She did not tell them what she actually thought, which was that no amount of incumbent messaging was going to adequately address a candidate who wasn't playing by the same rules. Sol wasn't arguing against Takeshi's record. He was arguing against the idea that the record was the point. You couldn't counter that with talking points. You could only try to make the contrast seem irresponsible rather than inspiring.
She wasn't sure it would work. She was managing it anyway.
---
4 PM. The Sol situation.
Enoch's document was sixteen pages. She read it in eleven minutes while he sat across from her and let her read.
Reclaimed Zone. Licensed hero for four years after operating unlicensed for the four years prior. Ranked mid-tier on registration, advanced rapidly. Widely regarded by the districts he'd covered as — and this was the word that appeared across multiple independent accounts in Enoch's research — reliable. Not spectacular. Not theatrical. Reliable. He showed up. He kept showing up.
She understood, without needing Enoch to explain it, why that image had moved people.
She set the document down.
"He's not going to accept full brand management," she said.
"No. The partial costume arrangement is probably the ceiling of what he'll agree to."
"Which means we can't shape his image from the inside. We can only respond to it."
"Correct."
"And he's polling at twenty-eight." She looked at the trend line. "Going up."
Enoch was quiet.
Hannah stood, moving to the window. The city stretched out below, Central Tower's shadow falling east in the late afternoon light. Somewhere down in the Reclaimed Zone, the people who'd filled that community hall were watching the poll numbers with a feeling she recognised at a distance: the precarious, half-believed sensation of something actually working.
She knew what Big Boys would do eventually if Sol's numbers kept climbing. The same thing they always did. She didn't know yet exactly what form it would take. She didn't need to know.
She just had to keep managing the surface of it while the decisions were made somewhere she couldn't see.
"Keep building the profile," she said. "I want a complete picture before the first debate. Everything public, everything we can source. If he has any message vulnerabilities, I want to find them before his opponents do."
"And if he doesn't have any?"
Hannah looked at the city.
"Everyone has some."
She said it the way a person says a true thing they would prefer not to have to say. Enoch heard it that way. He made a note and didn't push.
The door opened. Lucius leaned in, his expression unchanged from every other time he'd checked the room today. "Your evening materials are in from the debate prep team."
"I'll be with you in a moment."
He withdrew. She stayed at the window for a few seconds longer than she needed to, watching the light shift across the city she'd grown up in and would probably never leave.
Then she turned away from it, and went back to work.
---
TO BE CONTINUED