Chapter 503 | Walk With Me, Monroe

Chapter 503: 503 | Walk With Me, Monroe

We ran the drill four more times before Misato called it. By the fourth pass, Blair had stopped correcting and started calling, which sounds like a small thing until you’ve watched someone who’s spent eighteen years believing control equals survival hand a fraction of it to a girl she used to pay for existing. The diamond held. Naomi hit her marks. Jordan’s shadows caught a clone before it could tap anyone dead. Even Hikaru gave a slight nod when Blair let her cover both flanks the way she’d wanted to from the start.

Nobody said good job. This wasn’t a good-job kind of squad. But nobody died in the simulation either, and for the Midnight Foxes that counted as a standing ovation.

"Water," Misato said. "Ten minutes. Then we walk through the assault variation and I explain why Davenport’s target priority almost got Love shot in the back."

"It was tactically sound," Blair said.

"It was tactically sound if Love could see through her own skull." Misato didn’t even look up from her tablet. "She can’t. Ten minutes."

The squad scattered toward the water station like someone had cut the strings holding them up. Jordan didn’t make it to the water. He just lay down where he stood, one arm thrown over his eyes, and announced to the sky that he was resigning from the hunter profession effective immediately. Belle stepped over him without breaking stride. Javier crouched beside him and started asking about his recovery breathing, and Jordan told him where he could put the recovery breathing, and Javier wrote it down anyway.

I grabbed my towel off the fence and slung it over my shoulder, already thinking about the shower, the good water pressure in Building C, the specific luxury of hot water hitting muscle that had spent two hours getting yelled at by two women who could reduce me to ash. Eighteen days on the clock. A full vault. A field that had gone from wobbling to almost-steady in the span of one impossible party. Life was, against every reasonable expectation, not terrible.

"Monroe."

I turned. Misato had her tablet tucked under one arm and her ponytail coming loose at the edges, lime green strands stuck to her neck where the morning had made her sweat. She wasn’t looking at the squad. She was looking at the tree line past the track, where the path curved down toward the cliffs and nobody bothered to walk this early.

"Walk with me."

Not a request. Misato didn’t do requests. But there was something under the flat command that didn’t match the drill sergeant she’d been playing for two hours, some crack in the concrete, and I’d spent enough weeks learning to read the women in my life that the crack registered before I could talk myself out of noticing it.

"You need me to run more laps somewhere private?" I asked. "Because I’ve got a shower with my name on it."

"The shower can wait."

She was already moving.

I looked back at the squad. Belle had her head bent over her phone, updating whatever spreadsheet ran her soul. Naomi caught my eye and did the thing she did now, the tracking, the checking, the making sure I hadn’t spontaneously stopped breathing while she wasn’t watching. I gave her a small nod. She let it go. Barely.

I followed Misato down the path.

The sun had cleared the tree line and turned the grass wet-gold, the ocean past the cliffs catching light in a way that made the whole island look like a place people paid money to visit instead of a place that occasionally sent teenagers into dimensions that ate them. Misato walked ahead of me, three steps, then two, then one, until we were shoulder to shoulder and she’d stopped setting the pace like she had a destination in mind. She didn’t. She was just moving. I recognized that too. Some people can’t stand still when the thing they need to say is too big for standing.

We got maybe forty meters before she spoke, and when she did, her voice had lost the edge entirely.

"You almost died in that gate."

"I almost die most gates. It’s kind of my whole thing."

"Don’t." She stopped walking. Turned to face me, and her lime green eyes had that specific look, the one I’d seen exactly once before, on the floor outside my apartment when she’d told me the Davenports owned her mother’s livelihood and cried into my collarbone. "Don’t do the joke thing. Not right now. I need you to not do the joke thing for one conversation."

I closed my mouth.

She looked at me like she was cataloging something, the way she cataloged formations and gaps and every stat the squad had ever posted. But this wasn’t tactical. This was something she’d been carrying around since a black gate spat five of us out onto California dirt with one body missing.

"I was there," she said. "You understand that? I wasn’t watching it on Belle’s phone or hearing about it in a debrief. I was in the gate. I saw the leopards herd you toward the cliff. I saw you grab Blair and jump because there was no other move that kept both of you breathing, and I stood there with two clones left and no way to reach you, and I watched you go over the edge into a river a hundred feet down."

Her hands had gone tight at her sides. Not fire, she didn’t have Blair’s fire, but the same coiled thing, the body holding a scream it wouldn’t let out.

"And then the gate collapsed," she said, quieter. "And you weren’t there. You and Blair were just gone, downriver, in a canyon nobody could reach, and I had six other people to keep alive and no idea if the two of you were dead in the water or torn apart by something with too many legs. For three days, Jace. Three days of not knowing. Of running the squad and lying to Blair’s father through Blair’s phone and pretending I had it handled while I did the math on your odds every hour."