The briefing took eleven minutes.
That was the part that stayed with Hannah afterward — not the content, which was its own particular kind of alarming, but how quickly eleven minutes could swallow something that should have taken much longer to process. Toby laid it out clean and fast the way he always did, no editorialising, no hedging. Just the facts arranged in order from least to most disturbing.
Fact: The Magma Hog attacker — the one King and Miguel had brought down in Merchant Plaza three days ago, the first perpetrator they'd actually managed to hand over to NCC alive — was dead.
Fact: He'd been killed by a fellow inmate at the holding facility. Single puncture wound to the base of the skull, delivered during a forty-second window where the cell corridor camera had experienced what the facility's technical team was calling a spontaneous calibration error.
Fact: The inmate responsible had then killed himself within the same forty-second window. No note. No apparent motive. No history of violent behaviour in his file.
Fact: The background check Toby had run on the attacker himself had returned almost nothing useful. The man had no New Kong citizenship record. His biometrics matched no registered identity in the city's database. The aliases Toby had traced were dead ends — shell identities built to last exactly as long as they needed to and then dissolve. Whoever had built them knew what they were doing.
"So we have nothing," Miguel said.
"We have confirmation," Toby said. "Someone with reach inside NCC cleaned this up. That's not nothing. That's actually a significant piece of information."
"A piece of information we can't use," Kira said from his chair, pen resting still against his notebook for once. "Because we have no way to trace who reached in."
"Not yet."
The room was quiet for a moment. Hannah's office felt smaller than usual with the full team assembled — chairs pulled in, the campaign boards along the wall temporarily covered, the city visible through the windows behind her desk looking like it always did, indifferent and enormous and continuing without pause regardless of what happened in here.
"The inmate's background," Charlotte said. "Anything at all?"
"Long-term resident, minimal record, no known connections to organised crime or NovaBreed networks." Toby's expression was flat in the way it got when information genuinely frustrated him. "On paper he's exactly the kind of person who has no reason to do what he did. Which is, of course, exactly what a well-constructed false profile looks like."
"So he was planted," Liam said.
"Almost certainly. Inserted into general population at some point before our attacker was transferred. Waiting." Toby paused. "The timing of the camera malfunction was too precise to be coincidence. Forty seconds. Whoever planned this knew the exact window they had."
Hannah had been listening from behind her desk, her hands still, her expression composed. She'd been listening and she'd been calculating.
Someone had reached into a government containment facility, silenced a witness, and cleaned the scene in forty seconds. That level of coordination didn't come from a rival executive or a disgruntled contractor. That came from infrastructure. Resources. The kind of patient, deep-rooted capability that took years to build and answered to something far larger than a business dispute.
She already knew what it answered to. She'd known for most of her adult life.
What she didn't know was why now. Why this specific escalation. Why the attacks had shifted from occasional and manageable to frequent and increasingly bold.
"New protocols stand," she said. "Toby, keep looking for any trace on the attacker's identity — even a partial origin point helps. Charlotte, I want to know if there have been any unusual personnel changes at the NCC facility in the last six months. If someone was placed, there's a record of the placement even if the record was obscured." She looked around the room. "We assume the information leak is still active. We assume everything shared beyond this room has the potential to be monitored. That doesn't change."
People nodded. Some made notes.
"That's all for now."
The team dispersed with the practised efficiency of people who had somewhere to be. Toby left first, already on his phone. Liam held the door for Kira, who passed through it without acknowledgment. Miguel said something quiet to Charlotte on the way out that Hannah didn't catch. Kit slipped away last, silent as always.
Charlotte paused at the door. "You need anything?"
"I'm fine. Send the design review files through when Valentina's team submits them."
"Done." A beat. "You look tired."
"I'm always tired."
Charlotte's mouth curved slightly — not quite a smile, more an acknowledgment — and she pulled the door closed behind her.
The office settled into quiet.
Hannah looked at the covered campaign boards. Then at the window. Then at the city that kept going regardless.
Three days ago someone had sent a man made of living magma through a public plaza to kill her, and whoever sent him had enough reach to have him killed before he said a single useful word. That was the situation. That was the world she moved through every day, managing her division's output, running election narratives, negotiating costume contracts, sitting in meetings, answering emails before 8 AM.
She pulled up Enoch's updated Sol file and started reading.
