"I'm saying it scores." She flips her clipboard shut. "I'll factor in the remaining properties this afternoon. Results posted by five."
She walks back to her car. Each step leaves a perfect mud print on the sidewalk. She doesn't wipe her shoes before getting in. The door closes. The engine starts. She pulls away.
Silence.
Flynn drops the sledgehammer. Twelve pounds of steel hits the mud with a thud.
"She liked the trench."
"She liked the trench."
"The trench a golem made by trying to kill us."
"Art is subjective, Flynn."
A sound rips out of him. Half laugh, half roar. His head tips back and he shakes and the sound rolls across the destroyed yard like thunder. I start laughing too, bent double, hands on my mud-caked knees, wheezing because we're standing in a crime scene that just got a compliment.
Then a slow, deliberate clap echoes from the sidewalk.
Valerius leans against his car. Arms crossed. Smiling.
Valerius pushes off the car. His silver suit doesn't have a wrinkle. Not one speck of mud. No hair displaced from his immaculate platinum braid. He walks toward us across the ruined lawn like he owns it, which, if we lose, he literally will.
"Charming display." His smile is all teeth, no warmth. "I do hope the commissioner graded on a curve for... what's the polite term? Disaster chic?"
Flynn stops laughing. The shift is instant. One second he's shaking with that big, open-mouthed roar of relief, and thenext his spine locks straight, his shoulders roll forward, and the laughter dies in his throat like someone stomped on it.
"Walk away, Elf."
"Or what? You'll throw mud at me?" Valerius gestures at the carnage. The golem trench. The shattered archway. The beds crushed flat under clay footprints. "I've already seen the damage. The commissioner may have been generous, but generosity doesn't win competitions. Precision wins. Magic wins." He brushes an invisible speck from his cuff. "My garden is flawless."
"Your garden is stolen."
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. Valerius's smile doesn't flicker. But his pupils contract. Just a fraction. Just enough.
"Excuse me?"
Flynn reaches into his shorts. The man has nine pockets on each leg and he uses every single one of them. His hand emerges holding his phone, screen already lit, already loaded. He holds it up so the sun catches the display.
Valerius's greenhouse. Timestamp 2:47 AM. The footage is crisp, beautifully framed by Flynn's paranoid military-grade security cameras. In the video, Valerius crouches over Flynn's rosebush with a glowing shovel, ripping roots from the earth while his guards stand watch.
"That's trespassing." Flynn swipes. New image. Valerius hauling Mrs. Patterson's prize dahlias into a wheelbarrow. "That's theft." Another swipe. Valerius grafting stolen root stock onto his own plants under grow lights. "That's fraud." Swipe. The full interior of the greenhouse, rows upon rows of labeled, caged plants, each tag bearing a neighbor's address. "And that's a felony agricultural hoarding charge under Section 14-B of the Municipal Botanical Code."
I didn't even know there was a Municipal Botanical Code. Flynn has it memorized.
Valerius's jaw tightens. The mask cracks, just slightly, just around the edges. His nostrils flare.
"Those images are inadmissible. Obtained through illegal surveillance of private property."
"Your greenhouse sits on HOA common land. Paragraph nine of the neighborhood charter. All structures on common land are subject to resident inspection. You wrote that clause yourself."
The color drains from Valerius's face. Not slowly. All at once, like someone pulled a plug.
"You can't prove jurisdiction."
"I don't have to."
Flynn turns away from Valerius entirely. Dismisses him like a weed. He pulls up Commissioner Voss's contact card on his phone and dials. One ring. Two.
