Junia has the industrial hose at her feet like a spent weapon. My flannel shirt clings to her frame in ways that would be distracting if I weren't currently watching a city official step out of a town car with the expression of someone cataloging crimes.
Commissioner Voss clicks her pen.
The sound carries across the ruined yard like a gunshot.
"Plot seventeen and plot eighteen. Combined property assessment for the annual residential standards review." She checks her clipboard. "I'm early."
Early. She's early. The competition judging doesn't start for another forty-five minutes and the woman showed up to a war zone like she's walking into a board meeting.
"Commissioner," Valerius scrambles forward, his leather shoes splashing through the mud river currently flowing down the gutter, "I can explain the, ah, the situation. These two have been in flagrant violation of residential codes since-"
"Mr. Thornwood." She doesn't look at him. "I'll assess each property in order. Yours is plot twelve. I'll get to you."
Valerius's mouth opens. Closes. His jaw works silently. A vein pulses at his temple. He retreats to his car like a dog called off a chase.
Commissioner Voss steps off the sidewalk.
Her polished black shoe sinks two inches into the mud. She pauses. Looks down. Her expression doesn't change. She lifts her foot, mud sucking at the heel, and takes another step. Then another. Walking directly through the battlefield with the deliberate pace of a crime scene investigator who bills by the hour.
The clipboard comes up.
She writes something. Her pen moves in small, aggressive strokes. Not flowing cursive. Not casual print. Each letter is a separate act of violence against the paper.
She stops at the trench. The golem's empty husk fills it, stone fragments and dead root matter and pooling brown water. She looks down into it for three full seconds. The pen moves.
More writing.
She steps over a chunk of the golem's severed arm. Her shoe crunches on a fragment of golden rune. She bends, picks it up, holds it to the light. Turns it. Sets it back down on the ground with deliberate care, as though marking its position for a future excavation team.
The pen scratches paper.
Junia's hand finds mine. Her fingers are slick with mud and her grip is iron. I squeeze back. My pulse hammers in my ears, and it has nothing to do with the golem fight. That was physical. Simple. This is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has no weak points, no joints to target, no core to dissolve.
Commissioner Voss reaches the garden archway. The one Valerius tried to demolish. The one Junia saved with bylaw recitations. It's still standing, though the left post is leaning fifteen degrees and a piece of golem debris has punched through two of the crossbeams. Junia's climbing roses hang from it in mud-soaked tangles, petals brown and battered.
Voss tilts her head. Studies the joinery where wood meets wood. Her finger traces the dovetail connection I cut by hand.
She writes.
She moves to the flower bed. What's left of it. Junia's orchids are half-buried in sludge. The marigold border has been crushed under a stone foot. But along the far edge, where the golem's path missed by inches, a row of Junia's wild snapdragons still stands. Defiant. Colors screaming against the mud like paint splashed on a gray wall.
Voss crouches. Examines a bloom. Writes something that takes eleven full seconds.
"Flynn. She's writing a lot."
The commissioner straightens. Turns to face us. Mud to her ankles. Clipboard in her hands.
Her pen clicks.
CHAPTER 17
JUNIA
The commissioner's pen clicks a second time. The sound bounces off the mud and the broken archway and the inside of my skull.
"I have questions."
My stomach drops through my boots. Flynn's hand tightens around mine, his thick fingers squeezing hard enough that I feel the bones shift. I squeeze back harder because if I'm going down, I'm taking his circulation with me.
