I’d sent Casey a few follow-up text messages after having left him at the tender mercies of his parents yesterday. They were simple things, just a quick thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and question mark. Casey’s responses had been thumbs pointed center, though there had been one brief instance of a clear thumbs-down.

  By the time he followed up with another neutral thumb emoji, I’d already concocted and drafted a good half dozen possible “fake emergency” texts to get him out of there. I hadn’t deleted them, they might still be needed today or early tomorrow, but at least I hadn’t had to put them to the test quite yet.

  Unfortunately, while the rest of the day was mostly relaxed, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Remember that mysterious back pain from out of nowhere? Well, it had been gone for most of the last week, and I’d hoped that would be the end of it.

  But nope, it was back! I wasn’t the only one concerned over this, either.

  “Your speakers are tinny.”

  And that shared concern was probably responsible for my having to humor some complaints about my office setup.

  “Why yes, I know that, I do have to listen to them three days a week.”

  “You could just upgrade them. Get a similar system to home.”

  “If all you’re going to do is complain about how home is better, then maybe you should go back…”

  Gorou just huffed, nosed at the poofy blanket he’d curled up on, and wrapped his tails around his paws.

  Yes, you read that right: my office at the firm was currently playing host to a four-legged, four-tailed mythical being. If the firm didn’t outright own the building, then since Gorou wasn’t a licensed therapy animal, his very presence would’ve voided the lease.

  As it stood, while I normally delighted in Gorou’s presence and companionship, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed to have it follow me here.

  “You realize it’s evening in Japan right now, so you’re missing all your favorite shows,” I grumbled in yet another vain effort to convince the fox to go home. Half an hour of pleading, cajoling, and whisper-yelling had all fallen flat, and it seemed that appealing to Gorou’s love of idols and Japanese game shows was just as doomed to fail.

  “I set them all to record.”

  “Oh, that’s — wait, last I checked the DVR was full!”

  “That was right after we got back from England,” Gorou retorted with an annoyed flick of his ears. “Of course it was full. I deleted things as I watched them.”

  “… ah,” I said, rather lamely. Well, that failed, as expected. “Regardless—”

  The only warning I got was a light, almost pattering knock on my office door before it opened.

  “Hey, Naomi?” The door opened to let in Linh, the recent addition to the firm’s secretary roster who’d impressed me with her handling of that one tetchy deponent from the last major case I worked on, Leslie King. “There’s something a bit weird with your calendar in… the — um. Naomi?”

  “Yeah?” I said with a sigh, my ears drooping in dismay as I watched her eyes drift past me and over to the corner of my office.

  “Is, um, is that a fox?”

  “Yyyyyyeeeeessssssss…” I groaned, my growing annoyance at the completely expected reaction dragging the word out with almost painful slowness.

  Linh didn’t answer immediately. She instead reached into the pocket of her skirt (… note to self, ask where she got it, I want one), pulled out her phone, and snapped a photo of Gorou, who’d decided that this exact moment was the perfect time to stretch his legs and give a big, toothy yawn.

  “… I’ll be right back,” Linh said.

  Then she closed the door to my office, leaving me alone with nothing but Gorou and his self-satisfied snickering for company. I rested my forehead against my hand, and pinched the bridge of my nose in a desperate attempt to forestall the headache that I just knew was on its way.

  Two minutes later, I heard a good five voices murmuring amongst one another outside of my office door. Linh’s same soft knock came moments before the door opened once more.

  “See? See!?” Linh exclaimed as she pointed at Gorou, her voice an excited whisper-shout. “There is a fox!”

  Four of the other secretaries for the litigation practice group — Bethanne, Laronda, Marie, and Shaun, a list that was somehow in both ascending alphabetical and descending age order — peeked around (or over, in Shaun’s case) Linh’s shoulders to spot Gorou. And almost as one, their expressions just melted at the sight of the fox.

  “Oh, wow,” Shaun, the lone male amongst the group, practically gasped, bringing a hand to his mouth in apparent awe.

