The Reviewer of Pious Money II

In Which Nia Ponders Whether Bad Money Can Do Good Things — Episode Two* *The Reviewer of Pious Money II is a three-part series. Click here to read part I.

Analyst Nia Okafor has been quietly investigating a suspicious funding source for a community project two years in the making. Suddenly, the mysterious fund code resolves into an organization that looks almost too clean to be real. The colleague who flagged it before she could has an explanation that almost holds together. And the community leader whose project is at stake has issued an instruction Nia did not expect — and is not sure she can follow.

"So," Celeste said, without looking up. "Tell me what's wrong with my money."

She did not invite Nia to sit.

"Nothing's wrong with the money," Nia said, pushing her shoulders back. "Or — nothing is yet wrong with the money. There might be something wrong with where some of it came from." 

Nia was used to Celeste's manner. Celeste had not survived three decades of organizing in a neighborhood that had been written off six different ways by six different administrations by being warm. She had survived by being a steel post of moral rectitude against which opposition might flap vigorously at first and then, eventually, helplessly.

"Then why are you here?" Celeste said, looking up at last but without putting down her pen. She was wearing the blue Coalition windbreaker she wore on what Nia had come to think of as her load-bearing days — days where Celeste was running multiple things at once and had decided that questions of personal presentation could be answered by a single garment.

Nia sighed, pulled out the chair she'd never been offered, and settled herself across the desk, ignoring the older woman's laser-like stare. After what Nia had found last week about the mysterious Rhizome Foundation and its perfect deck of all-too-real board members, there was a lot more than just Celeste to be bothered by.

It was as though Celeste — let's face it, Nia thought, the woman had a predator’s ability to tune into fear, or its lack, in her prey — sensed an uncharacteristic defiance, and began, with a touch of listlessness, to stack papers and magazines to the side of the desk.

The Gentilly Neighborhood Futures Coalition operated out of the upper floor of what had been, until the 2036 floods, a corner pharmacy. The downstairs was a community kitchen now. Like most of the organizations in the Ikigai network — the loose web of theme-based and place-based communities — Gentilly Futures held a dual charter recognized by state and federal government. Throughout her seemingly interminable tenure as coalition lead, Celeste had painstakingly rooted that charter in this specific stretch of streets and houses and people, while simultaneously threading it into the larger fabric of the network — ikigai, the concept of purpose as tether to the good life. There was a small brass plate by the door downstairs that listed both affiliations.

"Well?" Celeste said, not bothering to throttle the impatience in her voice.

Nia sighed again. She was kidding herself if she thought she did not care deeply how Celeste would react. That was why she was here after all.

She told her about what she'd found in her late-night reconciliation work. The fund code  —  VRCX-7. The fact that roughly a quarter of the Abundance Commons capitalization — for the cooperative housing and wellness development Celeste and her coalition had spent years fighting for — appeared to be flowing from a source that didn't resolve cleanly to anything she could verify. This was not true on its face; Nia had indeed verified the source, in a sense. First there had been nothing — a fund code that didn't lead anywhere, that Nia checked robotically for days, as though magically it would resolve itself. And then, magically, after she'd left it alone for several days, it had. She had keyed in the code as a matter of compunction rather than expectation — and this time, a regranting organization popped up, replete with a website that made you believe in their mission.

The fact that roughly a quarter of the Abundance Commons capitalization — for the cooperative housing and wellness development Celeste and her coalition had spent years fighting for — appeared to be flowing from a source that didn't resolve cleanly to anything she could verify.

It had all been so flawlessly robust that she second-guessed herself for a moment, wondering if perhaps she had inadvertently typed in the wrong code, say about a hundred times. She hadn't fully caught up to what it all meant yet — there were too many thoughts already crowding her upstairs room — and she wasn't ready to hand over something she hadn't finished thinking through.

She also did not mention Jason — six months out from a promotion that would make him her supervisor — and the fact that he had, for reasons unknown to her, already flagged the code for compliance review while seemingly hiding the fact from her and the rest of the team.

When Nia finished, Celeste was quiet for a long moment. Outside, a child was yelling something incomprehensible and joyful from the playground across the street. Then she said: "How much of the project?"

"About a quarter."

"And if you pull on it."

"If I pull on it, the whole project could be frozen while they investigate. Could be months. Could be longer."

Celeste's face did the thing it did, which was nothing. Celeste's face was a place where reactions went to disappear. After a moment she got up and went to the window, which faced the empty lot where the Abundance Commons would, if everything held, break ground in March.

