Chapter 8 First Morning With A Fox

Leo's first conscious thought was that this was still happening.

Foxy was sitting on his chest, about four inches from his face, staring at him with the calm and focused attention of something that had been awake for a while and had simply been waiting for him to catch up.

He stared back for a second, in the specific way of a person hoping that blinking will change what they're looking at, and then he sat up and Foxy stepped off him and onto the bed like this was a normal and agreed-upon morning routine they had established together over years.

Leo got up and went to the kitchen.

Foxy followed, which wasn't surprising, and hopped onto the counter while Leo pulled out a pod and loaded the coffee machine, which apparently was a mistake.

"That brand," Foxy said, looking at the pod with an expression of genuine distaste, "is embarrassing."

Leo pressed the button.

"For a man who owns a third of the continent's active supply chain infrastructure, the coffee situation is genuinely difficult to explain."

The machine started running and Leo leaned against the counter and looked at his phone while it did, and Foxy kept talking — something about single origin beans and the specific flavor profile of pods manufactured at scale — and by the time the cup was full and Leo had taken his first sip he had arrived at a clear understanding of three things about Foxy.

No survival instinct. No filter. And an encyclopedic knowledge of things that would have been genuinely useful if every single piece of it didn't come sandwiched between a personal insult and a disappointed look.

His phone rang.

Maya. He answered it on the second ring.

"You have three Zephyr meetings today," she said, already moving, the way she always moved, which was the reason he'd hired her. "Nine-thirty, twelve, and three. The twelve has flexibility if you need it, the three doesn't."

"Push the nine-thirty and the twelve," Leo said. "Keep the three."

"Understood. I'll be there at eight-thirty with the briefing."

He hung up and refilled his coffee, even though the cup wasn't empty, mostly for something to do with his hands.

"What is Zephyr Global?" Foxy asked.

Leo didn't answer.

Foxy looked at him for a moment and then turned and began inspecting the kitchen counter with the energy of someone making a mental list of additional complaints.

★

Maya arrived at eight twenty-eight, which was two minutes early, which was standard for her.

She was twenty-six and she had the kind of efficiency that didn't need to announce itself, the kind that was just visibly present in the way she moved and the way she'd already pre-sorted the briefing before she sat down. Leo trusted her in the specific way he trusted tools that consistently did what they were supposed to do without requiring maintenance.

She couldn't see Foxy.

He'd figured that out within the first thirty seconds of her arrival, when she set her bag down directly in the space Foxy was occupying and Foxy moved out of the way without her noticing and she had absolutely no reaction to any of it. Foxy had looked at Leo. Leo had looked at the tablet Maya was already opening. That was the end of that conversation.

They went through the morning across the coffee table — three Zephyr Global operational updates, a briefing on the financial review Leo had quietly commissioned through a third-party auditing firm he had no public connection to, and two messages from the president's office about getting the private meeting on the calendar.

Foxy sat on the coffee table between them and said nothing through most of it, which was almost more unnerving than when it talked.

Maya pulled up the Zhang Enterprises preliminary report, the first numbers from the auditing firm, and started walking through the summary in that clean efficient way she had of delivering information without editorializing it.

"Already bleeding from four places," Foxy said, looking at the numbers on Maya's screen with something that wasn't quite interest and wasn't quite boredom, sitting somewhere between the two, "and they don't even know it yet."

Leo's eyes moved to the fox for half a second before he could stop them.

Maya looked up, clocked the direction of his gaze, and turned slightly toward the window, assuming he'd seen something out there.

She hadn't seen the flick for what it was. Leo put his eyes back on the tablet.

"Walk me through the debt structure again," he said.

She walked him through it.

★

Maya left at ten-fifteen with a list of follow-ups and the particular focused energy of someone who had already mentally begun working through it.

Leo sat in the quiet for about thirty seconds, and then he opened the interface, because the red dot had been in the back of his head since he woke up and not looking at it wasn't making it less present.

The daily mission drops loaded, and there it was.

One red dot, sitting in a warehouse district in Brooklyn, not moving, not doing anything, just existing on the map with that color that the interface had never used before in three years of missions.

S-rank.

He zoomed in and the system gave him the signature breakdown and he read it and sat with it and then read it again.

He had cleared C-grades yesterday and C-grades could warp gravity for a second and shift walls and make a space feel like something that wanted to hurt you. He had never fought anything above B-rank and he had never particularly wanted to, because B-ranks had been enough of a conversation. He had no actual data on what an S-rank could do and the part of him that had survived three years of this by not being reckless was raising a number of quiet objections.

The reward number sitting next to the mission flag was the kind of number that made his jaw do a small involuntary thing it almost never did.

He closed the interface.

Opened it again.

The red dot was still there, sitting in Brooklyn, patient and completely unconcerned with his internal debate about it.

"That one will eat you," Foxy said, from somewhere behind his left shoulder, apparently having been reading the interface this whole time without mentioning it.

"I know," Leo said.

"And yet you're going to do it anyway."

Leo closed the interface again and set his phone down on the couch cushion next to him and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

Foxy made a sound that was small and resigned and carried the energy of something that had just accepted a fate it wasn't particularly happy about.

★

He called Jamie back mostly to give the red dot somewhere else to be in his head for a while.

Jamie answered immediately, from what looked like a library, with the specific hollow-eyed look of a man who had not slept and had stopped being bothered by that fact sometime around four in the morning.

"Okay," Jamie said, not as a greeting, just as a starting point, "so she texted back."

"You mentioned."

"And then her roommate texted me, which — I need you to understand the timeline here because the timeline is important."

Leo listened for about forty-five seconds, tracking the situation, which had grown overnight from a what-do-I-do into a multi-person thing involving a dinner reservation that apparently two different people had been told about for the same night by accident.

"Why are you telling me this," Leo said.

"Because you're the only person I know who's actually good at strategy."

"I do corporate warfare and kill supernatural entities for money."

"Exactly," Jamie said, pointing at the screen like Leo had just proven his point, "so this should be easy for you."

Foxy, who had been sitting quietly to Leo's left for the past several minutes, chose this moment to walk directly across the couch and sit down in the camera frame, ears pointed forward, staring into the screen at Jamie with complete and open curiosity.

Leo moved the phone.

Jamie squinted at the edge of the frame with the expression of someone who had seen something and wasn't sure if they'd actually seen it. "What was that."

"Nothing."

"That was — was that an animal?"

"No."

"Rude," Foxy said, from off camera, in a tone that was quiet and matter of fact and completely audible to Leo.

"I heard something," Jamie said.

"You didn't."

"It sounded like — "

"Jamie."

"Yeah?"

Leo looked to his left where Foxy was now sitting with its tail wrapped around its front feet and its eyes fixed on him with the patient expression of something that had nowhere else to be and no plans to develop any.

"You cannot be in my FaceTime calls," Leo said.

Foxy's ear twitched.

"I was curious about the human," it said.

"I don't care."

"He seems distressed."

"He's always distressed, that's just how he is. You're not allowed in the calls."

Jamie, on the screen, had the look of a man listening to one side of a conversation and filling in the other side with increasingly incorrect guesses.

"Leo," Jamie said slowly, "who are you talking to?"

Leo looked at the phone.

"Nobody," he said. "Tell me about the roommate.”