My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 166: The Monitor Stopped Filing

By morning the feed had two million views and the academy had a problem it couldn’t reassign.

Soren watched the clip once, at the booth terminal, with Dani’s coffee going cold between them.

Forty seconds of it.

Selah’s cylinder going up, Maren’s fire carpet rolling, the wolf coming out of the seam bigger than she went in, and behind all of it, framed dead center by whoever held the camera, the exhibition square the committee had fought to keep Class Z on.

Their coordinate. Their grave. Their festival.

"They can’t bury us," Dani said.

"They can’t bury us quietly." He scrolled the coverage. Foreign outlets had it. The delegation’s home press had it with the delegate’s own footage cut in. "Quietly was the only way they ever did it."

"So what do they do now?"

"Now they find someone to blame who isn’t them, and they do it in a room with witnesses, because they’ve learned that’s the only kind of room I attend."

The notice went up before noon.

Open inquiry. Incident of the closing reception. All parties of interest summoned.

Soren read the phrase all parties twice and started making a list of who that let through the door.

◆◆◆◆

Dani had the shell mapped by the second pot of coffee.

She’d been pulling it for a season, layer by layer, and the incident had cracked the last of it open, because half the shell’s purchased credentials had used their festival access last night and access used was access logged.

She turned the terminal toward him.

The map was ugly and complete. The reseller. The broker.

The billing office two floors up in the Council building.

Every bought seat, every bought byline, the delegate’s border crossing, the fan-club seeding accounts, the recovery-language drafts, and the works orders for the east yard, all of it hanging off one shell like keys off a ring.

"Every crisis we had this year is on this ring," Dani said. "Paid for in advance."

"Except one."

She looked at him.

"The thing in the ground didn’t invoice anybody," Soren said. "Everything else on your ring is theater. That was a grave. Somebody used the theater to stand us on it."

Dani’s hands went still on the terminal, and she added a column.

◆◆◆◆

Voss came to the booth at dusk.

She came alone, in the gray, with the handheld she’d carried through a hundred rooms full of them, and she set it down on the counter between Soren and Dani with the screen up.

"Full access," Voss said. "Reporting credentials, filing history, the nightly queue, and the read-keys for everything my post ever logged on your class."

Nobody touched it.

"You know what this is worth," Dani said.

"I know exactly what it’s worth. I priced it for seven years." Voss kept her hands at her sides. "It’s worth what my reports were worth, which turns out to be whatever the office that bought me decided to do with them."

"You found your name on the list," Soren said.

"Three lines under the delegate’s." Her face did nothing, which he’d learned was her face doing a great deal. "I filed every night believing the chain ended somewhere clean. The chain ended in a shell. I wasn’t a monitor. I was inventory."

"And now?"

"Now I’ve stopped filing."

She said it plainly, no weight on it, a woman reporting the weather.

"Last night’s queue is still blinking on my wall. It’ll blink until they notice, and when they notice, they’ll ask why, and I’d rather they ask me that in your hearing than in their office."

◆◆◆◆

Soren studied her.

Seven years of dutiful lines going up a chain, a career of never checking the top of it, and the woman had found out on a Tuesday that the top was a purchase order with her name itemized on it.

Most people broke loud when that happened. Voss had broken silent, which was the dangerous kind, the useful kind.

"Why us," he said.

"Because I read the whole list, Kane."

She nodded at Dani’s terminal, at the map she couldn’t see and clearly knew was there.

"Every party the shell bought, itemized. Buyers, press, credentials, the delegate. Everything the office paid for this year."

She paused, the first pause she’d taken.

"Your class isn’t on it. All year they spent money moving things toward you and around you and on top of you, and not once did they spend a unit on you. You’re the only people in this building nobody purchased."

She slid the handheld an inch closer.

"I’ve spent a career filing on the wrong side of that line. This is me switching sides while switching still means something."

◆◆◆◆

Dani took the handheld.

She keyed into it right there, and Soren watched her run the filing history against her own map, node after node lighting up matched, the shell confirming itself twice from two directions, and the second confirmation was the one that would stand up in a room.

"It’s clean," Dani said. "It’s better than mine. Hers has timestamps mine had to infer."

"Then we hold it for the inquiry."

Voss turned to go, and stopped, and looked back at him with the handheld already out of her keeping and her whole career sitting on the counter behind her.

"One more thing you should have before that room," she said. "I pulled the shell’s founding registration on my way out of the archive. Habit. You always pull the founding."

"And?"

"The dates are wrong." Her face did its nothing. "Not wrong. Old. That shell wasn’t built this year for your festival. It’s been registered, funded, and quietly renewing itself since before either of us was posted here."

Soren went still.

"How long," he said.

"Long enough that I stopped trusting the number and re-pulled it twice." Voss buttoned her gray coat. "The office that bought me is new money on an old account, Kane. Whoever runs it was running it before there was anything here worth running it on."

She left.

◆◆◆◆

Dani found the registration inside the hour and put it on the screen, and the two of them looked at the date, and neither said anything for a while.

The count in Soren’s head had a column now, the one Dani had added at noon, the entries with no owner. The pre-filled coordinate. The oiled chains. The shadow that obeyed too fast.

He set the shell’s founding date next to them.

An account older than the office that used it. Money that predated the man everyone was about to blame. A machine that somebody had built early, and patiently, and left idling in the ground like the thing under the east yard, waiting for a year worth spending it on.

"The inquiry’s going to hang all of this on a Vasquez," Dani said, reading him.

"Yes."

"And you’re going to let them."

"I’m going to help them." He closed the terminal. "The Vasquez piece is real. He’ll hang correctly. A room full of witnesses gets its villain, the academy gets its ending, and everyone stops looking."

"Everyone except you."

"Somebody kept oil on those chains for a year, Dani. That name isn’t going to be in any room they schedule."

He picked up his cold coffee and drank it anyway.

"But it’s on my list now," he said. "And my list doesn’t adjourn."