Getting into the Joint Force Headquarters for today’s eting with my sister-in-law was far easier than… pretty much every other ti I’d been in the building. Part of was surprised that the guards, who normally demanded I announce myself while readying their weapons, instead just shrugged nonchalantly and let in.
Another part of reminded myself that this was now my third visit in a couple months, whereas it wasn’t uncommon for to go a full year between trips over to Stadium-Armory. These sa n had also seen the Staff Judge Advocate herself co and grab from the lobby last ti I was here, so maybe they’d made so assumptions?
Regardless, I made my way to gan’s office door without any real fuss, and started on my usual pattern of knocki—
“Just get in here,” gan groused, voice loud enough that I clearly heard her through the door. And sure, it was nice that I wouldn’t be left outside, but she didn’t even let finish my knock! Boo. That said, an invitation was an invitation, and she sounded horribly stressed, so I opened the door and let myself inside.
gan sat at her desk, one hand massaging her temple while she rifled through so docunts with the other, occasionally bringing the pen held between two of her fingers down to write sothing. Or maybe just notate, I wasn’t sure. She didn’t even look up when I entered, so I took a seat in front of her desk and waited for her to finish whatever had her attention. I didn’t have to wait long, thankfully; gan flipped through three more pages, signed and dated the last one, and set the bottom of the last page into a big, heavy press at the corner of her desk to emboss her seal of office.
Then she flipped the file closed, set it aside, closed her eyes, and sighed.
“Busy week?”
“You have no idea,” she grumbled, tapping out a staccato rhythm on the desk with the tip of her pen. “Was it too much to hope that rat bastard Gillespie was—”
gan had finally looked up at , and whatever train of thought she’d had before, it was now at a dead stop.
“Naomi.”
“Hm?”
“Your ears…” she trailed off for a mont, frowning. “Why do you look like a kicked puppy?”
“Hmph.” I crossed my arms, pouted, and looked askance, keeping my ears as far out to the side and parallel to the ground as I could to show that I was grumpy.
“Naomi…”
“You didn’t let finish my knock,” I grumbled.
“You—” gan stared at for a mont, so I wiggled my ears a tad before continuing to hold them out flat to the sides. “Naomi, it was just a knock at the door.”
“No, it was a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm!” I protested. “It is sacred, and must not be interrupted.”
gan blinked. I kept up my pout.
“You’re screwing with , aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I answered, letting my ears perk back up with a grin. “Yes I am.”
gan tossed the pen down onto her desk and sat back, and finally let out a rueful little laugh. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let out a sigh. Tension visibly drained out of her shoulders as she did this, and I could only imagine that this was the first ti since last Wednesday that she’d given herself a mont to just breathe.
“Fuck I needed that,” she said, her voice soft and almost exhausted to my ears. “Thank you.”
“Were you working over the weekend?” I asked, even as I withdrew a carefully-packaged bundle of docunts from my briefcase and set them down on the desk. “Also, these can go back into the filing cabinets downstairs when you have an excuse to go down there.”
“So right after we’re done, got it,” gan grumbled. She slid the docunts across her desk and into a drawer, which officially made our little heist a few weeks back no longer my problem. “And yes, I was. Gillespie was the perfect excuse for the top brass to order a sweeping audit of the National Guard, and as you well know…”
“... shit rolls downhill,” I finished for her. “Gillespie wasn’t the only one, I take it.”
“We’ve found two more active duty, and three in the reserves. Not all neo-Nazis,” she clarified, “just bearing suspicious affiliations. Ugh, enough of that.” gan shook her head and leaned forward again in her chair. “Give so good news. Liberty?”
“Well, today is the fourteenth, so if the stalker wanted to stick to his usual pattern of having his mailings always arrive on the fifteenth, he would’ve needed them in the mail over the weekend at the absolute latest,” I told gan. “Actually, you might be able to check with USPS to see if they refused service to anyone trying to send mail to the NMR recently.”
“And you’re sure he wouldn’t have just gone to UPS or FedEx?” gan pressed.
“He’s been using USPS for a reason,” I explained, crossing my legs as I leaned back in the chair to get more comfortable. gan really had sprung for comfy seats, they were pretty nice to sit in, but the back of the chair was making my back ache a bit. “Both UPS and FedEx are corporations, so at the end of the day, they care more about the bottom line than anything else. They protect the privacy of their custors, sure, but only to a point. Hell, all it would take to give them the absolute worst PR imaginable is one bad soundbite from Lady Liberty about how soone was using their services to harass mbers of the NMR with secret identities.”
Also — and this was the part I couldn’t tell gan — that thing I’d asked Cruz to do, last week? We’d set up a little computer virus that would automatically refuse service to the stalker in the FedEx and UPS systems, should he try and use them to send anything to an NMR PO Box. Was I fairly certain that this was overkill? Yes.
