No escorts, just a folded map, a borrowed badge, and a lobby plant that had outlived three managers.
The "respectable face" lived on Floor 7: a cultural preservation foundation with a mission statement in frosted glass and a donation box no one trusted with paper money. Awards on the wall. Air purifiers humming like polite excuses. A tiny altar by the copier—cute, performative, freshly dusted.
Alaudi didn't knock. He swiped. The badge beeped green like it wanted to be helpful.
Ren carried a slim case and a look that said intern with a checklist. Hibird nested in the hood like a smug cufflink. Roll's paws made no sound on carpet, which felt like a prank on the carpet.
Reception blinked. "Appointment?"
"Compliance review," Alaudi said.
"Which—"
"The one you rescheduled twice," he said, and let the silence walk the last three steps.
Paper beats people. Organizations flinch when you speak forms.
They flinched.
A corridor swallowed them: glass offices, tasteful prints, a meeting room full of chairs that practiced good posture. Alaudi let Sky overlay the floor plan—the false straight lines, the load-bearing lie. There it was: a closet that wasn't a closet, squared wrong to the hallway, breathing like an extra lung.
"Ren," he said.
Ren peeled off toward the copy room with a roll of eco tape and a civilian smile. He lingered by the shred bin. Warm. New jam cleared recently. He palmed a jammed strip with the lightest Mist touch—enough to remember the cut without reassembling the sin.
A voice with soft authority arrived before its owner. "Can we help you gentlemen?"
Director Hakozaki. Gray suit, black hair, warm voice, cold eyes. The kind of person who thanked donors with both hands and kept the real ledger in his head. He scanned for a name on a lanyard, didn't see one, decided to treat the problem as donor relations until it wasn't.
"We've had some concerns raised," Alaudi said. "Receipts. Blessing audits."
Hakozaki's smile didn't move his eyes. "Ah. The river gossip. We do educational work, not enforcement."
"You do throughput," Alaudi said. "We're here for your altar closets."
A tiny hitch. He hid it well. Pros always hide the first one.
"Closet?" he said mildly.
Alaudi looked past him at the wrong square of wall.
"Keys," he said.
"Surely there's a—"
"Keys," Alaudi repeated, same tone he used when a lesser devil insisted it had rights.
Hakozaki weighed the word scandal against the word search warrant that didn't exist but would begin existing if this got loud. He produced a key ring with the wear pattern of long marriages. The third key fit like a sigh.
The door opened onto the kind of compliance sin that isn't criminal—just ugly. Shelves. Drawer-box altars arranged in a grid, each with a polite stamp kit and a ledger. Blessings in, blessings out. Credit extended on names the building had borrowed from real shrines that would hate this if they knew.
Ren hovered at the threshold. "Hinges," he whispered.
"Later," Alaudi said.
He stepped in like the room might decide to be a throat. Cloud went out—not to seize, just to weigh. The boxes shivered. Not sacred. Not nothing.
"Who sold you this?" Alaudi asked without looking back.
Hakozaki's tone stayed silk. "We integrate community tools. Some are… prototypes."
"And some walk data to people who test cities to see where they break," Alaudi said. "You don't have to say the name. Your invoices do."
Ren had already set his case on a shelf, flipping it open to reveal nothing but neatly labeled dividers and a pen that made adults behave. He slid one purple slip into the top-left drawer.
HOLD FOR VERIFICATION.
The hub accepted the word like a bored clerk stamping "received."
"Don't shut it," Alaudi said. "Starve it. Flag everything until the front office starts getting escalation emails from their own ghosts."
Ren nodded, careful, and did it again at the hinge—Mist stitched along the seam where "outbox" decided to be "urgent." The drawer re-labeled itself pending like it had just remembered rules.
"Mr. Hakozaki," Alaudi said, still not turning. "This is your moment. You can say we didn't know and be mostly right. Or you can dig in."
