The extraction order was supposed to come down by morning.
Vasquez Senior had the pen for it.
He'd posted the tournament to give himself the cause and the cameras to make it clean, and a Class Z win was supposed to be exactly the kind of anomaly that justified a signature.
By morning there was no writ.
By afternoon there was Joan in his doorway with a face he'd learned to read.
"He didn't sign," she said.
"I noticed the part where I'm still here."
"You don't understand. He didn't not sign because you won." She came in and shut the door. "Winning makes the case easier. A fused-adjacent D-rank peeling Council tech off a beast on a live feed is the strongest extraction argument anyone's ever handed him. He had it. He walked away from it."
"So he wants something the writ doesn't get him."
"Or he's protecting something the writ would expose." Joan put her tablet on the desk, face down, which she also did for a reason.