But sotis, it didn’t hurt to be doubly sure.
“You’re giving this person a lot of credit,” gan warned. “Do they deserve it?”
“Potentially?” I hesitated a mont, flicking an ear as I thought of the best way to put this. “I still don’t know how he got his original search paraters, but he’s been using LL’s response to each of his mailings to further narrow down his geographic profile.”
“How close did he get?”
“DMV area.”
“Shit,” gan hissed. Then she sighed, and frowned. “It should never have gotten to that point. What the hell were the brass thinking?”
“I have a thought, but…”
“No, no, don’t hold out for my sake,” she said. “You’re an A1 too, your perspective has more rit than mine does. Give it to .”
“Well… consider what Lady Liberty is capable of,” I began, ears tilting back in concern and worry. “The only people who can get across the planet faster than her are teleporters, she can survive hard vacuum for an extended period of ti, and she is one of those ‘Rods From God’ that had engineers salivating back in the twenty-tens. If Lady Liberty were to go rogue, the number of people who could actually stop her can be counted on both hands — and four of them would probably just welco her with open arms.”
“Yes, because the Reagan administration shit the bed with Hawaii, and now we’re all paying for it.”
“I an, you said it, not ,” I said, raising my hands in defense against my sister-in-law’s slowly rising temper. “Point being: Lady Liberty is functionally untouchable. But her family isn’t.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“... are you suggesting that the brass was—”
“Holding her secret identity hostage against her, yes,” I broke in. “The sa way they held my citizenship hostage against .”
“That’s…”
gan trailed off, staring at her hands. I didn’t say anything, and just let her sit there with her thoughts as the clock ticked away. The phone on her desk lit up, but didn’t ring, and gan idly tapped a button to reject the call without looking.
“I can’t do anything about that right now,” she said after a good ten seconds of silence. “But Mariem deserves better than that. I’ll look into it once we’re done auditing our people for criminal ties.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
“What?” gan blinked, surprise coloring her expression. “Naomi, you… you do know you don’t need to pretend to care anymore, right? I thought you hated her?”
“Yeah, well, I thought I did too,” I said with a rueful chuckle, my ears folding low atop my head in slight sha. “But there are so things nobody deserves. And maybe I could’ve convinced myself that she was the exception, fifteen years ago. But not now.”
“I see…” gan gave a stern, appraising look. But then, she broke into a smile. “So was it her husband or her daughter?”
“W-what?” I blinked, ears tilting back in confusion.
“Waqas or Hounaida,” she said. “Which one of them won you over? Wait, no, don’t tell : it was Hounaida, wasn’t it?”
“What — h-how did you know?”
“Ha! I knew it!” gan exclaid, letting out a victorious little giggle at my expense. But then her smile dimd, and beca a little lancholy, almost. “Naomi, did it not bother you that I couldn’t do anything? That I was here in a position of not inconsiderable power, and yet had no options but to ask you for help under the table?”
“I an, it did a little, I’ll admit, but you have to rember that I’m also an A1, gan,” I explained. “I expect any help the NMR might offer to co with dozens of strings attached, so I sort of, you know… replaced any instance of ‘couldn’t’ with ‘wouldn’t’, here.”
“That’s… fair,” she muttered. “I pulled a lot of strings to help Mariem the first ti this bastard showed himself. Traded in a lot of favors.” Her lips twisted almost into a sneer, but it wasn’t aid at . “Of course they weren’t gonna listen to again the second ti.”
“That’s — I know you ntioned being her friend,” I ventured, “but this…?”
“I should’ve been more up front with you, and I’m sorry about that,” gan admitted, glancing up from her hands to look in the eye. “Mariem’s been a close friend of mine for quite a while now. She asked to be Hounaida’s godmother.”
Oh. Oh.
“Is that on record sowhere?” I asked gently, keeping my voice soft.
“It is,” she confird. “We don’t think Mariem will go up against anyone who could kill her anyti soon, but just in case… it’s her husband, her parents, her sister’s family, and then I’m the last resort.”
“Better to have and not need,” I mused. And I understood, really — after all, I was a little girl’s godmother, too. Not that either Satsuki or I thought anything would happen to her, but you just never knew.
“Exactly. Anyways!” gan clapped her hands lightly. “Enough about that. Back to another matter at hand: the boys.”
“Brendan and Zeke,” I nodded. “I assu everything’s set up on your end?”
“It took a bit of doing, but yes,” gan agreed, grumbling good-naturedly as she picked up her pen from the desk and spun it between her fingers. “The stipend is set up, their employnt at the drag bar is mostly above board now, and their neo-Nazi cop parents, God I can’t believe I had to actually say that,” she griped, “were denied bail. But there’s one last thing I need to know as their Guardian ad litem. Naomi?”
gan pointed her pen straight between my eyes.
