Inspector Auditor Chloe Sharp clicked her pen in growing irritation. It was technically only her third day working from home, after a weekend she had slept through most of, and she was already sick of it. Her switch to temporary work-from-home had followed after two days of sick time, taken on account of a nearly broken knee the doctor explained she had done no favours for by stubbornly trying to walk on it. Blame it on the hunting sprite, she had thought hostilely at the time. Except a busted knee didn’t care about blame one iota, and all she was left with was mandated rest. Her home had been a carefully crafted oasis away from work, and here was work doing its level best to invade said oasis. She’d made sure to dress in her usual suit at the start of the day, despite the painful protestations of her knee, and then had set about trying to find a surface to work from. She eventually settled on the kitchen - it was the most modern room in her house, and therefore the room she cared the least for. Staring at the cheap faux-marble countertops and dreary grey-tile backsplash was at least better than tarnishing any of her precious antiques with the indignity of being her backdrop while she menially scrolled through an unsorted list of Niirisu-supported labs and research projects.

  It was dull work, made slower and even more dull by having to do it through heavily bandaged hands. It was made only slightly less dull knowing that any one of them could have caught wind of her interest in Niirisu in the Eingopher investigation and sent a hunting sprite after her. There was certainly no shortage of candidates – going through the list it felt like Niirisu must have a financial stake or research-sharing arrangement with half the labs in the city. Given how wide his net seemed to stretch, it might have been more suspicious if he hadn’t been invested in Eingopher’s lab. Even still, his interest in that lab was definitely significant, accounting for nearly a third of the lab’s funding on his own. It was certainly far more significant than the vague recollections of a ‘former student’ he’d shared during Chloe’s interview. It was well short of incriminating, but it was still enough to be concerning, and beyond that, Chloe felt like something was off, even if it was little more than intuition at this point. She tapped her pen against her lip, quietly frustrated the bandages kept her from spinning it as she usually did.

  Hunting sprites in many ways were perfect assassins. They could be directed to their targets by rudimentary, millennia-old ritual, much the same as the process to seal them. Once so directed, there was nothing to link the sprite back to the assassin. And because they were so rare, the chances of a counter-seal being available on short notice was basically nil. In fact the only reason they had come up in the annual safety review was because someone had been caught the previous year using one to assassinate several rival researchers. The first few deaths were ruled to be unsolvable, but by the seventh, Security had identified the MO and the assassin had gotten sloppy hiding his ritual implements. The only other hunting sprite incident in the recorded history of the city had happened well over a decade before. That was about where reliable information about hunting sprites stopped – they were rare, deadly, and had specific known summoning and countering methods.

  So Chloe turned her attention back to the list of suspects. She was investigating numerous other researchers and no doubt all of them wished she would just disappear, but the ones who Chloe felt had the means and motive were few and far between. Tony Smalls lived deep within his own esoteric area of specialty – he wanted as little to do with Audits, or indeed the rest of the world, as possible. She couldn’t imagine he was the type to take the time away from his research to learn how to summon and direct a hunting sprite. Timidi Jonson was on the edge of getting his funding revoked, and had the kind of zeal that had Chloe grateful for her Security escort. Chloe could see him resorting to violence to remove a threat to his research, but his field was biology and synthetic organs, and again, he was far too specialized for Chloe to suspect him of dabbling in occult summoning rituals. Bernadette Minimis was a consciousness expert, and Chloe wouldn’t be surprised if her bank of knowledge included obscure type reds like hunting sprites, but her personality was far too mild to leap to murder to get an Auditor off her back. She’d actually been the easiest of the three to work with, and Chloe had assured her all was going well with her audit, so there wasn’t much in the way of motive either.

  Which left Niirisu. The professor was a complicated case. Chloe had been careful to avoid implying any suspicion of his involvement with Eingopher, but of course it wasn’t difficult to discover his significant financial stake in the lab. And likewise, it wasn’t difficult to assume an Auditor on the Eingopher investigation had discovered that stake. Niirisu was widely involved in research across the city, and it would be practically impossible to support so many different closets without a few of them hiding skeletons, but even so, he might prefer those skeletons remain hidden. Niirisu didn’t seem the type to pull the trigger himself, but as Chloe recalled the glimpse of urgency under his meticulous fa?ade, he didn’t have to. The right words with the right urgency to the right person – and if an inconvenient problem happened to go away as a result, who could complain?

  The problem was, that was all conjecture. Chloe needed evidence, and evidence was hard to find when you couldn’t leave your own apartment. Even with treatments to accelerate the healing process, the doctor had warned her she should avoid putting stress on the knee for 2 weeks, and full recovery would take weeks to months. Months! Her frustration over her lack of mobility threatened to boil over again, and Chloe irritably looked around for something to throw, but apart from her pen (a precious, beautiful antique), her computer monitor (company property), and assorted paper notes (unsatisfying to throw and a pain to sort afterwards), there was nothing in easy reach. She tried to exhale her irritation out with deep, measured breaths, and was only partially successful. As much as she resented the idea of net shopping, she was sorely tempted to buy a punching bag for her apartment. The only thing stopping her was that there nowhere to put it, and even if there was, she still didn’t want to see her oasis in the background as she drove her frustrations out through her fists.

