Chapter 477 | The References Were You

Chapter 477: 477 | The References Were You

The points left my account like a kidney leaving my body. Four thousand five hundred credits of survival converted into architecture, and the number in my vision dropped from 8,480 to 3,980 with the cheerful finality of a cash register at a funeral home. Three weeks of gate clears, two alpha kills, and one interdimensional near-death experience, all spent on a room upgrade so four women could yell at me in surround sound.

Worth it. Probably. Ask me in four hours.

I took Aurora’s hand first because she offered it first, and then Naomi’s fingers found my other palm, warm and calloused from her staff. Belle grabbed the back of my shirt. Addison grabbed Belle’s belt loop, completing a chain of women connected to me through fabric and skin and a parasitic divine system that some old man in a cosmic library designed specifically to reward this exact behavior.

"Everyone hold on," I said.

"To what," Addison said. "Your ego?"

I activated Private Sanctum at Gold rank, and Aurora’s apartment folded like an origami crane being crushed in a fist.

The transit hit different at Gold. Bronze felt like stepping through a door. Gold felt like the universe picked me up by the spine and dipped me into a bath of warm static for exactly one second before setting me down somewhere that should not exist. My ears popped. My vision whited out. The graft in my chest roared with satisfaction like a dog that had been promised a walk for six weeks and was finally seeing the leash come off the hook.

Then my boots hit ground that wasn’t ground.

I opened my eyes and forgot how to close them.

The Bronze Sanctum had been a room. A nice room, with cream walls and a fake cityscape and sheets that Belle had opinions about. The Gold Sanctum was not a room. The Gold Sanctum was a world.

We stood on a cliff of dark volcanic glass overlooking a cove that curved into the distance, the water below the impossible blue-green of somewhere tropical and ancient. The sky above was perpetual golden hour, the sun hanging low and fat on a horizon it would never reach, painting everything in amber and rose and the specific shade of orange that California pretends to own but has never truly earned. Behind us rose a structure I had designed in the thirty seconds between spending 4,500 points and grabbing Aurora’s hand, pulling references from every beautiful place I’d ever seen in two lifetimes and feeding them into the Sanctum’s customization engine with the desperation of a man decorating for the most important party of his short and ridiculous life.

The building sat into the cliff face like it had grown there. Open-air pavilion with dark wooden beams, sheer white curtains billowing inward on a breeze that carried salt and jasmine and something sweeter that had no name in any language I knew. The floor was polished stone, warm underfoot despite the shade. A sunken area dominated the center, three steps down into a space lined with cushions the color of wine and midnight and cream, large enough for ten people and clearly built for fewer. Candles sat in iron sconces along the walls, already lit, their flames gold and steady in wind that should have gutted them. A pool extended from the pavilion’s edge out over the cliff, infinity-edge, the water spilling silently into the cove below in a trick of perspective that made the pool look like it bled directly into the ocean.

And the bed.

God, the bed.

It occupied a raised platform at the far end beneath a ceiling of woven dark wood, and it was not a bed so much as a declaration of intent. California king was an insult to the dimensions. The sheets were dark silk, so deep navy they bordered on black, and the pillows were stacked high enough to constitute a defensive fortification. Sheer curtains hung from the canopy frame, the same white as the ones blowing in the pavilion, creating a space that was both open to the world and impossibly private.

Four hours in here. One hour out there. I had built us a world with its own sunset that would last the entire session because I told the Sanctum I wanted golden hour and the Sanctum, apparently operating at Gold-rank fidelity, decided golden hour meant forever.

Nobody moved for five full seconds.

"Holy shit," Jordan would have said, if Jordan had been here, which he was not, because Jordan was at the dining hall eating pasta and having the best evening of his life precisely because he had no idea what was happening.

Naomi released my hand and walked forward three steps to the cliff’s edge, where the stone dropped away into open air and the cove spread beneath us in its ridiculous blue. The breeze caught her pink and black hair and lifted it off her shoulders, and the gold light turned her brown skin into something I would have paid real money to photograph. Her mother’s shell necklace caught a sunbeam and threw a tiny rainbow against her collarbone. She touched the stone railing with both hands and looked out at the water and the sky and the impossible architecture, and her voice came out very small.

"Jace."

"Yeah."

"You built this."

"In about thirty seconds, yeah."

"You built this in thirty seconds."

"The Sanctum does most of the work. I just gave it references."

She turned around. The gold light hit her from behind and turned her into a silhouette, and her pink eyes were so bright they looked like they were generating their own light source, which given the Gold buff still humming through her system from two nights ago might have been literally true.

"What references," she said.

I could have lied. I could have said Bali or the Amalfi Coast or some resort I saw in a travel magazine in my previous life. I could have deflected with a joke about Pinterest boards or real estate listings.

"You," I said. "The way you looked on the east field at sunset the first night we practiced. The cove is the one you described from home, the one where your dad takes the boat out early and the water goes turquoise before the sun gets too high. The stone is volcanic because you told me once that your favorite rock at the beach was black and smooth from the waves. The jasmine is because you use that hand cream you think I haven’t noticed."

Naomi’s hand went to her mouth.

"Oh, fuck off," Addison said, but her voice was thick.