Chapter 10 A Fox With Opinions

The D-grades had been exactly as boring as D-grades always were.

Seven of them, slow to orient, slower to coordinate, and the hairline tear had been sitting right where the map said it would be, small enough that it sealed in under a minute once he fed the cores into it. He'd been back in the car in forty minutes and home in fifty-five and the whole thing had the energy of a work errand rather than anything worth thinking about.

The problem was Foxy had watched all of it and now had notes.

Leo stood at the bathroom sink cleaning up and Foxy was on the counter beside him going through the notes in the specific unhurried way of something that had organized its thoughts on the drive back and was now delivering them in the order it had decided on.

"The first three — your footwork on the approach was wider than it needed to be," Foxy said. "You're compensating for something on the left side that isn't actually there anymore. Old habit."

Leo rinsed his hands.

"The fifth one — you activated Dead Touch about two seconds before contact, which drains the channel for no gain. You can wait longer than you think."

Leo dried his hands.

"And the seventh — "

"Would you like to fight them yourself next time?" Leo said.

Foxy paused.

"I would not," it said. "I'm a companion, not a soldier. The roles are distinct."

"Then maybe consider silence."

"I'll consider it," Foxy said, and then after a pause of roughly one second that was not long enough to constitute actual consideration, continued with the seventh instance and what it had observed about his grip during the final approach.

Leo looked at his own reflection for a moment with the expression of a man arriving at an understanding, and the understanding was this: this was their dynamic, it had been their dynamic since approximately hour one, and it was going to be their dynamic for a very long time, and they both already knew it, and no amount of suggesting silence was going to change the fundamental architecture of the situation.

He turned off the bathroom light and went to the couch and Foxy followed and he opened his laptop without saying anything else.

Foxy, for its part, settled down nearby and kept its next observation to itself for almost four full minutes, which was probably a record.

---

He was going through the interface — mission map, reward summary, a new skill tree notification he was working through — when he hit something that stopped him.

A market-linked anomaly signal. He'd never seen one flagged before. The system was treating it like a standard notification but the data underneath it was doing something strange, cross-referencing financial market activity with the anomaly map in a way that didn't match any category he'd encountered in three years of using the interface.

He stared at it for five minutes and got nowhere useful.

Then, without making it a thing, without framing it as asking for help, he turned the screen slightly in Foxy's direction.

Foxy looked at it for about two seconds.

"The system is telling you that anomaly activity correlates with major financial events," it said. "High-volume market crashes create instability in the reality layer. The tears aren't only physical — they're partly psychological. Mass fear, economic collapse, collective panic — it thins the boundary."

Leo sat with that.

He sat with it for a while, turning it over, running it against things he'd observed and half-explained to himself over the years and never fully resolved.

"How do you know that," he said.

"I told you. I know things."

"And you couldn't have mentioned this at any point earlier."

"You didn't ask," Foxy said, simply, in the tone of something that considered this a complete answer.

Leo looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at the interface, then at Foxy, and made the quiet decision not to pursue the thread further because the thread led somewhere that was going to raise his blood pressure and the information was already delivered and useful regardless of when it arrived.

He updated his notes on the skill tree and did not throw the fox out of the window, which he felt deserved acknowledgment even if nobody was giving it any.

---

The morning update from his intelligence network — three people deep, no visible connection back to him, the kind of network that took two years to build properly — was more interesting than he'd expected the audit flag to produce this quickly.

Someone inside Zhang Enterprises was panicking.

The internal communications his contact had pulled suggested Wei had called two emergency board meetings in four days, which was two more than Zhang Enterprises had called in the past year combined. The green energy subsidiary's operating freeze had apparently hit something the Zhangs hadn't planned for, something they'd been quietly relying on in a way that hadn't been visible from outside the financials.

Ming, fresh CFO, was apparently not approaching an actual operational crisis with the same ease he'd approached the press coverage of his appointment. There was a difference between performing confidence in a room of people who wanted to believe you and performing confidence in a room of people who needed answers, and the communications suggested Ming had not yet located that difference.

Leo read the update and drank his coffee and his expression did not move in any particular direction.

He set the update down and pulled up the building management system for the Zhang apartment building, which he had access to through the Aethelgard subsidiary that had finalized its ownership acquisition eleven days ago, and he found the maintenance fee invoice that had gone out that morning.

Three hundred percent increase.

Due in fourteen days.

Foxy looked at the invoice on the screen and then looked at Leo and then looked at the invoice again.

"What?" Leo said.

"Nothing," Foxy said.

A pause.

"You're unwell."

"I know," Leo said, and closed the tab.

---

Jamie texted at midnight.

Leo read it lying in bed, phone held above his face, working through the message that was describing a resolution to the girl situation that somehow involved neither the girl nor the roommate but a third person named Dom who had not previously appeared in any version of the story Leo had been given.

He read it twice trying to map the logic.

He gave up.

Resolved? he sent back.

Jamie: mostly.

Then, after a short pause, another text arrived.

Jamie: also I told Marcus about your fox.

Leo stared at this.

Jamie: he thinks you've lost it.

Then: I think it's kind of amazing actually.

Leo put the phone face-down on the nightstand and looked at the ceiling.

"Who's Marcus," Foxy said, from the foot of the bed, where it had been sitting quietly enough that Leo had half-forgotten it was there.

"Another friend."

"Does Marcus have a spirit animal?"

"No."

"Pity," Foxy said, in a tone that was genuine rather than performative, like it actually meant that.

"Go to sleep."

"I don't sleep."

"Then go be quiet somewhere."

"I'll try," Foxy said, which they both understood was not a promise.

Leo put his arm over his eyes and let the room be still for a minute.

The mission map was open on the interface, projected faint and blue against the ceiling the way it sometimes ran in passive mode overnight, white dots scattered across the city like a second set of stars, the Zhang audit running somewhere quiet in the background of a server he'd never have to touch directly.

The sword was propped against the nightstand where it always was.

Foxy was curled up at the foot of the bed, tail over its nose, silver-tipped ears the only bright thing in the low light.

Four years since the blizzard, since the system had found him half-frozen and decided he was the kind of person it wanted, since his life had stopped being one thing and become whatever this was — anomaly maps and corporate warfare and a spirit fox with opinions about his footwork and friends texting at midnight about people named Dom.

Leo looked at the ceiling and at the soft blue scatter of the map and thought about it for a moment.

It was fine.