Page 16 of Alien Devil’s Crown

“Anhara covers the delegation after you peel off, then anchors the mezzanine. On extraction, she rejoins you.” She’d earned both postings on a burning farm; nobody in the room needed them justified. She just nodded, one hand resting on Kallum’s arm.

“Zarek, Bronwen, you’re the breach team. If it goes loud, you make it loud on our terms. Until then you’re the quietest cargo specialists in the sector.”

“I’m never quiet,” Bronwen said serenely. “I’m patient. It’s different.”

“Your breach kit masses forty kilos over the delegation’s equipment allowance,” Brevan told them.

“Then the manifest is wrong,” Zarek said.

“That’s... yes. Fine. Dorn the specialist falsifies his own manifest. It’s in character. I hate that it’s in character.”

I had left Lika’s assignment until last. The room was waiting for it.

“Lika guides the interior. She’s beside me from the front door to the vault and back out of it. Every corridor choice, every timing call inside the building, runs through her.” I said it evenly, at the table where yesterday she’d stood giving a briefing under guard.

“She knows what the building does when it’s tired. None of us do. That knowledge is the plan. Without it we’re the orbital drop with better clothes.”

Nobody objected. Talon went back to his overlays. After the caff-dispenser correction, nobody at the table needed another argument for why her judgment belonged in the plan.

I’d built operations around informants before. You verify what they give you and build contingencies in case they’re wrong or compromised. Now I would be taking her advice inside the building, with no time to verify it. If she was wrong, we died. If she was lying, we died slower.

I trusted what she had demonstrated and kept planning. What bothered me was how often my attention returned to her when the plan did not require it.

She’d taken the seat third from my left, and she worked quickly, correcting what mattered and ignoring what didn’t.

She rebuilt Brevan’s etiquette coaching in an hour. Which directors expect flattery and which punish it. How a Conclave clerk holds a slate when he’s about to escalate. The half-bow that marks money as new.

She pulled the personnel files from the unlocked archive and taught them as people. The lobby watch captain who never checks a petition twice after his mid-shift meal. The mezzanine supervisor who escalates everything on the days his superior visits, and the visit schedule to avoid him.

The hour that ended the arguments came late in the cycle, when Brevan stood to rehearse the delegation interview and she stopped him at the second sentence.

“No. You’re charming him. Don’t charm him.” She came around the table and took the clerk’s side of the mock desk. Her whole bearing changed, shoulders acquiring a bureaucrat’s stoop, face going pleasantly vacant.

“Conclave clerks get charmed nine times a day by people about to waste their time. Charm is the signature of a weak petition. Bore me. Bore me with paperwork so complete that processing you is easier than questioning you.” She slid an imaginary slate across.

“Verratt Combine. Purpose of visit.”

Brevan, who has talked his way past navies, adjusted in real time and gave her tedium: filing numbers, tariff subsections, a petition history with two prior rejections built in for realism. Masterful. She let him get ninety seconds deep and then said, mildly, “Your second rejection. Which office issued it?”

Silence. One second. Two.

“You just died,” she said, pleasant, vacant, terrible.

“Not because you didn’t know. Because you paused. A real petitioner has hated that office for two years and answers before I finish asking. The pause is the tell they train us to catch; the content never matters.” She straightened out of the clerk and was herself again.

“Again. This time, everyone in the delegation hates the Ministry of Adjustments. Personally. It rejected your petition and shorted your quarter. Rehearse the grudge, not the numbers.”

Brevan laughed, delighted. “Rehearse the grudge. Years of doors I could have opened with that.” He turned to the table. “Whatever we’re paying her, double it.”

“We’re paying her the Conclave,” I said.

“Then triple it.”

“You memorized their lunches,” Varrick said at one point, with frank admiration.

“I memorized their habits. Lunch is a habit with a timestamp.” She didn’t look up from the file. “The lock tells you what should happen. The person at the lock tells you what actually happens. That’s the useful part.”

I marked the relevant shift changes on the route.