"You know what I learned the long way," she said, still looking out. "I learned that there's a thousand ways people can control you with money. Keeping it from you. Making you chase it like a hamster on a wheel. Slicing it ten ways till Sunday. And just when you think you've seen it all, they invent a thousand and one ways — bad money for good things. Makes you wonder how good those things can truly be."

"I know."

"Mm." Celeste turned. "But you also know what the shotgun houses with the windows taped over look like in the winter. Miss Doreen be running the space heater off an extension cord because her landlord still hasn't fixed the wall unit. You know what the kids be doing in the summer when the cooling center closes early. You know what waiting another year costs us, for real, in this neighborhood. Don't you."

"I do."

"Then I need you focused on the March timeline," Celeste said, her voice settling into the particular flatness that meant the decision was already made. "Not chasing something that may be nothing. We are not handing them another delay."

This was not the reaction Nia had expected. "What?"

"You heard me. Not this time. Not this battle. Why should they win again, whoever they is." It wasn't quite a question. "I'm not letting another kid fall through the cracks because we stopped to be righteous about the paperwork."

"You heard me. Not this time. Not this battle. Why should they win again, whoever they is." It wasn't quite a question. "I'm not letting another kid fall through the cracks because we stopped to be righteous about paperwork."

Nia walked back to the CRX — the Gulf Coast Civic Resource Exchange, the regional finance cooperative where she worked — through the November light, which was doing that low golden thing again. She made it almost the whole eight blocks before she allowed herself to think about what she'd left out of the conversation upstairs.

The regranting organization was called the Rhizome Community Foundation, incorporated eighteen months ago, with a modest web presence and a filing record that was, on its face, entirely in order. She'd spent the better part of an hour with it. The stated mission — catalyzing place-based economic resilience — was almost aggressively aligned with everything Abundance Commons was trying to do.

Then there were the board members, who would read as real to anyone scanning their profiles for evidence of personhood. There was Linnea Soto, board chair: fifty-three, twelve years at a mid-tier impact firm, a wry LinkedIn post about being fired from her first job in '17, a photo of her at what appeared to be her mother's hospice. Marcus Akoto-Reyes, trustee: Tougaloo undergrad, Peace Corps Jamaica, a failed startup in '31, an MPA from the New School, and an essay he'd written for a small nonprofit journal on the moral hazards of upstream philanthropy.. Dr. Yetunde Bayo, the third member, had a faculty page at Howard, a 2034 podcast appearance on maternal health equity, and a son in college whose acceptance she had announced on the same profile the way a real parent does, with the right amount of pride and self-deprecation.

But the timing. Rhizome had incorporated eighteen months ago, and within nine was disbursing grants at a scale that should have taken three to five years to build the legal, financial, and reputational infrastructure for. Funders did not, in Nia's experience, hand significant capital to brand-new organizations without a track record. And yet, anyone could fake an organization. Faking coherent people — with the textures of history and small failures that real people carried — didn't seem plausible to Nia.

Funders did not, in Nia's experience, hand significant capital to brand-new organizations without a track record.

She thought, not for the first time, about the scholarship. Hendricks-Vora Fellowship, her junior year, the one that had made the difference between finishing and not finishing. The money had come from the Vora side of the name — Meridian Vora, whose company had built the virtual-reality curricula supplement half the higher-education institutions in the country had adopted, with serious psychological consequences for a sizable subset of students. And whose investment portfolio included a significant stake in Neurosolve, the company that held three of the key patents on the reality-dysphoria treatment that became the go-to for injured students. She had known this by the time she accepted. She had accepted anyway.

Nia was not, at bottom, a person who believed that those without much could afford the luxury of clean hands as a value in itself. She had seen too many people she loved make do with what was available, take the job that was there rather than the one that was right, cash the check and ask the questions later because later was when you had the margin for questions. But she had never quite stopped turning the Vora money over in her mind, the way you turn something over looking for where it was made. It was pious, pretentious money, wanting to show that it was doing good — and it had done good. She was evidence of that. Would recipients of the Rhizome money one day pick at this question the way one would a fragile scab?

She found Jason in the small conference room on the second floor, which he had a habit of colonizing in the afternoons because it had the only window with a real view. He was eating a salad with the precise, efficient movements of a man who had budgeted exactly seventeen minutes for it.

"Got a second?" she said.