“How.”
“Hmm?” I grinned, my swaying tail lightly dusting the floor behind my chair.
“How the fuck did you manage to get both of them spots at the British International School!?” she all but yelled. “Scholarship spots! That school’s tuition is forty grand a year!”
“gan.” I looked her in the eye and offered a patient, if exceedingly smug, smile. “You are asking , the walking diplomatic incident, who used to live with the UK’s diplomatic silver bullet, and was a guest of honor at a symposium hosted by Oxford in the UK… how I got the British International School to take an additional two students for one asly year.”
A beat passed between us. I flicked an ear absentmindedly, but a knowing little smile slowly slipped across gan’s face, which had my own smug grin fading away.
“You know, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but you’re rather good at getting the right words into the right ears,” she comnted.
“Don’t remind ,” I groused, huffing slightly as I crossed my arms. “I swear, playing ssenger and courier is all I’ve been doing this last month. Everyone else did the important work for things; kind of makes feel unimportant or replaceable. You know?”
“… uh-huh,” gan deadpanned, raising an eyebrow in what looked to like disbelief. “Now, far be it from to try and school soone else on her own heritage, but aren’t Japanese fox spirits supposed to be ssengers?”
“And your point is?” I replied testily, ears pulled low in challenge.
“No, nothing!” gan held her hands up in apparent surrender as she backed off of the point. “I’m just saying, there’s nothing wrong with ‘just’ being the ssenger. You know what they say, wars are won on logistics, armies march on their stomachs, and so on.”
“And yet no matter how many tis I hear that, it’s not gonna change—”
The phone on gan’s desk rang, cutting off as both of our attentions snapped to the handset. A sharp intake of breath had looking towards gan just in ti to see her eyes go wide and face pale a little bit, her lips dropping open in obvious surprise.
“What?” I asked, ears falling low in concern. “Who is it?”
She held up a hand to silence , took a breath, and picked up the phone.
“General Mathers, sir!”
Mathers!? Ooh, shit, this wasn’t—
General Matthias Mathers was the current Chief of the National Guard Bureau — the General for the National Guard, and a mber of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was also the top brass in charge of the National Moonshot Regint, to whom all superheroes nationwide theoretically answered.
And if he was directly calling gan…
“No, sir, I haven’t; I’ve been in a eting… they what!?” gan shrieked, loud and sudden enough to send scooting my chair back to get away from the noise. “That’s — yes sir. Yes; I understand, sir, I will. Consider it done.”
gan set the phone down before clenching her hands into white-knuckles fists, tight enough that I was worried she’d cut herself with her fingernails. In contrast, her jaw was almost slack, eyes unfocused and glassy as she stared out into nothing.
“gan?” I ventured, voice soft with concern. “What… what just happened?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she picked up the phone, dialed in an extension, and started barking orders at what I guessed to be the mont soone picked up on the other end.
“Sergeant, I need a car and an escort ready in five. Yes, I saw, we’re responding to that. Orders from brass. Get that handled and inform the vultures to keep away, or else.”
She slamd the phone down this ti. I didn’t try to ask her what was wrong again, though, because she turned towards with an almost forlorn despair in her eyes.
“We were wrong,” she said, letting out a little mirthless chuckle. “We guessed, we gambled, and now we’ve fucked up.”
“gan, what are you talking about?” I asked, anxiety starting to crawl up my gorge at her sudden one-eighty. “What happened?”
She didn’t answer imdiately. Instead, she jiggled her mouse to wake up her computer, clicked three tis, then turned the screen towards and hit play.
It was a live stream from CNN, which had gone up just three minutes ago. The stream showed over fifteen million concurrent viewers, and the contents were… they… I don’t…
“—ust in, Breaking News from the Capitol Beltway! Multiple news outlets have received docuntation from an anonymous source, which reveals the secret identity of Arica’s most beloved superhero, Lady Liberty!”
It, this — oh, God. Oh, fuck.
“We were wrong,” I gasped out in horror, barely able to tear my eyes from the monitor in front of .
Everything we’d found out about the stalker pointed to sobody patient, thodical, and conniving, but ultimately cowardly; sobody who wouldn’t take risks, who wouldn’t rock the boat, who would rather retreat outright than reposition. Everything I’d managed to put together about the stalker and shared with gan, from the man’s apparent motivation to his thodology to what I’d gleaned about his profession, all of it suggested this.
But we were wrong.
“—is none other than the unassuming Mariem Mouthlaki of Bethesda, Maryland, where she lives with her husband, daughter, and extended family just one mile from Federal Moonshot Bureau headquarters!”
We were so very, very wrong.
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