"Alright, so what's the marching orders, boss?" Jordan asks, tone light but expectant.

"What do you mean?" I frown, adjusting my grip on my phone. The voice chat's quiet now, like everyone else is waiting for me to answer something I don't even understand.

"You're the boss," Jordan says, like it's obvious. "Where do we go from here?"

"No, I'm not?" I say immediately, because I'm not. That's their job. The Auditors is their thing, their project, their squad. I just showed up and stuck around. "This is, like, your baby? I'm just here to punch things."

There's a silence. The kind of silence that makes my skin prickle, like I just walked into a room where I'm the last to get the joke. I'm imagining everyone staring at their computer screen, and I don't like it.

Jordan sighs. "Sam. C'mon. This little taco party is all you."

I blink. "What?"

"You heard me," Jordan says. "I mean, look at the roster. Maggie's only got superpowers because you saved her life in the first place. You met Derek--wherever he is--at group therapy. Lily and Amelia are from the Young Defenders, so again, through you. Tasha's your friend from middle school. The only person I dragged into this was Connor, and he's retiring, and he was also in the Young Defenders. You're the central nexus through which the Auditors revolve. The wheel spoke. The gyre."

I open my mouth to argue, but nothing actually comes out.

"Like father, like child," Jordan continues, because they know me too well to let me off the hook. I get the impression that this sentence is about to continue, and is not designed to reference my-- yep, Jordan's talking again. "I'm leaving in a month. I'm gonna be a deadbeat dad and foist the Auditors off to you. Congrats, you're inheriting my awful teenagers."

Maggie snorts. "I refuse to call you 'dad,' Westwood."

"Please don't," Jordan says. "But you get the point. You're the one holding this together, Sam. I'm just the strategist. I'm just your sidekick. So. I'll ask again--what's the marching orders?"

I exhale, flopping onto my back and staring at the ceiling. My mind races through everything we just found, all the stray pieces of information clicking together in weird, imperfect ways.

We know Huang is involved. That much is obvious. Finding her professional details is easy, but that's what makes it weird. She's a legitimate legal partner at Tremont & Fairfax. She specializes in due process cases. That's what her name is on. Not superhuman law. Not municipal contracts. Not the kind of paperwork that city council members typically file.

So why her?

I push up on my elbows, rubbing my temple. "Okay," I say. "Let's think about this. Huang's legit. She does business stuff, but all her pro bono work is due process and criminal defense. Which means her handling the paperwork for Argus Corps makes no goddamn sense."

Maggie makes a noise of agreement. "Right? Shouldn't Maya have, like, a guy for this? She's a city councilwoman."

"Exactly," I say, pointing even though she can't see me. "If Maya was doing things above-board, she wouldn't need an out-of-town megafirm to handle this. She'd have a local firm, a local attorney, someone specialized in superhuman law. Someone from Philadelphia - she might even tap Clara. Uh, the legal counsel for the Delaware Valley Defenders. That's someone for whom this is their whole life. That's what makes this weird - why Huang?"

"But it doesn't tell us why it's weird," Jordan says, picking up the thread. "Okay, let's zoom out. Tremont & Fairfax is shady, but they're not unique. Like I printed out, hold on, let me get my spreadsheets, there..." they continue, and the microphone is slapped with the awful, peaky sounds of rustling papers right against the speaker: "are four other firms that are similarly overinvolved in superhuman criminal defense--Halverson & Levine, Pritchard & Bowen, Perkins & Clyne, and Atwood & Brandt. All of them big names. Three in New York City, one in DC. No members in common. But all handling more superhuman cases than any firm should, statistically speaking. None of them are in Philly. They don't even have satellite offices."

"They've got no connections between each other?" Lily asks.

"No obvious ones," Jordan says. "Which doesn't mean nothing's there. Just that we'd have to dig harder to find it."

I stare at the screen, tapping my fingers against the bedspread. "So, best case, they're just an expensive firm that takes on weird cases. Worst case..."

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"They're a pipeline," Jordan says, voice flat. "A way to launder people in and out of legal trouble. A way to keep the right people out of jail and the wrong people in."

I chew the inside of my cheek. "Okay. Then we need to know what cases they've handled recently. What they're doing right now."

Jordan hums. “Yeah. That’d help. Cases should be public, at least some of them.”

“So can we pull them?” I ask, sitting up properly for the first time in this entire conversation. “Is there a way to look up what cases T&F has been involved in lately?”

There’s a pause. Then Lily, voice tentative, asks, “I mean—okay, but is there any possibility that this is, like, a weird misunderstanding?”

Maggie snorts. “Oh, yeah, sure, they just accidentally ended up working for both Maya Richardson and Aaron McKinley at the same time. Oopsie-daisy, total coincidence.”

Lily makes an exasperated sound. “I’m just saying! We’re doing a lot of assuming here.”