"For you, two." He smiled. He had a good smile, which was part of the problem. Jason was charming the way certain people who had grown up needing to be charming were charming — calibrated, deployable, in service of advancement. It had carried him through rooms, including the rooms in which the decision to promote him to her supervisor had been all but made. Nia had her own version of the childhood that produced charm like that. She had never figured out how to spend hers the same way.

"What's up?"

She closed the door behind her, which made him pause mid-bite.

"VRCX-7," she said.

The pause continued a beat longer than it should have.

"Ah." He set his fork down.

"You flagged it."

"I did."

"You didn't mention it at the meeting."

"No," he said. "Honestly? I wasn't sure it was anything. You know I've got the panel review next month — the promotion. I've been pulling everything I can find on small unfamiliar codes across the last four quarters, building a sample for the dossier. Judgement presencing in action, that whole framing. Showing I can catch the small stuff. VRCX-7 came up in a batch I was working through. I flagged it the way I flag everything. If it was real, I figured compliance would surface it."

Nia questions Jason about the mystery code. These comic illustrations were created with the help of AI. As such, some details may not exactly match how they are written in the story.

It was a good answer. It was exactly the kind of answer Jason Rodriguez would give — the kind that sat at the comfortable intersection of his ambition and the institutional logic of the place. Nia nodded the way she always nodded, which meant I am receiving what you are saying and have not yet decided what to do with it.

"Got it," she said.

"You're not going to write me up, are you," he said, smiling again.

"No, Jason."

"Good." He picked up the fork. "Because I would absolutely deserve it."

She left him to the salad.

She did not, that afternoon, write him up. She did, that afternoon, pull the dossier-prep records he was permitted to access for promotion review, which were logged by the system as a matter of routine, in the disbursement reconciliation module, in a way that would not appear unusual.

Jason's promotion sample was real. He had, in fact, been pulling small unfamiliar codes across the last four quarters. There were eleven of them logged in his review folder.

None of them were VRCX-7.

He had flagged VRCX-7 from a different access point, on a different day, under a different module path, and the timestamp on the access trail did not match the timeline of his promotion-prep activity. It matched, instead, a pattern of brief logins he had been making to the reconciliation system at irregular intervals — early mornings, late evenings — for the better part of three months.

She sat with that for a while.

She did not feel triumphant. She did not feel vindicated. What she felt was the very specific exhaustion of having been right about something she had hoped to be wrong about.

Outside, the November light was draining out of the sky. Down on Oretha Castle Haley, a streetlight came on, alone for a moment, before the others caught up.

This was the month she was supposed to be pushing the bulky furniture of ADHD and rheumatoid arthritis — along with, well, life — back against the wall in order to make room for thinking seriously about what was next. The human authenticator work — reading context, building trust, the kind of judgement that couldn't be automated because it lived in the particular texture of a person's attention — was what she wanted. The Ikigai network was one of the most reliable seedbeds for those roles, and Celeste's referral would be worth more than a year of résumé-building. That calculation had always sat beneath her near-obeisance to the older woman, alongside the genuine respect: not cynicism, just the recognition that wanting something from someone and admiring them were not mutually exclusive.

Instead she had VRCX-7 crowding her thoughts. She had Rhizome Foundation. She had Jason's access trail and Celeste's inexplicable instruction to let it go. She had the choice of whether to take any of it to Jeanine, her boss — which meant risking Celeste moving from un-warm to something considerably more volcanic.

Nia was still sitting with it when a task notification appeared in her queue, Jeanine's name in the header. She opened it and skimmed: a major new commitment. Jeanine's excitement, conveyed in the message with a proliferation of exclamation marks, was unmistakable. Nia was about to file it for tomorrow when one line near the bottom caught the edge of her attention.

Funding source: Rhizome Community Foundation.

She looked more closely. It was a multi-year capacity grant to the Ikigai network at large — not to a single organization or project but to the network spine itself: rare and desperately needed funding for operational support, governance infrastructure, programmatic alignment across the entire web. It was the kind of capital that would not build a building, but would, once accepted, build a presence inside the network for years to come.

She sat very still for a moment.

The streetlights were all on now, and the room had gotten dark around her without her noticing.

—END—

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Note: This piece was produced by a professional fiction writer using AI as a writing assistant. Specifically, this means that a human created the premise, plot, characterization, worldbuilding framework, and select prose, and made all consequential editorial decisions, including on theme, setting, pacing, and arc.

Writers: Malaika Cheney-Coker; Chat GPT; Claude AI | Editors: Jay Black

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