A jolt of pain ran up Kat’s arm, drawing a hiss as she adjusted the sling.

“Are you sure you’re ready to jump back into business so quickly?” Whippoorwill asked, her forehead furrowed as she leaned toward Kat. “You were just shot a couple of days ago. The doctors said that you shouldn’t exert yourself too much for the next week or so while we wait for the reverse engineered stallesp drugs to do their work.”

“I’m fine,” Kat replied tightly, shifting in her seat to avoid the discomfort of her shoulder contacting the chair’s leather. “I’m sitting down and once we finish the meeting I’ll be heading back to my room. I swear, there’s nothing more ironic than the person who can heal people with her hands taking a bullet to the bone and needing surgery to put everything back in the right place rather than simply using magic to fix everything.”

Across the table, both Emma and Heather’s mouths quirked slightly as they suppressed smiles. Meanwhile, Whippoorwill just glared at her.

“Serves you right,” she said with a sniff, flicking her pink hair to the side with a hand. “If you use magic as a crutch and run into every fight thinking you’ll just be able to spend some mana to fix anything bad that happens, this sort of thing is inevitable. Think of it as a learning experience. Next time you’ll wait for backup.”

This time, Emma and Heather couldn’t help themselves and the conference room broke into snickers. Kat rolled her eyes at the three of them, but there wasn’t much she could say without drawing another scolding from Whippoorwill.

“Anyway,” Kat responded, shifting the subject. “How is Jasper doing? He was in pretty rough shape when we pulled him out of the Silver Phantoms base?”

The snickers evaporated.

“He’s still in rough shape,” Emma said, a pained look on her face. “Jasper’s responding to treatment, but the Phantoms did a number on him. The doctors managed to wake him up, but he doesn’t remember anything from the last month. It’s all blank, like it’s been scrubbed clean.”

“Worse,” she continued, mouth twisted into a thin line. “He can’t speak without slurring and his hands tremble pretty badly whenever he needs to use them. The doctors don’t know if it’s permanent, but-”

“But it might be,” Heather finished for her. “Given the workups I’ve seen, between the physical trauma to his head and brain, and the exotic chemicals they pulled from his bloodstream, it might be for the best that Shareholder Haupt doesn’t remember the last month. The amount of trauma he must have suffered is absurd. If he remembered, I doubt he’d be able to sleep a whole night through if it weren’t for the Tower.”

“That isn’t something we’re just going to let slide,” Kat said angrily, drawing a round of nods around the table. “I don’t care if we have to chase Millennium to the ends of the Earth. I want them dead, I want the buildings they live in bulldozed, and I want the soil they were built on salted. A whole lot of people have become far too comfortable taking shots at us, and if the only way that will stop is a pile of bodies in the town square, then so be it.”

The table lapsed into tense silence. She took a deep, shuddering breath, pushing down the anger bubbling in her gut as her mind flailed about wildly, looking for a new subject to help break the mood.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“What about the Phantoms themselves?” Kat asked. “Do we have any information on Millennium or who they’re working with? Maybe some information on what they managed to pull out of Jasper while they had him?”

Emma shrugged helplessly.

“Belle is looking into it, but there hasn’t really been anything surprising or overly useful. There are records of Shareholder Ricket and his clique doing business with Millennium after the moratorium came down. It also looks like Ricket was the one that infiltrated your security team and created the opening for Millennium to use the mortar on your body doubles. I suppose that’s slightly useful from a blackmail perspective, but that really isn’t anything new. We were already aware that Blake Daniels, Jessica Vos, and Michael Grunewald hated your guts. They weren’t exactly shy about it, and after we got the information on Daniels’ past activities, it only made sense.”

“At least we have Daniels,” Kat replied, trying to ignore the burning itch in her arm. “Even if we don’t have clean data, he should be able to corroborate enough for us to make a public move against Ricket. He can’t be left to get away with what he did to Jasper and tried to do to me.”

Whippoorwill coughed awkwardly.

Kat glanced around the table, and neither Emma nor Heather would meet her gaze. The room’s air conditioner kicked in with a rumble and a soft whoosh of air.

“What?” She asked. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Daniels is dead,” Heather said apologetically. “While you were under, his mansion was taken out by some sort of plasma blast. Ricket is publicly trying to blame us because the explosion clearly used alien tech, but I’d bet my last credit that he was behind it. It barely took Daniels’ son an hour to appear out of a drug and gambling den run by Ricket and announce that he was sure that we were responsible.”

“It can never be easy, can it?” Kat replied, sinking back into her chair and almost immediately wincing as her shoulder hit the leather.

“Belle is running cover for us,” Heather continued, “and the general consensus is that either a third party did it, or that you killed him for making two attempts on your life. Ricket’s clique is screaming and hollering, but most independent shareholders aren’t stepping into the fray because they think that Daniels started the fight and got what was coming to him.”

In the center of the table, the incoming call light on the holographic projector blinked green. Kat cocked her head to the side, looking around the table and only receiving shrugs by way of a response.

“Whip,” Kat said, “if you could?”

Whippoorwill blinked once, accepting the call through her cerebral interface.

“Is the shareholder there?” A man’s voice questioned. “This is Raymond Cooper at the front gate. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother with a call, but well. Some guy wants to talk to her.”

“Did you forget to point to the no soliciting sign, soldier?” Heather asked incredulously. “If it’s important, he can be screened through ordinary channels. Someone will figure out whether or not he can talk to the shareholder after we check his background and cyberware to make sure he isn’t a threat. We are in the middle of a lockdown, now is not the time to let someone in because they are going door to door selling vacuum cleaners.”

“Well,” Raymond answered, dragging the word out in a long drawl. “The guy kinda is a giant black lizard alien with four arms. He says he knows the shareholder. Something about his fleet leaving orbit but him staying behind now that he’s finished ‘the change.’ I don’t know what half of this stuff means, but I do know that it’s far enough above my paygrade that I should probably phone the head lady.”

“Dorrik!” Kat shouted brightly, barely even noticing the pain in her shoulder as she jumped to her feet.