The room Harmony was in looked like it was cut out of a roadside motel and dropped straight into the base. Not some mom and pop operation. A big, national chain, where all the furniture was standardized and had to be bought from the head company. Pale pinewood furniture, gray curtains over an enchanted picture window, gray blanket lying over crisp white sheets. All neatly cleaned and made by the built in housekeeping enchantments on the bed. Safe, inoffensive art on the wall. A small scryball. A little glass-topped desk and a generic office chair. All over the gray tiled carpet.

Harmony was doing pushups. Back rigid, hands shoulder width apart, slow and controlled on the descent, all the way through the range of motion then an explosive push up. Then slow back down again. Then he changed to fingertip pushups. Moved his hands in different positions, working different parts of his arms, back and chest. Always in motion, always controlled. He was, in Truth’s expert opinion, killing it.

Truth just stood there in the doorway, watching Harmony go through a whole calisthenics routine. It wasn’t something Truth taught him. Not much time for working out when they were kids. Maybe he learned it in school, or at a Starbrite gym. Once he learned it, he would make a point of doing it. Steady. Harmony was always very steady. Consistent. While Vig and Sophia were raising Hell in school, Har had kept his head down and his mind on the grind. Plowed straight through his SAT, then made a run at a lab technician job. A job that shifted to a lab management track, thanks to Truth’s shockingly generous supply of Friends and Family points.

Looked like his work paid off. Har was looking healthy. Happy, even. Harmony did a final burpee, shook himself loose, and walked into the bathroom. Truth finally stepped into the room, and gently closed the door behind him.

There wasn’t much in the room. A small suitcase, a few changes of clothes hung neatly or put away in drawers. Two pairs of shoes tucked neatly under the bed, carefully shined. A small stack of folders and a notepad set on the desk. Truth had seen that exact setup before, in some of his poorer protectees. They couldn’t be without ‘work.’ Even if it wasn’t very useful work, or even work that someone had explicitly asked them to do. If it could be wedged into their job description, they would grab it and take it with them when they traveled. If they had work, then they were working. If they were working, they were useful. If they were useful, they would be remembered, and kept.

Harmony was always very steady. He could be without his socks, or his toothbrush, but he could never travel without the protection of ‘work.’

Truth gently flipped open the folders. Ledgers, receipts, inventory lists, expenditures. All things generally handled, with perfect accuracy, by intelligent spirits bound to serve Starbrite. A lot of things he would have assumed were handled directly by the System. Was this something new? Introduced due to the increasing unreliability of magic?

He tried to figure out what Har’s lab was working on. Nothing seemed to pop out. Well, he wouldn’t be running the lab after just five years. Given how slow promotions went in Jeon corporations, he could well still be the most junior person on the management team. Nobody above C-Tier got fired at Starbrite, after all. Why else would people kill themselves trying to pass the SAT? In a terrifying world, what could be better than a job for life in the biggest gang there was?

No pictures of friends or family. No little keepsakes. No wallet, of course. Why would you need one when you had the System? No fancy pens, or colorful ties. Truth checked the drawers. Nothing of interest there either. Anything hidden under the bed? No. Everything was just as it seemed. Which made sense to him. Once Mom had dug out a literal rat’s nest to find their hidden stash of cash, none of the sibs had ever tried to hide anything at home ever again. They were poor, not stupid.

Harmony would have made triply sure that nothing even vaguely questionable made it into his luggage or onto his person. The System would have kept his thoughts equally tidy.

The shower switched off, and Harmony came out in a towel. He got dressed like he was going to the office, then sat at the little desk and started working through the folders. Truth reached out with his senses. Level Two. More than respectable, after a mere five years. Only the PMC got those deep discounts on elixirs. Everyone else was paying close to market rates, if they could even access them in the System Shop.

Harmony was young, handsome, fit, on a management track in an important department in the best company in the world, in an era where security was the most precious thing there was. Quite the catch. Truth knew Harmony had lost his virginity in his mid teens, but he wasn’t big on dating. Was that still the case? Was he still flying solo, having the occasional meaningless hookup, then moving on without regrets on either side? Or had he found someone? Someone worth getting up and going to work for?

Did he set aside his salary for the other sibs, taking care of school fees and saving up to buy Friends and Family points? At this point, surely not, right? Vig would have vanished after his national service. Vig wouldn’t have kept in touch with Har. That probably ate at him.

Maybe Harmony was saving for Sophia, but she was working while she was studying at uni. Not in any rush to join Starbrite. And he had tipped her about the System so… so he didn’t know what she did with that information. She would have kept her mouth shut about it to Harmony, though.

