"This trench." Voss points her pen at the golem crater. "Intentional?"
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
"Yes."
Flynn's head snaps toward me. I don't look at him. I look at Commissioner Voss, who is standing ankle-deep in an earth monster, and I lie with every cell in my body.
"It's a sunken garden bed. Orcish military tradition." The words are pouring out of me now, pulled from some deep well of panic-fueled creativity. "Flynn's warband used to dig fortification trenches and fill them with medicinal plants. We're paying homage to that heritage."
Voss writes. "And the structural debris embedded in the soil?"
"Aggregate drainage. Stone fragments improve water runoff in heavy clay soil. Standard practice."
Voss's eyebrow lifts a fraction of a millimeter. She turns back to the trench. Studies the chunks of golem arm and the golden rune fragments scattered through the mud like buried treasure. She writes for what might be an hour or might be four seconds.
"The archway."
She walks back to it. We follow, our boots making obscene sucking sounds in the mud. She taps the leaning post with her pen.
"This angle. Fifteen degrees off vertical."
Done. We're done. She's going to cite us for structural instability and Valerius is going to seize both properties and turn them into a parking lot for his collection of luxury sedans.
"It references wabi-sabi."
Flynn and I both look at each other.
Voss traces the damaged crossbeams where the golem debris punched through. "The Japanese aesthetic of imperfect beauty. The lean creates visual tension with the vertical trellis. And these gaps in the lattice, where the wood splintered, they frame the climbing roses." She steps back. Tilts her head the other direction. "The effect is striking. Controlled decay alongside aggressive growth."
My mouth is hanging open. I can feel mud drying on my lower lip.
"The, uh." I swallow. "That's exactly what we were going for."
Flynn makes a deep sound. Not quite a word. More like the noise a man makes when reality stops making sense and he's choosing to just ride it out.
Voss moves to the flower beds. She crouches again beside the snapdragons, the ones that survived the golem's rampagethrough sheer stubborn refusal to die. Their stems are bent at wild angles. Mud coats half the petals. But the colors, God, the colors. Fuchsia and tangerine and electric violet, all blazing against the brown devastation like signal flares.
"These weren't staked."
"No. They grow where they want."
"And the structural edging here." She points to the stone border Flynn laid three days ago. Precise. Level. Each piece cut at identical angles and set with military spacing. Half the stones are cracked from the golem's foot. But the line holds. The border stands. And the wild snapdragons are cascading over it, spilling color across the rigid geometry like paint running over a ruler's edge.
Voss stands. Brushes mud from her knee. Opens her clipboard to a fresh page.
"In twenty-three years of residential assessments, I have never seen this particular integration."
Flynn's hand goes slack around mine. His fingers loosen. His whole arm drops six inches like someone cut the tension wire holding it up.
"The structural foundation is unmistakably Orcish military engineering. Clean lines. Functional drainage. Load-bearing walls incorporated into raised beds." She gestures at Flynn's stonework. "But the botanical elements reject the structure entirely. They grow through it. Over it. Around it."
She turns to face us. Her expression hasn't changed once during this entire assessment. The same flat, clinical neutrality. But her pen taps the clipboard twice. Fast. Almost eager.
"The result is a garden that appears to be at war with itself. And it's the most visually compelling residential landscape I've assessed in my career."
Flynn's mouth opens. No sound comes out. His tusks catch the morning light. His moss-green skin is caked in drying mudand his tee shirt is nothing but ribbons hanging from his shoulders and he's staring at Commissioner Voss like she just told him the earth is flat and he needs a minute.
"You're saying you like it."
