“The list I gave you back in June…”

Astral nodded. “I couldn’t do anything with it. It’s just a bunch of names.”

Damien nodded. “Yeah, I figured that was going to be the case. It was just a small sample size anyway. I have other people working on it, so don’t worry about it. But I am running another experiment.” He tapped the side of head, indicating her glasses. “You’re wearing the upgraded version?”

Astral nodded.

“I’m sure everyone and their dog has told you not to take those off in public. Sure, I configured it to mask the glow in your eyes, and that will only last for so long.” He paused, “By the way, maintenance checks have get done every three months now if we want to keep up with your stigma’s growth.”

She nodded. She understood that her guardians did not want to deal with backlash caused by the ignorant. Of course, if humanity proved too much of an obstacle, she might well let them fend for themselves. Her job was to eradicate demons, not necessarily to save humanity from itself.

“I programmed a feature into the latest model. All hand coded by yours truly, not a stitch of borrowed code anywhere.” Damien beamed with pride. He tapped the side of his right temple. “Tap twice here, and you’ll trigger the application. It’ll scan everyone in front of you. It’ll start with your line of vision, and work its way out.

“From there the app will run the api for the Academy’s search tool, and cross reference the student or staff IDs through the school’s registration database. You’ll have a visual indicator, a name and a green box for successful scans, and a red box for failed scans. I expect the bulk of the failed scans will be guests of the Academy. You don’t have to worry about those folks, my people will sort them out.

“Your lenses will hold a ton of data, but even then, it has its limits. Do a data dump at least once a day, twice if you can manage it. You can run a data dump by tapping the left side once.” He mimicked the action on himself. “You’re going to have to go outside of the Academy grounds to do a data dump. Everything here is stored locally with no external network capabilities. Add in the firewalls, and the security protocols…” He tossed his hand up in the air. “I’d put my credits on the fact that these programs don’t just do what they say they do. I have a hunch the back-end is running some non-standard security systems disguised as firewalls. I don’t want our stuff to touch their stuff. You get me?”

Astral nodded, not entirely sure she was following the technical information. If she converted the terms to magic, as in barriers for firewalls, and networks as energy funnels, she understood the basics. Since there was evidence of magical practices on the site, Damien’s caution is well earned.

“When the upload is done, we’ll cross-reference students on this year’s roster and maybe locate the few who hadn’t turned up. Won’t do us much good for previous years though, but at least we’ll have a timestamp for current students, and maybe keep track of their presence over the school year. All that helps going forward, but that’s not why I need you, specifically, to do the scans.”

Astral cocked her head, intrigued.

Damien continued, “You mentioned something about personal connections and impartial systems. I’m wondering if seeing these people for yourself, tying a name to a person will help, sort of in the long term…” He was referring to her ability to see souls.

‘Ah!’ Astral smiled. ‘Clever, clever man.’ It was possible that once she established a personal connection, however small, even with the basic awareness that this person existed, she would be able to read their souls from the data Damien had given her. “It pulls up more than just names, right?”

Damien nodded. “Lists enough individual data that you should be able to separate Mary born in Mountain Crest from Mary born in Sector 27 of the capital. If it works, I have a few ideas we might explore. To do this right, you’re going to have to be pretty friendly over the first few weeks so we can get to know as many people as possible. Given how much PR pops is planning to spend announcing your enrollment, people are going to want to make quick friends with you.”

Noland arched a brow so high it nearly joined his close-cropped hair. “Are you insane?”

“I agree with Noland,” Astral said. “Just kill me now.”

Damien laughed; the underlying tone of cruel amusement took the joy out of what would have been a wonderful sound. “You’ll be fine. Show up fashionably late, make your rounds, and disappear. People will know you’re there, but will only invest so much energy in actually looking for you. If they engage in conversation, ask about them, look interested, and after a few minutes, excuse yourself because you see someone you recognize. No one will want to hold you up, at least not initially. Short bursts. You can handle that. Don’t think of it like a crowded room. It’s always just you and the other person, which I know goes against all of your awareness training, but that’s the only way you’ll survive the noise of having a social life. I’m told it’s good to step out of your comfort zone.”

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Astral and Noland glanced at one another. The sergeant’s second brow had joined the first, and Astral felt her blood run cold.

“Focus on the mission. Focus on why you’re doing this,” Damien reiterated, his tone turned serious. “You do this, you do it right, and not only do we find a way to make sure these folks all survive the year, but you’ll also have the start of a solid information network. In my world, this is how this works. I know in your world; demon informants aren’t really a thing. How you shape and use your network is up to you, but you have to start with something.”

