The Henderson account took until three.

  He made a fresh pot of coffee at one, worked through the corrections methodically, and had the reconciled figures on Hargrove's desk by quarter past three with a handwritten note explaining what had been done and why.

  Hargrove read it, looked up, and said "you're the only person I've ever employed who writes margin notes in pen."

  "Old habit," Medrias said.

  Hargrove looked at him for a moment. Then he looked back at the note. "Good work."

  Medrias went back to his desk.

  Rosario typed steadily at the front desk. Gerald microwaved something in the break room that was, at minimum, not fish. The light coming through the window shifted from sharp to amber by five, and Medrias saved his work, straightened his desk, put on his jacket, and said goodnight to Rosario on his way out.

  "Goodnight," she said, already on the phone again. She pointed at the door without looking up, then held up seven fingers.

  Seven o'clock. He had two hours.

  He stopped for a coffee on the way.

  The evening walk was different from the morning one. The city had shifted registers — the office workers thinning out, the dinner crowd starting to fill in, the light going soft and orange over the tops of the buildings. Medrias had a cup in one hand and his phone in the other and nowhere to be until tomorrow, and that was, he thought, one of the better feelings.

  He checked HeroWatch out of habit.

  [HeroWatch — LIVE: Active Incident — Caldwell & 9th]

  [ScannerFreq: Getting reports of a Class B designation on scene at Caldwell and 9th.]

  [TowerGazer99: Class B means what exactly.]

  [HeroMetrics: Enhanced individual. Think mid-tier criminal. He calls himself Shockwave.]

  [Nightwalker_fan: So who's on scene.]

  [ScannerFreq: Ironveil confirmed on scene per scanner. No other confirmed responders yet. Dispatch is calling for backup but Tower response ETA is 14 minutes.]

  [ClearRateEnjoyer: 14 minutes is a long time.]

  [TowerGazer99: Ironveil can hold 14 minutes.]

  [HeroMetrics: Against a Class B? I wouldn't be so sure.]

  Medrias looked up from his phone.

  Caldwell and 9th was two blocks over.

  He stood there for a moment on the pavement, coffee in hand, people moving around him in both directions. Somewhere ahead, past the intersection, he could already see the edge of it — a faint discoloration in the air above the rooftops.

  He put his phone in his pocket, finished his coffee, and turned left.

  The cordon was a loose ring of police vehicles and yellow tape at a radius of about half a block. A small crowd had gathered at the edges, phones up. Medrias walked the perimeter until he found a gap between two cruisers where the officers were facing inward, and stepped through it without hurrying.

  Nobody stopped him. He had found, over the years, that if you moved with enough certainty in a direction, most people assumed you were supposed to be going there.

  The parking structure was a six-story concrete block on the corner, and it had not had a good afternoon. The entire front face of the second level had been punched through from the inside, concrete and rebar hanging in ragged curtains over the street below. Cars on the first level had been shoved sideways.

  In the open space in front of it, Ironveil was not winning.

  He was upright, which counted for something. His armor was a dark gray composite, no insignia, a visor that read flat and unreadable and was cracked along the left pauldron and one gauntlet had shed its outer plating entirely. He was breathing hard.

  The thing across from him was a man, technically. Wide, dense with an unnatural solidity that meant some variety of enhancement. He was rolling his neck from side to side as if the previous exchange with Ironveil had been nothing more than a warm up.

  "You should call for backup," Shockwave said.

  "Backup's coming," Ironveil spat the words out.

  Ironveil moved fast, faster than someone in that much armor had any right to be. He crossed the distance in under a second and hit Shockwave with a shoulder charge that would have put a car through a wall.

  Shockwave stepped into it, caught him by the forearm, and threw him.

  Ironveil hit the concrete barrier at the edge of the lot and went through it. He came to rest against a parked sedan, one arm under him, and didn't get up.

  The crowd behind the cordon made a sound.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Medrias had already stopped walking. He was standing at the edge of the open lot, still in his jacket and work shoes, coffee cup gone, hands in his pockets.

  Shockwave turned and looked at Medrias.

  Medrias looked back.

  "I suggest you scurry along little man. I have no quarrel with civilians."

  "I'm fine here," Medrias responded.

  He took his hands out of his pockets.

  [Binding of the Still Place.]

  Shockwave's next step didn't happen.

  His leg did not move, and then his other leg did not move, and then his arms, and he stood in the orange evening light looking as if he had been frozen in place by some invisible force. His eyes moved with shock and awe, tracking Medrias as he walked forward.

  "What is—"

  "Shhh," Medrias said, not unkindly.

  He walked past the man and crouched down beside Ironveil, who had gotten himself upright against the sedan and was working on removing his cracked gauntlet.

  "You're the one from this morning," Ironveil said, "The purse snatcher, right?"

  "He tripped."

  Ironveil looked at him. The visor was cracked in the lower left corner and through the gap Medrias could see one eye, dark and watchful. "I have a cracked rib," Ironveil said. "Maybe two on my left side."

  "Can you walk?" Medrias asked him.

  "I'll be fine."

  Medrias straightened up and looked back at the man standing motionless in the center of the lot. The binding would hold for another four minutes, give or take. It was an old working with nothing elegant about it. "Your backup will be here in—"

  A sound overhead. Three figures descending from altitude, Tower response, moving fast. One of them was Stellarion, which was significant overkill for a Class B, but Medrias supposed dispatch had escalated when Ironveil went through a concrete barrier.

  "Twelve seconds," he said, correcting himself.

  Ironveil looked at the frozen man. Then at Medrias. "What's your classification?"

  "Unclassified."

  "That's not an answer."

  "No," Medrias said. "It isn't."

