Chapter 502 | You’re Dead, Davenport

Chapter 502: 502 | You’re Dead, Davenport

"It’s not a compliment about the laps. The laps are stupid." He watched Belle try to redirect Blair toward literally any other topic and fail. "It’s a compliment about the not-dying. You died. Twice. On a stretcher. Belle told me. And now you’re standing here getting yelled at by two women who could set you on fire, and you look happy about it."

"I’m not happy about the laps."

"Nobody’s happy about the laps." Jordan sighed, and the sigh contained the weight of a man watching his life get more complicated in real time. "But you’re happy. And I liked it better when it was just us and Misato yelled at all of us equally. Now we’ve got Blair, who yells at everyone like a supervisor, and Hikaru, who I’m pretty sure could kill me with a look, and Javier, who won’t stop taking notes on how we breathe."

Across the field, Javier looked up from his notebook. "The breathing patterns are relevant to stamina optimization. If we sync our recovery windows we could theoretically extend engagement time by eleven percent."

"See?" Jordan gestured at him. "That. Every day now, that."

"You wanted more firepower," I said.

"I wanted to sleep. Firepower was your idea. And Vale’s. And whoever decided we needed eight people who all hate each other in one squad." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I had a system. Wake up, complain, get yelled at by one woman, complain more, go home. Now there’s three demanding women and a note-taking gremlin and you’re the field lead, which means when it all goes wrong they’re going to look at you, and you’re going to make one of your insane calls, and somehow it’s going to work, and then I have to hear about it."

I clapped him on the shoulder. "You care so much."

"I care that you keep breathing so I don’t have to lead this circus. Those are different things."

"Are they?"

"Don’t Naomi me."

At the center of the field, something finally broke.

"Enough." Misato’s voice went low and dangerous, the register that meant she’d stopped negotiating. "Davenport. You want to lead? Fine. Lead. Run the next drill. Whole thing. Your formation, your calls, your target priority. And when it falls apart, you’re going to understand exactly why I do it my way."

Blair’s chin came up. That aristocratic tilt, the one her father drilled into her with a piano bench and a stopwatch. "Fine."

"Diamond spread," Blair announced. "Love, point. Fox and Wayne, flanks. Monroe, center rear. Tanaka, cover left. Mendoza, right. I’ll anchor damage."

It was a decent formation. On paper.

Then she started giving orders, and it fell apart in eleven seconds.

Because Blair didn’t call adjustments, she issued corrections. She didn’t trust anyone to move without her telling them, so she told everyone, all at once, in the tone of someone identifying failures rather than coordinating a unit. Naomi tried to advance on point and Blair snapped at her spacing. Jordan deployed shadows and Blair criticized his timing before he’d finished. Hikaru moved to cover the left flank exactly the way she’d said she would, and Blair told her she was wrong again, and Hikaru simply stopped and stared at her, and the whole diamond collapsed into a cluster of people waiting to be told what they’d done wrong.

I stood in center rear and watched it happen and did nothing, because Misato had said to let it fall apart, and because Blair Davenport needed to see it fall apart with her own ice-blue eyes.

Belle appeared at my shoulder, blue hair pulled back, expression flat. "She’s going to get us killed."

"She’s going to get herself frustrated. Different thing."

"How long do we let this go?"

"Until she asks."

Belle looked at me. "Blair Davenport has never asked for help in her life."

"I know." I watched Blair try to reset the formation and get it wrong again, watched the panic she was hiding behind the contempt, the same panic I’d seen in a collapsed cave when she’d kissed me and insisted it meant nothing while her body called her a liar. "That’s why it’s going to be a great semester."

Belle followed my gaze. Her eyes narrowed. "You’re doing that thing."

"What thing?"

"The scheming thing. The one that means someone’s going to end up different from how they started."

"I’m doing an observing thing."

"Jace."

"Belle."

She held my stare for three seconds, then made a small sound that might have been disgust and might have been something warmer, and went back to filming Blair’s disaster on her phone. For the record.

Across the field, Blair’s formation died its final death when she called for advance and target-fire simultaneously and Naomi, Jordan, and Hikaru all moved in different directions because none of them knew which order took priority. Misato’s clone, which had been standing in as a training dummy, walked through the gap in the formation and tapped Blair on the shoulder with a wooden sword.

"You’re dead," the clone said, and dissolved.

Blair stood in the wreckage of her own command, breathing hard, red hair loose from the movement, the burn scar at her collar visible where her scarf had slipped. She looked at the squad. At me. At Misato, who watched with an expression that wasn’t quite triumph and wasn’t quite pity.

And I saw the exact moment Blair Davenport understood that individual strength meant nothing, the same lesson Vale had shoved down our throats in a lecture hall, the lesson she’d agreed with out loud and never once believed.

She looked like she wanted to burn the whole field down.

She looked like she wanted to cry.

She locked both of those things behind the Davenport steel and turned to Misato and said, through her teeth, "Show me how you do it."

The System pinged at the edge of my vision.

Blair Davenport. Devotion: thirty-one percent. Status: ???

Two points since yesterday.

I didn’t smile. Smiling would’ve gotten me set on fire.

But somewhere in the back of my skull, on a crystal plate in Santa Barbara I’d never see, the seventh ring flickered a little brighter, and the graft in my chest hummed its stupid satisfied hum, and I stood in center rear with eighteen days on my clock and thought about the fact that the woman who’d tried to buy my compliance, then threaten it, then investigate it, had just asked another person to teach her how to be part of something.

Misato started explaining. Movement first. Trust the unit. Call adjustments, not corrections. Blair listened with the specific rigidity of someone hearing a foreign language they’d decided to learn.

Jordan groaned beside me. "She’s going to be here every day now, isn’t she."

"Every day."

"With the yelling and the fire and the perfect posture."

"Every day."

"I hate it here." He said it with the same fondness he used for everything he pretended to hate. "Get up, Monroe. She’s about to make us run the drill again and if you’re standing still she’ll blame you and I’ll get another lap by association."

I got up.

Because Misato would blame me. Because Blair would find something wrong with my spacing. Because I was the field lead and the stress ball and the guy with four rings burning steady and a fifth one flickering awake in front of me, and because the graft was full and the timer had breathing room and the sun was coming up over the water turning everything gold in a way that felt like it might actually mean something.

Naomi caught my eye across the field. Mouthed, told you.

I mouthed back, worth it.

And we ran the drill again.