  “Oh my goodness, he’s gorgeous!” Laronda, the secretary bank’s MVP when it came to shutting down abusive callers, opened my door a little wider and stepped into the office. “I didn’t know you could have a pet fox in DC! Oh, his fur looks so soft—”

  “He’s not a pet.”

  “I’m not a pet.”

  All five of the secretaries froze. In the moment, as I realized that I hadn’t been the only one to say something just then, all I could do was just… slump in my chair, fold my ears low, and groan.

  “God damn it,” I grumbled.

  “Did… did the fox just—”

  “Yes,” I interrupted, “but that is secondary to the fact that all of you have barged into my office to—” I cut myself off, took a deep breath, and started over. “Just… shoo. All of you, shoo. Except you, Linh,” I cut back in, dropping the secretary who’d initially come to ask me something before this whole kerfuffle. “You, stay, and close the door.”

  “I-I’m sorry!” she stammered out, almost tripping over the other four in their rush to flee from what they saw as a likely reprimand. One of them closed the door for Linh on their way out, thankfully, so at least I didn’t need to drag this out unnecessarily. “I didn’t—”

  “Linh.” She cut off almost immediately at my stern, almost commanding tone. “Please, let me talk. Yes, you messed up. No, you shouldn’t have gotten the others, or said anything to them without asking. And no, knocking alone wasn’t enough, you shouldn’t have come in without waiting for permission first either time.

  “But!” I held up a finger, interrupting Linh from reacting badly before I had a chance to soften the blow. “No, it’s not entirely your fault, there’s some onus on me here. Yes, I should have said something to make it clear that a boundary was in place, particularly since you’ve been routinely seeing Casey not have to abide by it. Yes, the fox can talk; his name is Gorou. And no, I can’t give you permission to pet him,” I added, watching as Linh’s gaze drifted over to Gorou and her hand reached ever so slightly in his direction.

  Her face fell in disappointment, giving her a look like I’d just told her that sunrise was cancelled and chocolate was illegal.

  “If you want to pet Gorou,” I continued, “then you need to ask his permission.”

  Linh gasped, then all but prostrated herself before Gorou with her hands clasped as if in prayer.

  “Mm,” the fox mumbled. “Be gentle.”

  “Aaaaah!” Linh practically squeaked in excitement, and wasted absolutely zero time as she sat on the floor beside Gorou and began running her fingers through his soft, silky silver-white fur. Gorou’s breath hitched slightly as Linh teased at a particularly good spot or two, and given how Gorou started letting off this high-pitched whine of pure contentment, he was basking in the attention he received just as much as Linh enjoyed giving it.

  “Psst,” I stage-whispered in her direction. Once Linh turned to look at me, I raised one hand, bent my fingers into a bit of a claw, then pointed the other at my ears. “Base of the left ear.”

  Linh barely let me finish before she started scratching at the base of Gorou’s left ear, and the soft whine he’d been making escalated into a full-blown, open-mouthed happy yell. It wasn’t the kind of vocalization you could get from a human voice box, and it lay at almost the complete opposite pitch from Gorou’s normal speech.

  And it was also how I knew Gorou was so blissed out that he wouldn’t notice me snapping a photo of how Linh had reduced him to a fluffy puddle on the floor of my office. I immediately shot a copy of the photo to Linh’s inbox, of course, and — wait, shit, that reminded me.

  “Almost forgot, but what was that thing you wanted to ask me about my calendar?”

  “Huh?” Linh pulled her hands away from Gorou’s fur as she turned to face me, only for him to whine in disappointment and use both paws to drag her hand back to his ears, needy fox. “Sorry, sorry! Um, it was an 11:30 appointment with a client, but it was kind of odd?”

  “I don’t remember…” I trailed off, letting that thought fade away before it could distract me any further. “How do you mean, odd?”

  “Well, it didn’t follow any of our usual formatting,” she explained, the thought enough to make her frown despite the continuing fur therapy beneath her fingers. “And I didn’t see an email scheduling it. So I checked the call log in case I’d missed something, but there was nothing there either. And I asked the others for help looking, too, but none of them could find anything either.”

