Chapter 7 Foxy

The penthouse didn't have Leo's name on any of the paperwork.

It had a holding company's name, which had another company's name behind it, which eventually traced back to something that would take a motivated person about four layers of documentation to connect to him — and by that point most motivated people had lost interest. Everyone who mattered knew it was his anyway. That was enough.

He came in, dropped his jacket on the first surface that presented itself, and went to the kitchen to pour a drink, doing all of this in the specific autopilot of someone who had just finished a moderately draining afternoon and wanted ten minutes of nothing before the next thing arrived.

He took the drink to the couch, opened the interface, and pulled up the reward summary for the past week.

It ran through the list the way it always did — mission completions, core valuations, funds transferred, skills logged — and he scrolled through it with the detached attention of someone reviewing a bank statement they already roughly know the contents of.

He'd been stacking rewards for a while now. Some cashed out, some sitting in the interface holding balance, a few he'd been meaning to look at and hadn't.

He got to the bottom of the list.

There was a notification he hadn't seen before, sitting below everything else, flashing in a color it had never used. Gold. Not the red of a threat alert or the white of a standard update. Gold, slow-pulsing, with a small icon next to it he didn't recognize.

MILESTONE REACHED: LEVEL 500. UNCLAIMED REWARD DETECTED.

He stared at it.

He hadn't known there were milestone rewards. In three years of running missions and leveling up and learning how the system worked, nobody had mentioned milestone rewards.

The interface had never mentioned milestone rewards. He'd just assumed the system ran on a flat model — missions in, rewards out, level number going up on the side like a scoreboard nobody else could see.

He looked at the notification for another second, drink in hand, and then tapped it.

★

Nothing happened immediately.

He waited, which wasn't something he was particularly good at, and was about to tap it again when the air in the middle of his living room did something.

Not dramatic. No portal. No sound. No flash of anything. Just a shimmer — the kind of visual distortion you got off hot asphalt in July, there and gone in under a second — and then there was a fox sitting on his coffee table.

Small. White, with silver-tipped ears that were currently pointed straight at him. Eyes that were open and alert and doing something that could only honestly be described as evaluation.

Leo looked at it.

The fox looked at him.

The interface, unprompted, opened a new panel in the corner of his vision.

COMPANION ASSIGNED. CARE MISSION ACTIVE. DURATION: ONGOING. FAILURE TO COMPLY: PENALTY.

He read it once and then read it again, in case the second read changed the contents, which it didn't.

He looked back at the fox, which had not moved and had not stopped looking at him.

Then he looked at the interface again, at the word penalty sitting there doing nothing to clarify itself, and then back at the fox.

"Absolutely not," he said, out loud, to the room in general, to the system that had never once cared about his opinions, to whatever version of the universe had decided this was the appropriate reward for five hundred levels of killing things in the dark.

The fox's ear twitched once.

★

He tried closing the panel.

It reopened. Same text, same gold border, same penalty sitting at the bottom like a quiet warning.

He tried walking to the other side of the room, on the theory that distance from the fox would make the situation feel less real. The fox got off the coffee table and followed him, silent, moving across the penthouse floor with the complete ease of something that had already decided it lived here and was simply allowing Leo to catch up to that fact.

He tried telling the system, directly and without softening it, that this was not part of any agreement he had made. The system didn't respond, because the system operated entirely outside the realm of his feelings about things, which was not new information but was newly frustrating.

He stood in the middle of his living room and looked down at the fox.

The fox sat down and looked up at him.

"What am I supposed to call you," he said, mostly just to hear himself say something, because the silence between him and a magical fox in his three-million-dollar penthouse was a specific kind of silence he didn't know how to sit in.

The fox said nothing.

Leo thought about it for approximately one second, which was about as long as he was willing to spend on the question.

"Foxy," he said.

The fox went very still.

Not the stillness of an animal being calm. The stillness of something that had just heard something it needed a moment to fully process, and was using that moment to decide how to respond.

Then it looked at him with an expression that had absolutely no business being on the face of a small white fox, an expression that was, without question, personally offended.

"What?" Leo said. "It's a fox. You're Foxy."

The fox opened its mouth and when it spoke the voice was low and dry, carrying the energy of someone who had been waiting exactly three seconds to respond and had used those three seconds well.

"My name," it said, "is not Foxy."

Leo stared at it.

The fox stared back.

"Foxy it is," Leo said.

★

He put Foxy in the guest room, which was a reasonable and logical solution, and went to his own room, and got into bed.

For about forty seconds there was silence and it almost felt like the situation had resolved itself.

Then Foxy's voice came through the wall, unhurried, conversational, as though they were sitting across from each other and Leo hadn't literally just shut a door between them.

"This penthouse has bad energy."

Leo stared at the ceiling.

"Stop talking."

"The kind that accumulates," Foxy continued, as though he hadn't said anything. "From unresolved things. You have several."

"Stop talking."

There was a pause that felt less like compliance and more like Foxy deciding to cover a different topic.

"The sword you carry has micro-fractures forming in the silver coating. The kind that compound with repeated activation of channeled abilities. It should be maintained before the next high-grade mission or the Dead Touch application will start degrading mid-use."

Leo was staring at the ceiling and then he wasn't, because he was sitting up.

That was actually useful information. That was the kind of information that the system had never flagged, that he wouldn't have caught until it became a problem mid-fight, and it came from a fox through a wall at eleven at night.

"How do you know that," he said.

A pause.

"I know many things."

He waited, because that answer was not a complete answer and something in the delivery suggested there was more coming.

"For example," Foxy added, "I know that you named me Foxy and I will never forgive you for that."

Leo lay back down.

His phone was buzzing on the nightstand. Jamie. A FaceTime missed call and then, almost immediately after, a string of texts that started arriving in clusters — the girl situation had apparently escalated from a what-do-I-do into a what-do-I-do-she-texted-back, which was a development that under normal circumstances he might have engaged with.

He left them unread.

The guest room door opened, which it shouldn't have been able to do because he was fairly certain he'd pushed it fully closed, and then there was the soft sound of something landing on the bed, and then Foxy was sitting at the foot of it, looking at him with those silver-tipped ears and that expression that had decided to be his problem now.

Leo looked at the ceiling.

He had survived the Void, which was a place that existed outside the boundaries of what most people understood reality to be. He had survived three years of solo missions in spaces that folded in on themselves. He had survived the Zhangs this morning, which had been a different kind of hostile environment but a hostile environment nonetheless.

He would survive this.

Foxy settled down, curled its tail around itself, and closed its eyes like the matter was finished.

The ceiling had no opinions. Leo appreciated that about it.