  The Tower response landed. Stellarion hit the ground and took in the scene — the bound man, the structural damage, Ironveil with a cracked pauldron, Medrias in a work jacket and office shoes — and said nothing for a moment.

  "Who secured him?" Stellarion asked.

  "He did," Ironveil said, gesturing with his chin towards Medrias.

  Stellarion looked at Medrias.

  "The binding will hold another three minutes," Medrias said. "After that you'll want something more conventional." He looked at the bound man. "He's cooperative, I think. He just didn't want to wait for the conversation."

  Medrias checked his phone for the time and saw that he was already late.

  "Goodnight," he said.

  He walked back through the gap in the cordon.

  Behind him he heard Stellarion say something, and Ironveil say something back.

  On HeroWatch, by the time he reached his street, the live thread had already hit four thousand replies.

  [HeroWatch — LIVE: Active Incident — Caldwell & 9th — RESOLVED]

  [ScannerFreq: Suspect is in custody. Ironveil is ambulatory. Tower response on scene. Incident closed.]

  [TowerGazer99: Okay but who is the guy in the JACKET.]

  [EastsideWitness: I was there. I have footage. I don't know how to explain what I saw. The guy just — he said something and the Class B stopped moving. And then he checked on Ironveil and talked to Stellarion like it was nothing and WALKED AWAY.]

  [PowerScaler: Walked away?!]

  [ThinkAboutIt: Walked away....?]

  [ClearRateEnjoyer: WALKED AWAY???????]

  [RegistrationNerd: I just checked the incident report. The responding officer listed an unidentified civilian male as a secondary responder. The description matches. No name. No registration tag visible. But at the bottom of the report, under notes, someone has written: "See file: CAPTAIN ARCHMAGE — TIER: UNCLASSIFIED"]

  [TowerGazer99: YOOOOOOOOOO.]

  Medrias put his phone away.

  He was twenty minutes late.

  Rosario was already at the corner table at Nadia's, the small Greek place on Ferraro Street that they had been coming to for eight months now, ever since she had said there's a good place near the office if you ever want and he had said tonight works because it did.

  She had a glass of wine and a bread basket and was reading something on her phone and did not look up when he sat down, which was one of the things he liked about her.

  "You're late," she said.

  "I know."

  She handed him the bread basket and he took a piece.

  The waiter came. They ordered — the lamb for him, the salmon for her, and Rosario put her phone away and picked up her wine and they talked about the things they usually talked about.

  Her sister's new apartment in the Westside, which had a dishwasher for the first time in her sister's adult life and had apparently changed her as a person. The novel Rosario was reading that had started well and then made a decision in chapter nine that she was still not over. Whether Gerald had always microwaved fish or whether this was a new development, then made a joke that it was a Class A offense for him to do so.

  Medrias told her about the Henderson account and the spreadsheet someone had built wrong from the ground up, and she listened the way she always did.

  "He uses the wrong date format," Medrias said.

  "He uses three wrong date formats," she said. "Inconsistently."

  The food came and they ate.

  It was partway through the salmon that Rosario said, without much preamble, "I've been thinking about the Tower job."

  Medrias looked up.

  "The agent position," She turned her fork over in her hand. "They posted it three weeks ago. I've been sitting on the application."

  "What kind of agent work?"

  "Coordination and logistics, along with managing response deployments. That kind of thing." She shrugged one shoulder. "Basically what I do for Hargrove but with a budget and a reason to care about the results."

  Medrias considered this. It made sense, actually — the way she ran the office, the way she tracked everything at once and never needed to be told something twice. He had thought, more than once, that Rosario was somewhat wasted on quarterly filings.

  "You should apply," he said.

  She picked up her wine. "They have a consultant program too. It's an independent registration with flexible hours, you'd basically just advise on cases when asked." She looked at him over the glass. "You could do it from home. Hargrove would probably let you split the hours."

  "I like my job," Medrias said.

  She looked at him for a moment.

  "And doing your job is enough for you?"

  It wasn't a challenge. She said it the way she said most things, straight and to the point.

  "Yes," he replied without preamble.

  She nodded once, like she'd expected that, and reached for the bread basket.

  They finished dinner and the waiter cleared the plates. Rosario ordered a second glass of wine and Medrias ordered a tea and they sat for a while longer.

  His phone buzzed twice in his pocket. Then three more times.

  Rosario's phone lit up on the table, face-down, enough times that even she glanced at it.

  "HeroWatch?" he asked.

  "HeroWatch," she replied.

  She turned it over, scrolled for a moment, and then made a sound that was almost a laugh.

  "What," he said.

  She turned the phone towards him.

  [HeroWatch — BREAKING: The Ferraro Incident — Who Is THE GREY CONSULTANT?]

  [TowerGazer99: No cape. No announcement. Just walked through the cordon in a WORK JACKET, froze a Class B with three words, checked on Ironveil, had a word with STELLARION, and LEFT. I am coining the name right now. THE GREY CONSULTANT. You're welcome.]

  [ClearRateEnjoyer: The grey consultant??]

  [Nightwalker_fan: The grey consultant.]

  [ThinkAboutIt: The grey consultant!!]

  [PowerScaler: I said his power was making people trip. I was wrong. I'm leaving this account and never coming back.]

  [TowerGazer99: No you're not.]

  [PowerScaler: No I'm not.]

  Medrias looked at the screen for a moment.

  "The Grey Consultant," he mouthed the words.

  "It's a good name," Rosario said, taking her phone back.

  "I already have a name."

  "You have a goofy name." She picked up her wine. "The Grey Consultant is a cool name."

  He thought about this.

  "I think I'll stick with Captain Archmage."