Chapter 504 | Tired of the Lines

Chapter 504: 504 | Tired of the Lines

"Misato."

"I said don’t." But she didn’t step back. If anything she moved closer, and I could smell the salt and the sweat and the specific thing that was just her, ocean-air-after-a-storm, the scent I’d noticed once and filed away and pretended I hadn’t. "I’ve spent nine years learning how to lose people, okay? That’s the whole job. Blair’s family, they take. They took my mom’s back with the hours they work her. They took my scholarship and made it a leash. I learned real early that if you care about something, someone with more money decides when you get to keep it. So I stopped. I made myself the person who handles things. The one who doesn’t need. Because needing is how they get you."

I stayed quiet. This was the most words I’d ever heard string out of Misato Ayame that weren’t formation calls, and every single one of them cost her something, and I wasn’t going to be the idiot who interrupted it.

"And then you happened." She laughed, but it came out wrong, wet at the edges. "You and your stupid squad of lottery rejects. You gave me a team I actually wanted. Not because Blair assigned me to it. Not because it paid. Because I was building something that was mine for the first time in my life, and it was made of you and Belle and Naomi and Jordan, and I stopped calculating what it would cost me to keep it."

She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. Hard. The way you do when you’ve made a deal with yourself never to cry where anyone can see, and you’re losing.

"So when you went over that cliff," she said, "and I couldn’t reach you, and three days went by, I found out exactly how much I’d let myself need. And it was so much more than I planned. It was everything. And I hated it. I hated you for making me feel that, for being the person I’d built the whole squad around, because if you died I wasn’t just losing a field lead. I was losing the reason any of it mattered."

The wind came off the water and pulled a strand of green hair across her face. She didn’t move it. She just stood there in the wet-gold morning with her armor gone, the same way Blair’s had gone in a cave and Hikaru’s had gone in a bathroom and Addison’s had gone in a hospital, all these women who’d spent their lives learning to hold weight alone, all of them cracking open in front of me one at a time like I was some kind of key.

And the graft in my chest hummed, the smug divine parasite, because this was exactly the mechanism, exactly the machine the old man built. Connection as currency, love as the thing that kept me alive.

But standing there, watching Misato Ayame come apart because I’d almost died, I wasn’t thinking about the machine. I wasn’t running the numbers. I didn’t check her devotion percentage or calculate the resonance value or think about the ring on the crystal plate in Santa Barbara that would burn a little brighter if I played this right.

I just wanted her to stop hurting.

"I came back," I said.

"You came back looking like you’d been through a wood chipper." Her laugh was broken glass. "You told a national news camera you needed a burger and then passed out in Naomi’s arms, because apparently medical attention was too boring for your dramatic exit."

"That was a great line."

"That was you bleeding internally and making jokes about it." She finally moved the hair, pushed it back with fingers that trembled. "That was you looking at me in the recovery bay like nothing happened, like you didn’t understand why everyone was staring at you like you’d risen from the dead, because you don’t get it. You fundamentally don’t understand that people are allowed to care if you live or die."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Because she was right and I didn’t have a witty comeback for being right.

"You act like you’re expendable," she said. "Like the only thing that matters is the mission, the squad, getting everyone else home safe. And maybe that worked when you were some lottery kid nobody knew. But you’re not that anymore. You’re the person who held Blair together in the dark. You’re the reason Naomi doesn’t apologize for existing anymore. You’re why Belle actually believes she’s worth something besides her ability to find loot. You’re why Jordan gives a shit and Hikaru lets people see her and Addison stopped treating kindness like weakness."

She took a step closer. Close enough I could see the red around her eyes, the way her jaw was set like she was bracing for impact.

"You’re why I care," she said. "And I don’t know how to stop, and I’m not sure I want to, and that’s the most terrifying thing I’ve felt in my entire life because you keep almost dying and I keep having to watch it happen."

"Jace." Her voice broke on it. Actually broke. "I watched you die on the ferry footage. I watched Naomi carry you out with a broken arm because she wouldn’t let anyone else touch you. And I stood in the recovery zone with the whole squad and I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t tell anyone why it mattered so much, because you’re the field lead and I’m the captain and there’s a line and I’ve spent my entire life on the right side of every line."

She looked up at me. Lime green eyes wrecked and wide and honest in a way she never let herself be.

"I’m so tired of the lines," she said.

I stepped in.

I didn’t decide to. My body moved before the calculating part of my brain could file a report, the same way it had moved when Belle went down under the guardian’s tail, the same way it had moved to grab Blair and go over that cliff.

I brought my hand up to the side of her face, slow, the way you approach something that could break if you got it wrong, and Misato went still. Not the trained stillness. The other kind. The kind where the whole body forgets what it’s supposed to be doing.

"You need me to give you an order?" I said, low. "Because I can. I’m the field lead. That’s a chain of command thing."

A laugh punched out of her, half sob, half the real Misato, the one who threw punches and threatened murder and read shojo manga she’d die before admitting to. "You’re insufferable."

"I’ve heard."

"Everyone in your life has told you this."

"There’s a very long line."

"I’m about to add my name to it."

"Add away."