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His siblings were all, in their own ways, hard. He watched Harmony as he worked. Eyes on the page. Top button buttoned and tie perfectly centered, sitting by himself in a room where he had been, apparently, put and forgotten. Putting in the work. Because it didn’t matter if someone was watching. He would know he hadn’t given his all. So he squared up, and did his best. Every day. For as long as it took.

There was a knock on the door. Harmony put his work back in its folder and answered the door. There were a couple of deathsworn soldiers and a tidy looking office lady. She had her own tablet and stylus. She had to keep on the work too.

“Mr. Medici? It’s time.”

“I am ready.”

“This way, please. How is the room?”

“Eerily similar to a GuestaRest I stayed at once. I am very comfortable, thank you.”

She smiled meaninglessly and gestured down the hall. They started walking. Harmony and the office lady, the two guards behind them, and Truth behind the guards.

“So, Mr. Medici, just a quick review-”

“Actually, I’m going to need more than a review. I was, literally, pulled out of the office with no notice. I barely had time to grab some work I could do on the road. What I’m wearing now is what was in the bag I was handed at the airport. Nobody actually explained what I am doing here. I’m naturally delighted to serve Starbrite however I can, but right now, I’m not sure how I can be of service.”

There was a visible glitch in the OL’s posture. Truth smirked a little. Harmony wasn’t on script. Oh well. Better to catch it now, when it was just a couple of juniors talking.

“The Business Forecasts Department, working in conjunction with the Department for Strategic Development, Security, as well as several other departments, have established an interdepartmental and inter-division collaboration to mitigate an ongoing cost center and source of considerable short-to-mid-term uncertainty.”

This time it was Harmony who visibly glitched.

“Miss? I help make roads better by making sure the road materials laboratory runs efficiently. I’m not sure how helping to run a materials lab can assist with any of what you just described. Not if the ‘mitigation’ requires all this.”

The OL preened at being called ‘Miss,’ but then lightly cleared her throat and checked her tablet. “What you need to know is that there is about to be a ritual, and you need to not move around once you are in the middle of it. The dev team has repeatedly emphasized that your willing cooperation is crucial to the success of the ritual, and you must therefore be conscious, unenchanted, undrugged and unrestrained.”

“Well that sounds ominous. It will hurt?”

“Yes. The phrase “excruciating” was used. Also repeatedly. You will be issued a mouthguard, and naturally, this will be recorded as a major contribution in your record.”

Truth silently whistled. “Major contributions” weren’t really a thing in the PMC, but he had heard about it in other departments. It was very, very hard to stand out in a gerontocratic corporation. Making a major contribution was one of the ways you could do it. Most people wouldn’t get such an opportunity in a lifetime. What’s a bit of pain compared to that?

“Very good. What else do I need to know about the ritual?”

“This ritual will be overseen by Mr. Red and Ms. Black.”

That brought Harmony to a dead stop.

“The C-Suite?”

“Yes, Mr. Medici. The co-heads of the Worship and Offerings Office will be conducting the ritual. Let’s not keep them waiting, shall we?”

Harmony started walking again, more quickly this time.

“It is my honor to serve.”

“Yes. At the ritual site you will remove your shoes, left foot first. You will then-” The OL rattled through a detailed list of steps to be performed to prepare for the ritual, how he was to enter the room, what he had to carve on his chest, what he had to rub into the wound, and how he had to stay standing throughout the entirety of the ritual. She never explained why any of this was happening, and Harmony was too well trained to ask. He certainly never asked “Why me?”

It was the corporate way. ‘Why’ was above your paygrade. You just had to do what you were told, and eat the pain.

They reached another anonymous looking steel door, and went in. Truth nearly had a stroke sorting through everything he was seeing. There were sigils, naturally. Inscriptions, incantations, carved gems made of stone or glass or some other, rarer, material. Talismans were integrated into the broader structure at seemingly key points, providing sub arrays or other magical support for the great working.

If he had a month, he could figure out a hundredth of it. Maybe. Or maybe not. Not a single thing in here looked standard, and when you got right down to it, he was pretty vague on the ‘why’ behind ritual design too. He didn’t have to know ‘why’ a talisman worked. Just that it should look a certain way, and fix it if it didn’t. Everything else was what he had figured out on the job.

Truth very slightly loosened his grip on his self-inflicted reality perception spell. Just a smidge, to see if he could get a clue about what he was actually looking at. The room faded away, the spells faded away. What was left was a set of matching nooses, one solid, the rest ghostly. The solid one was already hanging from a beam. The rest were in the mouths of demonic hounds. Not dogs, but an infernal inversion of everything good and loving dogs represented.

It was a curse. One that took something about Harmony, and ran down whatever that connection was, to whomever it ran to. And then it killed them. Or dragged them back here. Either way. They were going to kill him, and use Harmony to do it.