  In the end, she limped over to her kettle. Tea was the one mid-day respite she still had access to. As the fragrance of peppermint wafted out of her cup as it steeped, her thoughts drifted back to the hunting sprite – she’d been fortunate to encounter the priestess when she did. And her friend, who’d helped carry Chloe out of the park. Who’d managed to think quickly enough to pull out her phone and first arrange her own safety. Who doubled back to draw the hunting sprite to their seal. Davis had said her name, what was it again? And Davis! Davis again! And he’d carried her! ‘You better not drop me.’ ‘I’ll do my best, but you’re not exactly light.’ Even if it had only been to a car and into the hospital, letting him look after her had been warm, and it had been comfortable. Perhaps her adrenaline was simply spent at that point, but Davis had been far warmer and more comfortable than the robot that had carried her to the elevator in Office 38. She’d been carried a lot that day. She tried ‘embarrassing’ on for size, and found it didn’t fit the memory. Despite the fact it had been Davis, it was still just… nice. A gentle chime from her wind-up timer let her know her tea had finished steeping. She took a small sip, letting the warmth, the smell, the taste all wash over her. She spared a glance around her room, letting the warm wood tones relax her further. If only Davis was always the inconsiderate oaf he’d been when they’d been dating, it would make dealing with him a lot easier.

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

  Her tea in hand, she settled back into her work. She again brought up the list of Niirisu’s affiliated labs and researchers, and tried a new filter: Duration of support. Right near the top was Eingopher - Niirisu really had been invested for a long time. Was there anything suspicious about the others populating the top of the list? Several were high-profile, well-established institutions, and several more were much smaller labs Chloe didn’t immediately recognize. Several were flagged as being in the queue for an audit – her department was certainly kept busy, and it was an ongoing struggle to make sure her precious time away from work wasn’t swamped by a deluge of OT. Her manager certainly asked often enough. Chloe’s eyes were drawn to a line a few rows below Eingopher indicating a scheduled audit had recently been upgraded in priority, based on a recent Records report. Chloe didn’t recognize the name ‘Angela Trebira’, but to her surprise she found she did recognize the name of the Records clerk who had submitted the report – William Stocks.

  ****

  William Stocks looked much the same on her monitor as she remembered him in person – tired eyes, a mild mustache, and a stiff upper lip. A consummate professional. The kind of person Chloe found easy to work with, as long he didn’t bring up a certain mutual Security acquaintance. “Inspector Auditor Sharp, glad to see you appear to be doing well.”

  Chloe nearly rolled her eyes. She couldn’t walk without wincing and her hands still needed bandages – at a certain point bland and inoffensive greetings became offensive in their own way. Although at least he hadn’t called her ‘Miss Sharp.’ “You were looking into Dr. Angela Trebira’s financials. The last report was submitted two weeks ago, but the status is still ‘open’ – has anything new come up?”

  He raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he wasn’t used to people who got straight to the point. “I’m afraid not. Have you read the initial report?”

  She glared at him silently. It only took a few seconds for her meaning to be communicated. “Ahem, well, in that case, as per the report, roughly half Grand North’s total spending isn’t properly accounted for – no receipts, and the transaction records were obviously filled out by an android with generic descriptors. ‘Medical supplies’, ‘transport’, ‘mechanical parts’, and so on. One was even filled out simply as ‘red’. I understand the file was sent to Audits, but it’s still showing as active in the Records system, and my name is still attached, so I’ve been attempting to gather more information about these transactions from Finance, but I gather looking into an individual account like that requires a lot of permissions, and they’ve been very slow getting back to me.”

  Chloe nodded, clicking her pen thoughtfully. That sounded like typical Finance, all right. “Trebira might be related to another case I’m working through, so please keep me up to date. I’ll reach out to Finance – I’ve got a few tricks to get them moving a little faster.”

  The easiest trick was unfortunately the one that didn’t work if you were housebound - face-to-face, most Finance clerks were all too happy to rush through a request if it meant you’d stop doing unpleasant things, like making eye contact. The next best approach was to skip through to a manager. If you could keep your explanation of why you needed approval to under two sentences, they’d more often than not take one look at the request and shrug it off with a routine ‘approved’. Which was exactly what happened when Chloe reached out to Greg Stamps, Office 92 Finance Manager. She explained it was related to severe delinquencies in reporting and had possible links to the Eingopher investigation, and a command to his android and three mouse clicks later, approval was granted and the files were unlocked. Chloe tried to make sure to keep up a pleasant expression until the call ended, but really, if it was that easy then why did approvals normally take so long?

  Of course, the approval would have returned the files to the original requestor, so Chloe called William Stocks back up again. She could wait until he’d looked over the data, but after the detour to deal with Finance, she was growing impatient. In her defense, half of a lab’s finances missing receipts was unusually bad, even for the most scatter-brained researchers. Audits would certainly need to review the situation, so she was just skipping another drawn out process of bouncing around approvals and staff assignments by picking up the case herself. When Stocks sent the files over promptly without asking about sign offs or approvals, Chloe nodded to herself – this was definitely someone she could work with. The next hour was spent digesting the considerable trove of receipts attached to the Grand North account record. At length, William looked up, and made eye contact through the screen. “Auditor Sharp - I don’t mean to be alarming. I hope there’s an innocent explanation I’m missing, but Dr. Trebira’s purchases are a disturbingly close match to the components used for Alpha project life support systems. And I’m hardly an expert, but it looks like it’s significantly more than would be necessary for just one.”

  Chloe had been reviewing the same data, multiple times at this point. She too was hoping to find a perfectly innocent alternate explanation. But if Stocks had come to the same conclusion, hoping for a less catastrophic explanation was probably just escapism. As she stared at her handwritten notes, then back to the records, looking for a mistake that wasn’t there, reality began to sink in. Eingopher had access to one stray Alpha project. Chloe breathed out shallowly, “At the low end, Trebira’s equipment could support at least six.”