I rub my forehead, exhaling sharply. “Yeah, we are. But here’s the thing.” I sit up properly, adjusting my headset. “We’re not cops.”

Jordan cuts in immediately, completely flat: “Thank God.”

Maggie, deadpan: “Hallelujah.”

Lily: “I wasn’t saying we should be cops—”

“But we’re not,” I push through, ignoring them. “That means we don’t have to operate through due process. We can go off hunches. We can connect dots without absolute certainty and see if the picture looks like something or if we’re just making shapes out of noise.”

Maggie clicks her tongue. “Starting to sound a lot like Argus Corps there, boss.”

I point at my laptop screen, jabbing the air for emphasis, even though nobody can see it. “No. See, that’s the difference. I’m not about to go terrorize Huang or raid her house or zip-tie her to a chair and start demanding answers. I’m not even looking at her. We’re looking at her employer. There’s a gap between ‘following a lead’ and ‘beating the shit out of people on live TV.’”

“Just a little gap,” Jordan mutters.

I gesture broadly. “Argus Corps, as we literally just saw at the marina, uses their lack of oversight to concuss people, throw them in piles, cause crazy amounts of property damage, hold hostages, and zip-tie them so hard their wrists bleed. We’re using our lack of oversight to follow a pretty reasonable leap of logic and see if it gives us a direction to aim our investigation.” I take a breath. “So that, if we do uncover something, we can actually turn it over to someone who gives a shit and won't terrorize them.”

Lily’s quiet for a second. “And if Huang’s innocent?”

“Then we’re not targeting her,” I say, firm. “And we’re making sure that the people here aren’t getting buried in something they have no idea about. If this is a rot that starts at the head of Tremont & Fairfax, then the rest of the firm is just collateral. If we take this thread and find something real, then we’re saving them from going down with the ship when the cannon gets fired.”

Jordan lets out a low whistle. “Sure hope she’s innocent, though.”

Maggie snorts. “Sam, you cannot possibly think that this giant corporate lawyer from New York is secretly a good person.”

“I don’t,” I say. “I just—she didn’t strike me as corrupt.”

“Ah, yes,” Jordan says dryly. “The ‘they seemed fine’ heuristic. Historically bulletproof.”

“Stop interrupting me,” I groan, throwing a pillow at my laptop screen on instinct, which bounces off and rolls over to my bed. “The point is, if Argus Corps was running this investigation, they’d already be storming the office, rounding up interns at gunpoint. We’re taking a step back and actually looking at what makes sense before we do something stupid.”

Maggie clicks her tongue. “Bold of you to assume we won’t still do something stupid.”

I roll my eyes. “Jordan. Can you do that search?”

Jordan doesn’t answer immediately, and I know them well enough to recognize that hum—the one that means they’ve been doing exactly what I just asked for this whole time. “I was typing during your entire little speech, don’t worry. I won’t bore you with the details, Sammy, but I have a script that lets me paste a comma-separated list of terms into this little box, and it runs a bunch of NetSphere searches automatically.”

“A web scraper?” Lily asks.

Jordan freezes for half a second. “Yes?”

What the hell is a web scraper? Actually, you know what, I'm too afraid to ask. I don't want to know. I just hear Lily delicately slurping tea on her end of the microphone.

“Anyway,” Jordan says, recovering. “I have a bunch of scraped links now for every court case Tremont & Fairfax has been involved in that I can find public records on.” They lean back in their chair, satisfied. “This and their partners. I can spend a weekend sifting through it.”

I frown. “No. Hold on. I’m changing my mind.”

Jordan raises an eyebrow verbally. “No?”

“I mean, I’m sure the court cases are interesting,” I say, rubbing the back of my head, “but I don’t think they’re gonna give us anything actionable. Or at least, not anything actionable enough to do something with.”

I can hear the rustle of Jordan's hoodie as they tilt their head. “Go on.”

“Superheroes and authorities get involved in court proceedings all the time. If anything weird was popping up there, the authorities would already be on it. If we want to find something they haven’t yet, we need to look somewhere they aren’t looking.”

Jordan doesn’t necessarily agree—I can hear it in their silence—but they don’t argue. Instead, they just say after a five second pause, “Alright. You’re the boss.”

I blink. “No, I’m not.”

Jordan snorts. “Not doing this bit again."

I take a breath. “Okay anyway. Anyway. If Tremont & Fairfax is compromised, it’s not gonna show up in their legal work—it’s gonna show up in their business work.”

Jordan snaps their fingers. “Now that, I can do.”

I frown. “That fast?”

Jordan smirks. “Sammy. Do you know how much shit is legally required to be filed in the US? Publicly? The Pennsylvania Department of State has it all in a nice, neat little webpage for you. It's even asynchronous, it doesn't look like it was made in 1995, which is a rarity for government webpages.”

Maggie laughs. “Oh, that explains why corruption never happens.”

Jordan cracks their knuckles. “Give me, like, an hour. Go make yourself a sandwich.”