She'd gotten through four pages when Mint appeared.
No sound of approach — she simply materialised on the desk's edge the way cats did when they had decided their presence was overdue and saw no reason to announce it. Snow-white fur with curry-blue stripes running from the crown of her small head down her back in thin, elegant lines. Blue eyes that matched them exactly. Her gold name collar caught the late afternoon light coming low through the windows. She was half the size of a normal adult cat and carried herself as though this was everyone else's problem.
Mint looked at Hannah for approximately one second. Then she looked toward the office door.
Hannah followed her gaze.
King stood in the doorway, the door slightly ajar behind him. He'd stepped out after the briefing for his standard corridor rotation and apparently come back to find the announcement already handled.
"She does that," Hannah said.
King looked at the cat. Mint looked back at him with the focused attention she rarely gave anyone other than Hannah and Charlotte.
"I can come back," he said.
"You're fine. Come in."
He entered, letting the door close behind him. Mint tracked his movement across the office, and when he reached the desk and stopped — maintaining professional distance, hands at his sides, that default stillness — she simply walked to the near edge closest to him and sat down.
King looked at her for a moment.
Then, with the automatic quality of someone who hadn't consciously decided to do it, he reached out and scratched behind her ear.
Mint's eyes closed halfway. A sound emerged from her that was disproportionately large for an animal her size.
"She likes you," Hannah said, watching.
"Apparently." He didn't stop. His expression had shifted — not dramatically, not into something unguarded exactly, but fractionally softer than the default. The way a person's face moves when they're doing something that feels familiar.
"Do you have a pet?"
"Yes."
"What kind?"
He paused for just a moment. "A cat, I think."
Hannah looked up from her tablet. "You think?"
"It's a cat."
"You seemed uncertain."
"I'm not uncertain."
She set the tablet down. "Where is it?"
"Hibernating."
She stared at him. He continued scratching Mint's ear with perfect composure.
"Cats," Hannah said carefully, "don't hibernate."
"Mine does."
She looked at him for a long moment, trying to determine whether this was deadpan humour or some variety of concerning sincerity. His expression offered nothing. Mint continued purring at a volume that suggested she had no concerns either way.
"It's not even winter," Hannah said. "It's late June."
"Its a weird cat," King said.
Hannah laughed. It came out before she'd decided to, short and genuine, the kind that surprised her slightly. She pressed her fingers to her mouth for a second, composing herself.
King glanced at her. Something shifted very briefly in his expression — there and gone, too quick to name.
"I had you figured for someone who is always serious," she said, when she'd recovered. "Every situation, same expression. Same energy."
"I'm only serious on the outside."
"Is that right."
"It depends on the situation," he amended. "Some situations require it."
"And this one doesn't?"
He considered this with apparent sincerity. "Your cat walked across a desk to make an introduction. It seemed rude to ignore."
Mint chose this moment to butt the top of her head firmly against King's hand, demanding continuation of services. He obliged without comment.
Hannah watched them for a moment. The late afternoon light caught the blue lines in Mint's fur, made the gold collar glow faintly.
"Can I ask you something?" King said.
"You can ask."
"What are your powers?"
The question landed cleanly in the quiet room. Hannah's hands, which had been relaxed on the desk, stilled.
It wasn't that it was a strange question. In a world where NovaBreed abilities were public knowledge and social currency, people asked about powers constantly. It was the context — the fact that neither of them had mentioned the rooftop since the day she'd hired him, the fact that she'd assumed from his professional composure that he had either forgotten or chosen not to address it, the fact that she had been almost comfortable with that assumption.
Apparently the assumption was wrong.
"What makes you think I have any?" she said.
"The rooftop."
She kept her expression still. "That was quite a long time ago. I didn't think you remembered."
"I remember everything," he said, simply, without pride. "That building — the access door to the roof is security-coded, locked from inside. No external route that doesn't involve either a powered ascent or significant climbing equipment. You had neither. No signs of exertion when you spoke to me. No elevated breathing, no physical stress."
"Maybe I had the door code."
"The code belongs to building maintenance. You weren't maintenance."
"Maybe I—"
"I've trained for a long time to be aware of my surroundings," he said, not unkindly. "Presences, distances, people approaching. It becomes a kind of sense you can't switch off. I didn't register you until you spoke. That only happens with someone whose approach I genuinely cannot detect."