  “… the appointment wouldn’t happen to be for Cruise or Cruz, would it?” I asked, a sudden nasty suspicion pooling in my gut. “Rachael Cruz?”

  “It… is, actually.” Linh blinked in surprise. Even Gorou hummed in interest, despite the fact that Linh had once again stopped giving him ear scritchies due to her surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Just a hunch.” I took a deep breath, then let out an exasperated sigh. From the way that Linh flinched at the sound, though, it probably came out as more of a growl, which wasn’t a sound that should be able to come from a human throat — and which wasn’t what I’d wanted to do. “Linh.”

  “Y-yes?”

  “Make sure Bethanne is the only one manning the secretary bank at 11:30. Tell her that she’s looking for a blonde woman who, while conventionally attractive, looks a little uncanny after too much plastic surgery. She’s probably going to be angry, obnoxious, and demanding as all hell. She’s also more than a little, ah, small-minded, which is why I want Bethanne there to cow her, and the rest of you to get out of the line of fire.”

  Bethanne, bless her heart, had been dealing with this exact kind of problem since I was in diapers. If she could force a forty-year Big Law partner into staring down at his shoes in shame? Then she could do the same or better to an entitled middle-aged Moonshot who somehow thought it was okay to hack our computer system for the sake of… what? What did Rachael Cruz even want? I was still waiting for the bank to respond to a subpoena for information on the wire transfer, so it wasn’t like I could even do anything, either!

  “O-oh. Um…” Linh trailed off, looking off to the side and chewing on her lip in clear discomfort.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Is, um. Does this have something to do with Moonshot stuff?” she asked, concern in her tone.

  “It does, yes. One of the criminal cases the District Court assigned to me. Anyway, you’ve all got about…” I checked the time on my computer. “Forty minutes to get yourselves to a convenient spot to take a break, so I’d recommend you hop to it and warn Bethanne what’s coming.”

  Linh nodded. Then she and Gorou released simultaneous disappointed sighs as she stopped petting him and stood up, heading for the door to return to work.

  “And Linh?”

  “Hm?”

  I reached into my briefcase and pulled out the company card, which I held out for her to take.

  “Treat all the secretaries to lunch on the firm’s dime today. And don’t let Bethanne pass on a dessert this time, either.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “O-oh! Okay!” Linh grabbed the card, but her excitement almost immediately faded to hesitance. “You sure?”

  “Very.”

  “Okay! Bye for now, Mister Fox!” Linh gave Gorou one more wave and blew a kiss in his direction, then left my office, closing the door behind her.

  “I like her.”

  I just gave Gorou a half-lidded stare, ears low to showcase my disdain.

  “You like every cute girl who stops to pet you, old man,” I countered. “Like that customs officer at Heathrow. Or that LLM candidate who wanted to interview Ambrose for her thesis paper.”

  “Mm,” Gorou demurred, but declined to offer any other response. I sighed.

  “If you’re going to stay, I expect you to help make sure this twat doesn’t try anything else funny.”

  “Oh?” Gorou stood up, mischief shining in his amber eyes. “Not going to demand I leave?”

  “Given that I recognize the playbook Cruz is clearly working from?” I scoffed. “I was gonna want a witness for this next meeting anyway, and you’re already here, so…”

  “Mm. A playbook. Elaborate?” the fox prompted.

  “It’s one part of a classic, commonly right-wing playbook, meant to game the court of public opinion and shape the nature of discourse,” I explained, resting my eyes for a moment as I tried to decide the best way to phrase this. At least Gorou hadn’t swapped the conversation back to Japanese — that language’s sheer politeness and hierarchical structure didn’t lend itself well to this kind of almost derisive explanation. “Say you have an outside audience which holds some manner of influence over how things shake out for you, and you want them to cry foul when things go badly for you. Now, because this audience only gets to see the end result, this leaves you free to play muckamuck with the process: engender negativity through deniable means, or through actions that you can just pass off as proactivity or diligence. You build that up enough, it starts to color the way involved parties act, talk to, and treat each other, no matter how hard they try to stay neutral and unbiased. This gives you something to point at, which you then use to overturn, diminish, or otherwise delegitimize your bad outcome after the fact. And while it’s clever in a malicious sort of way, it’s also really predictable in this instance, because… because it, well…”

  I sighed, trying to think of the best way to put this. Gorou clearly picked up on the sharp downturn in my mood because he hopped up onto my desk, laid his head atop one hand, grabbed my other hand with a tail, and buried it in his fur. I started running my fingers through his silky coat, and let that soft, smooth sensation calm me down.

