The StretSec office was full of biometric scanners of various types, so—after making sure Misha had sent him the files he needed to review from the day before—TamLin focused on accessing that data first, then quietly pulled up Kasy’s medical records.

He wasn’t going to ask, “So what has Puce done with your kids?” unless or until he had no other choice.

It didn’t take TamLin long to understand what he was looking at, and even less time for him to start feeling disgusted with himself for not thinking on it sooner. He should’ve been working to stop this back when he started his job. He saved the documentation to his console—specially encrypted by Janni herself—and shut it down, and fought the urge to cry on Kasy’s behalf.

Murder, assassination, accident, self-defense—however he could wrangle it, he was going to see Puce dead. As soon as possible.

A timer went off on Kasy’s console. TamLin shifted focus from his personal project to the paperwork from Misha; she got up and poked Icarus with her stylus.

The man jolted awake with a snortle and a “I’m awake!”

“Now you are,” she said. “Your break’s up.”

Icarus blinked at her a few times, then grimaced and rubbed his eyes. “Fuck Puce.”

“He show back up after his office got bombed?” TamLin asked, keeping his body language as casual as his voice.

“He’s alive,” Icarus said, “and some of the uppers have seen and spoken to him, but he’s gone to ground, saying the napalm was an assassination attempt.”

“It wasn’t?” Kasy asked, mock-seriously.

“The supervisors say it was,” Icarus answered, “but I saw the damage. That was targeted at his files, not at him.” He hesitated. “Makes me wonder—”

“Hold that thought,” TamLin cut in, and he pulled up a particular program on his console that interfered with the office cams. He activated it, double-checked that it was working, then said, “Go on.”

Kasy was staring at him with clear incredulity.

“What?” he asked. “Did you seriously think I wouldn’t have a reflector?”

“No,” she said, “but I have to wonder why you don’t use it more often.”

Usually, TamLin wouldn’t have this conversation in front of witnesses, but he was done hiding, and someone who’d gotten steamrolled into an illegal triple shift wouldn’t be among the assholes. “Puce knows we hate his guts. If that never showed on the surveillance, he’d get suspicious.”

“…Right.” Kasy shook her head, then turned back to Icarus. “You were saying?”

“Uh…” It took the man a few seconds to recollect his thoughts. “Is that why someone would target Puce’s files? He was blackmailing people?”

Kasy went blank-faced and stiff, her eyes going dead.

“Among other things,” TamLin said casually, to draw Icarus’s attention away from Kasy.

“Then why does nobody stop him?!”

TamLin indicated the room at large, as a stand-in for the fact that Puce ran their building.

“What, so because he’s a chief sec, he’s above the law?”

“No, it’s unwise to go after him because he’s a manipulative asshole who can easily destroy more lives than just yours if you move against him.” If he was the grade-black executioner that TamLin thought he was, Puce could even electrocute a person to death without touching them, but TamLin was frightening these two enough already. “He craves power and will do whatever the fuck he has to in order to get more of it.”

“…What does that have to do with you?”

Kasy let out a hollow laugh.

TamLin kept his gaze on Icarus. “Breathe, Kasy.”

With her history of having been forcibly impregnated—more than once—so the infant could get dissected for study, he wasn’t going to tell her to calm herself. She was fucking calm. She was handling the situation and conversation a lot better than most primes would, judging from the ones he’d known.

“What did he do to you two?” Icarus whispered.

“Me?” TamLin asked breezily. “Nothing.”

Kasy laughed again. “Not for want of trying.”

He allowed himself a glance her way. She looked more collected than she had any right to be.

To help her keep that equilibrium, he kept his tone idle. “Puce telegraphs his moves four months out. I could dodge that shit from my mother by the time I was twelve.”

“So you knew he was going to interpret the attack on his information as an attack on his person and organize a witch hunt after the invented assassin?” she asked.

Uh, duh. “What else was he gonna do? Invite Second over for tea and ask her nicely to leave his information the fuck alone? She’d have him dead inside two minutes.” Grade-black executioner or no, his experience came from dealing with civilians in quiet, one-on-one situations. She was special ops from a universe that suffered a zombie apocalypse. “Being outnumbered and outgunned is her normal, and she’s still alive.”

“Wait… You know who napalmed Puce’s office?”

The reflector should’ve still been active, but he double-checked to confirm before admitting, “Yeah.”

“Who—”

“My wife” slipped from his lips before he thought about it. He kept his calm to avoid drawing attention to it. “Why?”

Icarus and Kasy both stared at him.

“…Wife?” Kasy asked first.

Close enough. He shrugged.

“I thought she was Nameless.”

He intentionally answered as if Kasy was asking how he’d married her, rather than why. “We had an accident with resonance bonding.”

“Okay. I’m gonna pretend that makes sense to someone born in this universe, who doesn’t have a clue what the fuck is going on unless someone deigns explain things to her.”

Cursing was unusual for Kasy.

He looked at her.

As if she’d been waiting for that, she slammed her palms on his desk and leaned in his face, glaring at him—obviously well aware that he’d understood what she’d meant and refused to answer.

Either she was better at reading him than most, possibly as a side effect of surviving all the abuse from Puce and his lackeys, or she was supposed to be at least a grade-red sensate. Which meant her current grading of yellow was outright faked, because even training couldn’t take a person from yellow to red.

“Fuck. You.” She stormed out of the office.

TamLin had thought she wasn’t broken entirely, and the evidence that he was right filled him with relief. Of course, that meant she’d possibly resent him when she realized just how much he could’ve been doing all along, but the fact that there were a few dozen civilians who would’ve paid the penalty for his overt behavior would likely mitigate that particular source of ire.

“…What?” Icarus was one of the nice ones—or at least nice enough that he wouldn’t have been one of the ones Puce sought to impregnate Kasy.

“Oh,” TamLin said lightly, “Puce has been drugging her for illegal experiments without her consent for at least two years, now.”

Icarus went white. “And you…knew this? How?”

He shrugged. “I’m not from this universe.”

“Why haven’t you done anything?!”

“She’s assigned to our office, isn’t she?” he asked mildly—a setup that let her have protection part of the time, when he was around. Puce had done that, himself—but TamLin had wittingly led him into it. He’d just known that Puce would be more willing to do it and more reluctant to change it if he thought it was all his idea.

Puce had been all too eager to assume that TamLin would knock up Kasy if left to his own devices, and that had helped for a while. There’d been too much risk to others for TamLin to be willing to sabotage his own standing with Puce to assist one woman who wasn’t even asking for his help, so he’d maneuvered to minimize harm to as many people as possible.

And now Second’s destruction of that information meant the very reason TamLin had fallen into the détente no longer existed.

So he smiled and added, “Puce isn’t from this universe, either.”