“This scan tech is a little too invasive,” the sergeant objected.

Damien shrugged. “Our society is under constant surveillance, and has been for the past two hundred years at least. Pops says that people were monitored constantly in the old world, just the-powers-that-be hid it until people just… I guess, got used to it.”

“Yeah, but private companies…” Noland let the thought hang.

“Who do you think makes the tech?” Damien pointed out. “Look we’re the good guys-“

“Says every bad guy ever,” Noland retorted.

Damien chuckled. “This is the only way I can think of doing this fast. If there’s a demon at the school, we want to get ahead of it. If there’s a group of people wanting to use a demon for reasons, we want to get ahead of that too.”

The Sergeant scowled. “You can justify pretty much anything if you say you’re doing it for the good of the people.”

Astral frowned. He was not wrong. “If you can come up with an alternative, I’m all ears.” Damien aura softened with compassionate greens. “I definitely don’t want to end up as the bad guys, and this data could ruin lives in the wrong hands. Go ahead and tell me what would make you feel better about this.”

The Sergeant lowered his eyes, cowed.

“He’s serious,” Astral said. “Find us another way. Until then, we’re doing the best with what we have.”

The greens in Damien’s aura darkened as his thoughts shifted. “It gets worse…”

Astral shut her eyes, steeling herself against the frustration. She felt like she was standing at the precipice of the inane, one step away from walking away.

“Well…” Damien glanced at the sergeant, then back to Astral. “You know how I said I stepped out of bounds into less legal territory. Well, it was not just a step. I pulled all of the student data as far back as I could go.”

The Sergeant gaped, and gestured with a wave of his hand silently saying, ‘What the hell?!’

“It’s not conclusive, but it’s not good either.” Damien struggled for a moment with finding the words. He put the side-by-side into drive. For a while he stared into the distance, passing several shield rods. “It looks like regular students have been going missing for years. I mean, people go missing all of the time… But I’m taking into account the first-year curve, and the sponsors terminating their contracts, but even then… The numbers are just too high to be normal. I don’t want to put this on your shoulders. I’ll handle this.” But he needed the invasive data from the Academy to get a clear picture of his missing students.

“I want to know,” Astral said firmly. “I don’t expect to be much help, but your findings may be part of a larger pattern. I need to know the pattern.”

Another long moment passed between the trio, several more shield rods slipped by.

“I have people cross-referencing last known locations of the missing students. Someone edited…” he took a heavy breath. “There are gaps in the security footage, seamless crops in the footage showing an empty location. It looks natural too. There’s one instance where we saw a student enter a building from one of the outside cams, and then bam! He doesn’t turn up on the interior cameras. We have no visual evidence that these students have ever left the Academy. According to the logs, the student had tickets to leave for home that day. Thing is these students aren’t disappearing specifically at the train station. There’s no specific location, no specific time. But when they do go missing, it’s when they are alone.”

Alone. That was the detail that worried Damien. The nature of Astral’s work meant she’d spend the bulk of her time alone, especially on night patrol where she intended to use a new invisibility spell to keep her hidden from the drones, a spell inspired by the very same demons she hunted.

“Cult,” Noland repeated. “We’re dealing with a cult. That sort of thing says they’ve been perfecting their craft over years. And I hate to say it, but I think this is bigger than us, bigger than even the Academy. The Councilman might be right in that we need to take this slow and weed out the snakes.”

“You think the Council’s involved?” Damien asked, his tone wavered in its certainty, begging that his suspicions were just too far out there.

“The whole bunch? Nah, that’s too fucked up even for me. But a handful? Maybe. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s just people with connections, with influence asking for favors that just add up over time,” Noland said. “The thing is we don’t know. Not for sure anyway. Which means, Lady Daamon, you’re at risk in a big way that has nothing to do with demons.”

Astral shrugged. Humans will be Humans. If they eliminated her, they would inevitably kill their chances of survival. She might not live through it, but she’d die knowing that Cosmic Justice would be done. “What’s there to do? Should I go home, leave this all to continue, pretend I don’t know? Let another legion loose onto the world? I won’t stand by and let it happen. I know it sounds like idealism, but this- fighting demons is what I do well. The rest of it… I’ll have to trust that you, and my family will handle it before they can get to me.”

“Our world depends on it,” Damien said. The darkness of his aura remained.