  “It’s predictable because Rachael Cruz tries to only exist in the world she wants, while categorically refusing to accept the world she made. Her worldview demands that we all acknowledge and reward this… this sort of manufactured victimhood, this paradoxical existence that somehow justifies every action she takes, but also holds none of the outside prejudices that victimhood should carry with it. In this bubble of bizarro-land she’s made for herself, every bad thing that happens to her gets reframed as this grand injustice perpetrated against her for the thought-crime of ‘speaking her truth’.”

  I scoffed. God, it sounded even more ridiculous now that I’d said it out loud.

  “What’s actually happening is that Rachael Cruz is used to always getting away with at most a slap on the wrist, be it because of privilege, favors owed, future utility, or whatever. And now, for maybe the first time in her life, she can’t. Instead, she’s finally feeling the consequences of her own actions in a way that she can’t just weasel out from under, or turn around and sell to an audience of willfully-blind sycophants who will mitigate it for her. But because this sort of definite, concrete penalty is antithetical to the worldview she’s oh so carefully constructed for herself, she’s looking for someone else to blame. Like me.”

  “So essentially she is… throwing a tantrum.”

  “That about sums it up, yeah,” I agreed. “And unfortunately for me, because the court decided that I’m her lawyer, she’s trying to make that tantrum my problem.”

  “She is trying to… what was that turn of phrase again,” Gorou murmured. “Ah — pass the buck.” He lifted his head from my hand and looked me in the eye. “Don’t let her.”

  “I don’t plan to,” I assured him. “I just really didn’t feel like yelling today, and I have this funny feeling that I’m going to be raising my voice within the first thirty seconds.”

  My warning to the secretary bank wasn’t the only heads-up I offered, and thankfully, the paralegals and other attorneys with cubicles and offices near mine all took the suggestion to find somewhere else to work until after lunch. Thanks to the quiet brought on by their absence, I was able to pick out the angry, half-dragging footsteps headed towards my office with enough time to school my features and glare at my door.

  Ten seconds later, Rachael Cruz forced my office door open with enough force that it left my interior window vibrating. If she hadn’t stepped further into my office in the same motion, it would’ve bounced off the doorstop and slammed right back into her.

  Instead, all it did was slam the door shut behind her.

  “You,” she ground out, giving me that look I tended to call ‘the crazy eyes’. “I need y—”

  A resounding, horrific yowl reverberated through my office, a scream torn from the jaws of hell itself shocking Cruz into silence. Color drained from her face, crazy eyes giving way to sudden panic as that mental switch in her subconscious flipped from fight to… well, not flight. She didn’t react quickly enough for that. From fight to freeze.

  And that moment of indecision was the opening I’d been waiting for.

  “Take a seat.”

  My tone brooked no dissent. This was not a request, much less an offer. This was a command. And with whatever nerve she’d mustered up shattered to pieces, Cruz didn’t spare so much as a second thought before sitting down, the arm not clutching her gaudy, overpriced advertisement of a designer purse clutching white-knuckled at the arm of the chair in front of my desk.

  “I want to make one thing perfectly clear, Mrs. Cruz,” I began. “Your little stunt today has given me all the grounds I need to go to the Chief Judge, be granted permission to withdraw as your lawyer, and leave you at the tender mercies of being your own fool of a client. The only reason I will not be doing that is because it would just be more fuel to the fire of your ridiculous little persecution complex.”

  “I — surely I don’t know w-what you mean.” But from the way her eyes shifted around, not even she believed her own words.

