CHAPTER FOUR — THE CLEARANCE (1)

DORIAN

I did not sleep that night.

I have not needed sleep for nine hundred and seventy-four years. Mortals call it a rest; I call it a habit the body abandoned around the time Manhattan was still a swamp. But pacing is different from sleep. Pacing is what a man does when a thread that should not exist goes rigid in his chest at four in the morning and tells him, from across eight miles of cold concrete, that the woman he wants is afraid.

I stood at the window of the tower that had never known warmth and watched her borough breathe. A grid of tiny yellow lights. One of them hers.

"Leon," I said.

He was already in the room. He never knocks anymore. He says knocking is for people who still believe I value privacy, and "you value approximately nothing since February, sir."

"The Moone came to her door at two in the morning," I said.

Leon didn't ask how I knew. He has stopped asking how I know things. It saves us both time. "I found the house," he said. "You were right to send me. It's not a small house. It's one of the old ones—the ones that predate the country. The Moones have been in Manhattan since before Manhattan was a name." He set a folder on the desk. "They deal in artifacts. Provenance. Things mortals hang on walls and tell themselves are just very expensive paintings."

I did not open the folder. I knew what it would say. Every old family has hunted for the Spirit-Touched Mortal for a thousand years. The Moone had simply been the first one with the nerve to walk up her stairs.

"Clear the field," I said.

"Boss," Leon said, carefully, "define 'the field.'"

"Everyone."

He waited. I turned from the window.

"Every hand that touched her in the last month," I said. "Every account that funded the deepfake. Every board that nodded while her painting came down. Every gallery, every PR firm, every venture fund, every cousin's cousin who posted the yacht joke and thought it was free." My voice was quiet. It is always quiet when I am about to do this. "Find them. Unmake them. Not loudly. Quickly."

Leon made a noise halfway between a sigh and a smile. "You are asking me to rewrite the finance section of New York before lunch."

"Then start early."

He picked up the tablet. He did not complain. He has served me long enough to know that there are two versions of me: the one who moves markets for a living, and the one who just felt a mortal woman's terror in his ribs at four a.m. The second one does not negotiate.

By nine in the morning it was done, the way a scalpel work is done—clean, unnoticed until the bleeding starts.

The gallery that pulled Ember and Dawn? Their backer, a man who liked to fund young artists and then decide which ones survived, found his line of credit pulled so fast it was as if it had never existed. By noon he was calling people who no longer returned his calls.

The PR firm that built the deepfake? Leon did something elegant with a shared drive and the password queenelinor1 that I will not describe here, except to say that by evening their client list had evaporated and their founder was giving a very long, very quiet interview from a location he would not name.

The venture fund that quietly yanked Layla's anonymous "scholarship" the week before? Leon leveraged them into a corner and let the corner do the work. They did not even understand what had hit them until three of their own investors called to "discuss the future."

I watched it all on a screen I didn't really need to watch. I already knew how it would end. It always ends this way. Nine hundred and seventy-four years of practice.

"Done," Leon said at last. He sat down across from me. He looked, for the first time all morning, like a man who wanted to say something.

"Say it," I said.

"You realize," he said, "that none of this helps her. You burned down the people who were mean to her on the internet. Good. Brilliant. She's not going to feel safer. She's going to feel like the ground under her apartment just changed shape and she doesn't know why." He tilted his head. "She's going to ask questions, boss. The kind I can't answer with a spreadsheet."

"She can ask me questions."

"She doesn't know you. She knows a wine stain and a gala and a man who canceled a merger to watch her paint." Leon set the tablet down. "With respect. You are nine hundred and seventy-four years old, and you have the social instincts of a volcano. Volcanoes do not protect people gently. They bury villages."

I looked at him. "Are you done."

"I'm adding it to the document," he said. "Don't worry. The document is very long now. It's practically a book. The Day the Ice Cracked: A Memoir by Leon Thorn, Sole Survivor."

I ignored him. I was already looking at the grid of lights again.

She was awake. I felt that too, now—a low current of grief, like a radio left on in an empty room. She had seen the painting. The Moone had shown her the painting, and she had not called me.

That was the part that mattered. That was the part Leon could not spreadsheet.