And walking between them…
Wearing her grandfather’s twenty-ounce Scottish tweed hacking jacket over her Army service uniform, her hand-welted leather field boots crushing the shattered glass into the floorboards with a clean, concussive *tack… tack… tack*…
Her bronze transit pin and her silver eagles gleaming beneath the downlights, her gaze steady, unbroken, and holding forty decibels of pure polar diamond…
Was Colonel Clara Eleanor Mercer.
Me.
The Cleaner.
The auditor.
Alive.
Beside me walked Aunt Eleanor, her gold-headed surveyor’s cane striking the stone in synchronized cadence.
And walking on our left flank, his fangs bared, his amber eyes fixed on the Chief Justice…
Was Barnaby.
Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance did not dive for cover.
A man who had spent four decades operating at the absolute pinnacle of judicial authority does not lose his composure when a door splinters; he recalculates the leverage, identifies the constitutional immunities, and prepares to deploy his statutory protections.