  “Do not lie to me,” I warned. A subtle flick of my tail was all the signal it took for Gorou to hop up from his position beside the doorway and onto the desk, my lips peeling back into a toothy sneer at the sharp, terrified inhalation from across the desk, and the wide-eyed terror that accompanied it. “You may have some measure of intelligence, but there isn’t a clever bone in your body. We both know you did the same damn thing that got you dragged into and kicked out of the NMR, and when you slid yourself into my schedule, you made the exact same sloppy mistake that got you found out both those other times. And, need I remind you, that means you committed another crime.”

  “What — I’m innocent!” Cruz yelled back, a moment’s indignance finally letting her find her spine. “I already told you that!”

  “Not the thing I’m supposed to defend you in court for, you idiot,” I hissed. “The hacking. You hacked my law firm’s computer systems.”

  “And would you have given me the time of day otherwise?” she fired back.

  I locked eyes with Gorou, lowering one ear in question, to which he flicked an ear in response. The movement drew Cruz’s eyes over to the witness in the room again, and even that brief reminder that it wasn’t just her and me was enough to steal away what little spine she’d gathered as she crumbled in her seat.

  “And you just admitted to the exact crime I accused you of,” I deadpanned. “In front of a witness, no less.”

  “Idiot,” Gorou mumbled in Japanese, his rumbling baritone drawing a shocked yelp from Cruz as she rocketed back from him, knocking my poor chair to the floor in the process.

  “More to the point,” I continued, “first: any other shenanigans like this will be the absolute last fucking straw. Second: while I will represent and zealously defend your case to the best of my ability, I do not believe your professions of innocence even a single bit. Do I make myself clear?”

  I didn’t get a verbal response from Cruz, not for lack of trying on her part. Her mouth opened, then her eyes darted over at Gorou, and she clammed up entirely. All I got out of her was a nod.

  “Good. Now, pick up the chair, sit back down, and explain what was so urgent that you needed to commit cybercrimes to bring it to my attention right now rather than just pick up the damn phone.”

  Once again, I didn’t get a verbal response from Cruz. Instead, she pulled that gaudy designer purse of hers around to her front, rooted around in it for a bit, and then slapped a thumb drive onto my desk. I looked up to meet her eyes, and my ears tilted back in surprise at the sudden surge of confidence in her posture.

  “And this is…?” I prompted, picking up the USB stick between two fingers. There wasn’t a chance in hell of me putting this thing into my computer; no, a stripped-down, airgapped $100 laptop would be its destination, just in case—

  “Proof,” Cruz declared, crossing her arms with a haughty smirk. “Proof that the bank received voice confirmation for the wire transfer, meaning it can’t have been me.”

  … oh, God damn it.

  “I see. And how did you come by this information?” Though my tone was neutral, Gorou had intuited my disquiet from the way my ears pulled low and my tail hung limp. “With your powers, perhaps?”

  “How else?”

  “... of course,” I sighed, gently tossing the thumb drive into the air.

  When it came down, it fell into a crackling, almost white-hot mass of lavender-violet foxfire, and landed on my desk as little more than noxious, bubbling slag.

  “Wha—you—what the fuck!?” Cruz yelled. She rushed towards my desk and probably would have tried to push me away from the thumb drive’s remains, if not for Gorou erecting a wall of fur before her with his four tails.

  “If you had told me you’d gotten this from an email chain, then regardless of whether you got it with your powers or not, that would have been fine,” I began. “If you’d told me they sent this over after you picked up the phone and called them, that would’ve been kosher. If you’d told me you walked into the damn bank and they gave this to you, then even though I wouldn’t have actually believed you, I could have still used that. But no. You let slip that you used your powers to get this information.”

  “So!?”

  “So, because you’re not an NMR super, and don’t have a flier’s license, using your powers to get anything means that, by default, it was illegally obtained. And that means I can’t use it.”

  Fruit of the Poisonous Tree — a term first coined in Nardone v. United States, 308 U.S. 338 (1939), which ruled that any evidence acquired by the police through illicit means, and which would not have inevitably been uncovered in some other fashion, was inadmissible as evidence.