Hakozaki watched a drawer try to make a decision and lose. "We ensure continuity of—"
"You ensure plausible deniability," Alaudi said. "While someone rents your face to move leverage. I don't care about your mission plaque. I care about the people who will aim through you at a nine-tailed fox and a kid who eats his noodles too fast."
He finally turned. Let the Director see the part of him that didn't blink when things with teeth tried to be clever.
"You have donors," Alaudi said. "Some are clean. Some are clever. One of them runs invoices through a vendor with a name that changes just enough to pass lazy filters."
He set a card on an empty shelf. One of the ones from the river. Hakozaki didn't touch it. People who know paperwork know paper is hot.
"What do you want?" Hakozaki asked.
"Write an email," Alaudi said. "Subject line: Suspension of experimental channels. CC the kind of people who hate embarrassment. Use the words external review. Use mine if you need to. Then burn your altar closets in a way that makes a report."
"And if I don't?"
Alaudi glanced at the shelves. Cloud tightened around labels like a weather front. "Then the next review isn't quiet. And you explain to donors why their good names show up on bad forms."
Hakozaki stood in the doorway of his own complicity and looked like a man who realized he'd been laundering someone else's risk for the price of a plaque.
"Give me the afternoon," he said.
"You have until dusk," Alaudi said. "After that, the city stops pretending not to see you."
Hakozaki nodded once. Not concession. Calculation. He was going to survive this. Fine. Survivors are useful if they're scared the right way.
They left him with his keys and his choices.
In the copy room, Ren held up the shred strip, Mist-bright at the cut. "It's a crest," he said. "But cheap. Ink, not the press."
"Draft brand," Alaudi said. "Someone upstream rehearsing their righteous logo."
"Hero Faction?"
"Adjacent," Alaudi said. "Their fans love stationery."
Hibird pecked the shred like it might confess. Roll sniffed, sneezed, sneezed again, offended by toner.
They took the stairs down two flights and out into afternoon air that smelled like rain deciding. Ren exhaled everything he'd been holding.
"Did we win?" he asked.
"We made them count out loud," Alaudi said. "People trip on counting."
Ren nodded like he wanted to write that down and hated himself for wanting to write that down.
"Back to the shrine," Alaudi said. "Drills."
Ren groaned. "We literally just—"
"Guardian work is sweeping and forms," Alaudi said. "The fights are recess."
Hibird agreed with a rude little trill. Roll wagged in a way that meant snack soon.
Yasaka didn't ask how did it go. She was already reading the CC list that found its way to her, the way CC lists do when people want protection.
"Consequences will be… educational," she said. Her eyes held something like pride and something like apology for making anyone live inside bureaucracy.
Kunou leaned on the table, chin in hands. "Did you really scare them without fighting?"
"We weaponized their inbox," Ren said, too pleased, catching himself, blushing, not taking it back.
Yasaka's smile lived in the corners. "We will adjust wards around 'foundations.' Quietly. Thank you."
Alaudi took the broom outside because the stones were asking again. The first pass always tells you if a place is listening. The second tells you if it forgives scuffs.
Sky Crown traced faint lines between lantern and rail, rail and step, step and the place Ren always stumbled on form eight. Cloud spread in a low sheet along the threshold—here, not yours, not mine; ours if you behave.
For three breaths, the city breathed with him.
Then he pulled it back, the way you release a stretch before it turns into a claim.
Ren appeared with two bottled teas and an expression that said do not say I am doing hydration because Yasaka told me.
"Type drills?" he asked, resigned.
"Type drills," Alaudi said. "Feet first. Hands follow. Sky second. If you fall, you start at zero."
Ren sipped tea like it had betrayed him. "You know that makes you the worst, right?"
"Promotion perks," Alaudi said.
Hibird cackled. Roll flopped dramatically on the cool step, belly up, unconcerned with geopolitics.
No escorts. No fanfare. Just a folded map, a key that had beeped, a director who would draft an apology to his own altars, and a city that let a Cloud draw lines without calling them borders.
Work tomorrow. Fights later. Forms forever.
He could live with that.