Hannah was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "Is that the same thing that happened at the tournament? During the finals?"
A pause. Subtle — but there.
"You were there," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"I was watching." She held his gaze. "I felt it. Whatever you did when Adam Mavrick was about to kill Odd. The whole room felt it." A beat. "I felt it. I couldn't move."
The silence between them had a different weight now.
"That's separate," he said finally. "Different from the awareness."
"But it comes from the same place."
He didn't confirm or deny that directly. "The awareness is trained. Something I built over time to compensate for things I needed to compensate for." A pause. "The other thing is not something I use if I can avoid it."
She understood, without him needing to say so, that this was as far as she was going to get. She accepted it the way she'd accepted a great many things about him — not without noticing, just without pushing.
"Beyond that," he continued, redirecting with the smoothness of someone practiced at navigating around edges, "you told me yourself you're capable of protecting yourself. In this city, in your position, with the people moving through your world daily — someone who says that and means it usually has a reason to mean it. The rooftop. The things I can and can't sense around you. The locked door." He let it sit. "It adds up."
Hannah looked at him for a long moment.
"I thought you hadn't remembered me from that night," she said. "It turns out you remember considerably more than I do."
"You found that funny a minute ago."
"I find it funny and slightly inconvenient." She folded her hands on the desk. "My abilities are a secret I can't simply reveal. I'm sure you understand why. The moment I become something other than an executive with a bodyguard, I become a different kind of problem for different kinds of people."
He nodded once. Accepting it without pushing.
"How long," she asked, "have you had it? The awareness."
"Since I was young." He said it the way people describe things that were never optional. "It gets easier to manage over time. Harder to surprise."
"But I surprised you."
A beat. "Yes."
Mint had settled fully now, folded into a neat shape at the desk edge, her purring steady and even. Hannah looked at her for a moment, then back at him.
"The hibernating cat," she said. "Where is it, actually?"
"With my girlfriend."
The words arrived without preamble. Hannah processed them in the space of a second — cataloguing her reaction with the same composure she applied to everything else — and found it doubled. Surprise and not-surprise, sitting precisely side by side.
Not surprise because look at him. Because of course. Because the universe was not that uncomplicated.
Surprise because the background check had been thorough. She'd read it herself — no current registered relationships, no co-habitation records, no financial entanglements suggesting a shared life. He had presented, on paper, as someone who existed in effective isolation.
"You have a girlfriend," she said.
"Yes."
"Our background check didn't surface any current relationships."
"I know." No apology, no explanation — and she understood from his tone that he'd known about the check from the beginning. "I don't like involving her in the work I do. The less information connecting her to me, the better."
Hannah absorbed this. "But she knows where you are? What you're doing? You haven't exactly been nearby — it's been over a month since the tournament."
"She knows the kind of life I live." A pause. "She accepts it."
"That's a considerable thing to accept."
"Yes."
She thought about what that meant. The woman on the other side of that arrangement — someone who knew enough about what he was and what he did to accept it without demanding more. Someone who understood that demanding more was simply not the shape this particular thing took. Someone who waited with that understanding intact, month after month, while he was somewhere she couldn't follow.
She thought about what it said about him that he'd built something like that and then protected it so thoroughly it didn't exist on any record.
She also thought, with a clarity that surprised her slightly, that it didn't change what she'd been carrying for several weeks. If anything it made the thinking sharper. More defined.
Three years. That was the contract. Three years of him as her personal bodyguard, and she was already few weeks into the first year. She was going to spend the remainder watching him stand in doorways with that permanent stillness and scratch her cat's ears with the unconscious gentleness of someone whose hands knew how without being told.
She was very aware of what she was sitting with. She wasn't naive about it. She wasn't building anything she couldn't see clearly. She just also wasn't the kind of person who watched a window closing and pretended not to notice.
"I should get back to the rotation," King said. His hand moved from Mint, who opened her eyes and looked profoundly unimpressed at the development.
"Of course."
He moved toward the door, quiet as always. She watched him go with the composure of someone who has made a private decision and has not yet decided what to do with it.
The door closed.
Mint turned on the desk, watched the door for a moment, then turned back to face Hannah.
"I know," Hannah said quietly.
Mint blinked once, long and slow, in the way cats did when they had understood everything and elected not to comment.
Hannah went back to reading.
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TO BE CONTINUED