  Now, that ruling itself suggested that it should only apply to the government, no? Well… remember that little thing I mentioned a while ago, and that Casey brought back up during his graduation speech? The ECLIPSE Act?

  Yeah… one of the surviving provisions of the Act stated that any evidence uncovered by the use of a Moonshot's powers was presumed to be Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, except when that power use was sanctioned by written orders from either their commanding officer or the ranking member of law enforcement.

  “If you’d told me that you’d gotten it any other way, then regardless of how likely I considered that to be a lie, I could honestly say that you’d gotten it through legitimate means,” I explained, successfully keeping my tone at least somewhat polite. My ears were still pulled low to the sides of my head, broadcasting my anger, but there wasn’t a chance in hell Cruz knew my body language well enough to understand that. “But, no. Because you told me you’d used your powers, I didn’t have that plausible deniability. Nor can I reasonably claim plausible deniability in the future, even if you were to leave then come back with a new thumb drive and a different explanation.”

  Once again, Cruz didn’t have any verbal response, which began to surprise me at this point. Didn’t this woman host a podcast? Wasn’t it her job to always have a response to things, even if it was just a canned talking point or pithy sound bite? Well, I wasn’t exactly going to complain about sparing my ears from her idiocy.

  Instead, I just used the lull to brush the remains of the thumb drive into a paper towel pulled from my desk drawer, and tossed that into the trash, followed by a spray of air freshener.

  “Now, if you’re quite done shooting your own case in the foot?” I pointed at the door. “Feel free to show yourself out.”

  Cruz’s features twisted up as much as the copious plastic surgery she’d subjected herself to would allow, but despite bracing myself for some serious vitriol, nothing came. Instead, she just stormed out the door, slamming it shut with about as much force as she’d initially opened it.

  But it was only when the angry footsteps faded out of earshot did I allow myself to relax, leaning on my desk and resting my head in my arms to ward off the headache I could feel coming on.

  “What a pain,” I mumbled in Japanese, fully aware that there was a nonzero chance Cruz was living up to her old NMR callsign and listening in on whatever I said next.

  “What an absolutely pleasant person,” Gorou snarked, adding his two cents on this whole shitshow. “And yet, I find myself wondering about this information she professed to have, regardless of the methods used to attain it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not allowed to be,” I grumbled, tilting my head to the side so I could peer up at Gorou without actually lifting up from my comfy arm-pillow. I swapped back to English for the next bit, since even if Cruz was using her powers to listen in, this was something I actually wanted her to hear. “There’s an argument to be made that it was the kind of information that would inevitably come up, but it’s not something I’m willing to risk. Plus, the only source we have for our client’s ability or inability to spoof audio or voice is her word. And if I were the jury, all it would take for me to set that aside is a quick reminder that the defendant is on trial for a dishonesty crime.”

  “And if you do come by the information some other way?”

  “Then at least this meeting will have given me some reason to keep an eye out for it,” I admitted. “Regardless, I’m not getting my hopes up. Cruz has a God-awful case, and honestly? Unless there’s some silver bullet that we just haven’t found yet, I can’t see a way to win it.”

  “What is the plan, then?” Gorou asked, right before he set himself to grooming my ears.

  “Really, Gorou? Right now? And in the office?”

  “Mm,” he hummed. I sighed, and thought about his question long enough for him to get halfway down my left ear before answering.

  “Hopefully she sees the value in a plea bargain, but I won’t hold my breath. Barring that? Prison, then a directed verdict in the subsequent civil case due to preclusion. So she’ll be penniless, imprisoned, and desperate enough to go crawling back to the NMR, no matter what bullshit they might decide to put her through for it.”

  And God, if that was something I wouldn’t even wish on my worst enemy… then again, Rachael Cruz had spent most of her life playing fuck-fuck games with hardly anything more to show for it than a slap on the wrist. She was long overdue for a fuck-fuck prize, and full disclosure? I’d be happy for her to finally get it. I did wish the court hadn’t set things so that it would happen on my watch. But, well, you know what they say about choosing beggars.

  And, hey — if I did have to take another loss for the books, at least it was open-and-shut enough that it didn’t feel like one.