[b]York:[/b]

About the writing; “It makes you a great investigative [i]copy-editor[/i].” Pope thinks about that. “Don’t really need any of those as long as we keep our Frosty subscription going.” Frosty was editing software named after Robert Frost, it’s a pretty beefy bit of machine learning kit that tried to smooth out an author’s text without impacting their authorial voice. The only editing left to do was the higher level stuff, now. 

York looks across the road. “They’re across the road, working. This is one of the places our researcher dug up from our source’s raw materials, and I asked Jezebel if any of her activists knew about it. This is who she sent to find out, and now we’ve got to pick them up. HD can’t get here fast enough, so-” York reaches into his blue op-shop suit jacket and slides an attorney’s badge over to Brown, along with a datacard that slots into the tablet. “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, you’ve been granted power of attorney. Let’s go spring your client. Thought it might let you make a good first impression”

Across the road is a squat gray-brick warehouse surrounded by concentric rings of hurricane wire. Shining flecks in its surface give away that it’s the cheap, heavy concrete made of asteroid tailings, silica-nickel without the impurities removed before firing. As far as the secret police blacksites go, this one’s as unsubtle as the plainclothes officers in the bakery. 

York is rash, but this is next level. To not tell you in advance that this was going to be an op is- But no. His entire attitude is off. He’s not just ignoring opsec, it’s like he’s willing to bait a fight with the cops here right up until the point that you’re collateral damage for it, and then he shuts up again. 

Two people were meant to be waiting for you at that table. 


[b]Juan Costa-Silva:[/b]

There is a double-edged sword here. On the one hand, there is a magical level of trust and respect in an adult treating you completely like an adult, not dumbing their words down in the slightest, and acting like you’re an equal. In that regard, the speech hits hard. 

On the other hand, there’s the fact that Juan is still 12, and is [i]not[/i] an equal. And in that, a lot goes over his head. He hasn’t even heard the word tsar before, he’s barely left the confines of his family property, he doesn’t know what a slum [i]means[/i]. He’s tabula rasa here. 

Green has one thing going for her, though. She’s invested enough trust and respect into this kid that when he doesn’t understand all this stuff, he doesn’t think [i]she’s[/i] stupid, he thinks [i]he[/i] is. Maybe in another year, when he hits puberty, that’d swing different and he’d be shitty and defensive, he’d take that ego wound and lash out about it, find ways to beat Green down to his level again. But he’s not. He’s a confused kid in way over his head, and he doesn’t need to understand any of this to think you might. 

“Yeah, maybe.” He mumbles. “I dunno, I guess I mean, my mum never killed anyone. I don’t think Chough hurt anyone either. It’s just money stuff. And I mean, I know money stuff is bad, but Sir tells me about the stuff his people had to do sometimes. Like, one time one of his guys got killed, and they’d wrapped him up tight in like a rubber sheet, and they filled it with gasoline, and then they lit him on fire.” The art of ‘necklacing’ has outlasted the existence of car tires, then. Eighty years earlier, Brazilian investigative journalist Tim Lopes was killed this way. Juan looks squeamishly at the graph. “He says my mum stopped that kind of stuff happening too. What does that look like?” 

Honestly? Better. Aevum imported much of Earth’s problems, but it had a socialized welfare system already in place to address the cycle. It took pretty fearless work from people like Carmen Costa-Silva though to apply brakes to what was already set in motion, and often it was their bare bodies that acted as the friction surface. For all her problems, bribery couldn’t have been enough for her peers to vote her to the Supreme Court… probably didn’t hurt, though. 

Green can start to answer here if she has one, but she’ll get cut off by the sound of the stairs opening. Juan is going to tell her to hide, but his hiding spot only fits him. Green will have to make her own plan 

[b]Team Bondi:[/b]

“There you are!” Luis claps his hands and breaks into a run to catch up. “Just a minute, please, all I ask of you.” 

“I’m sorry, Lorenzo is insisting that he be there to check your bags going out, since he missed them coming in.” He rolls his eyes, genuinely sympathetic. “I just wanted to apologize for that. But we have had problems with guests taking souvenirs before. And I’m sure he wants to make sure you’re not missing any knives or smokebombs or such that Isabella might find later. God knows what she’d do with it. Normally I’d trust her to tell me if she found something like that, but I think my daughter’s so starstruck with you she’d be scared I’d take it from her and hide it from me! And that's just begging for a William Tell moment with little Herman to happen.” 

He beams and claps his hands together again. “That’s really what I wanted to talk to you about. The children had a wonderful time, even the oldest ones. I cannot thank you enough for that. We must have you again sometime for Gwen's quinceañera, she will never forgive me if I don't. Also, I have to ask… Why [i]Caliban [/i]and [i]Ariel[/i]?” 

And this he asks Orange and Pink directly. It's not that he bought the servant routine before as much as he understood the point of being in character. Now, with the show oever, he just values a literary reference discussion over kayfabe.