Chapter 506 | My Squad of Misfits and Heiresses

Chapter 506: 506 | My Squad of Misfits and Heiresses

"Adding laps," I called back. "Very on brand. Have you considered a personality outside of cardio-based threats?"

"Have you considered running eight instead of four?"

"That’s the same threat with bigger numbers."

She didn’t dignify that. Just walked ahead of me up the path with her ponytail fixed and her tablet out and her spine locked into the posture that said the last five minutes had been a temporary firmware glitch and normal service was now resuming. I fell in behind her because falling in behind Misato was safer than walking beside her when she was pretending nothing had happened, and because the view was, objectively, part of the reward package.

The field came back into view. My squad of misfits and heiresses and one girl pretending to be a boy sat scattered across the turf in various stages of collapse.

Jordan hadn’t moved from where he’d fallen. He lay on his back with his hands folded over his chest like a man practicing for his own funeral, which, given the training schedule, was less morbid than it sounded. Javier crouched near him with the notebook open, apparently still recording Jordan’s crude recovery-breathing suggestions for scientific posterity. Belle had claimed the shade of the one tree at the field’s edge and was drinking water like it owed her money. Naomi stood near the water station stretching her calves, and when she saw me she straightened and gave me a look that was ninety percent relief and ten percent something sharper, the specific something that meant she’d clocked exactly how long the captain and the field lead had been alone in the tree line and had already drawn conclusions.

She wasn’t wrong. Naomi was never wrong about this stuff. Her Perception hit B-rank and her emotional radar hit something the academy didn’t have a chart for.

Hikaru stood apart from all of them, red eyes forward, favoring her left side by maybe two degrees that nobody but me would notice. She didn’t look at me when I came back into the clearing. She looked at Misato. Then she looked at me. Then she looked back at the horizon like she’d already run the equation, arrived at the answer, and decided the answer wasn’t her business.

The graft hummed. Six rings now. Then it hummed a little different, and I understood it was seven, because Misato’s had gone hot and clean and moved inward, and somewhere in Santa Barbara a copper-haired woman with neon eyes was probably watching a crystal plate light up and losing her mind about the data.

And then there was the eighth. The one at the far edge. The one that flickered.

Blair Davenport stood in the middle of the field with her arms crossed and her red hair catching the morning sun and an expression on her face like she’d bitten into something she couldn’t identify. She’d watched me walk off with Misato. She’d watched us come back. And whatever she thought she’d read in the space between those two events, it had done something to the set of her mouth that I filed away for later, the way I filed everything about Blair away for later, in a folder marked complicated and probably dangerous and also, if I was being honest with myself, extremely fun.

"You’re staring, Monroe," Blair said.

"You’re standing in the middle of the field looking like you smelled something. Hard not to."

Her jaw tightened. Heat shimmered off her shoulders for half a second, the air going hazy the way it did when she forgot to keep her thermostat in check, and then she reeled it back in through whatever breathing thing her absent mother had taught her before she left. "We have a drill to run. If you and the captain are finished with your walk."

"Jealous, Davenport?"

The heat spiked again. Higher this time. A patch of grass near her left boot went brown and curled at the edges and she didn’t seem to notice, which was the tell. Blair always noticed her own fire. When she stopped noticing it, that meant something underneath had grabbed the wheel.

"Of what," she said. Not a question. A dare.

I opened my mouth to say something I’d regret, because I’d earned it and the day was young and needling Blair Davenport was rapidly becoming my favorite hobby, but Misato clapped her hands once, hard, and the whole field flinched.

"On your feet," she barked. "Assault variation. Diamond formation, Davenport calls target priority, I call movement, and if either of us gets confused about which is which, Monroe makes the call as field lead and you all follow it without argument. Understood?"

Jordan groaned from the grass. "Do I have to be conscious for this?"

"Yes."

"Counteroffer. No."

Belle stepped over him again on her way to formation. "He does this every morning. If you feed him a granola bar he starts working."

"I am not a Tamagotchi," Jordan said, but he sat up, so Belle was proven correct.

We took formation. Naomi at point, staff already humming with that blue-white spiral energy that meant her Gold buff was still riding through her system from last night’s session, which was going to make this drill look a lot better than it had any right to. Belle and Hikaru on the flanks for detection and coverage. Jordan and Javier on area control, Jordan’s shadows pooling at his feet like spilled ink and Javier with his daggers out and his notebook, somehow, still safely buttoned in his chest pocket. Blair at the offensive point with her hands loose and flames flickering blue-white at her knuckles. Me in the center rear where the field lead lived.

And Misato at the top of it all, floating between roles, holding two broken squads together with nothing but personality and the sheer refusal to let any of us die.

She summoned her clones. Six of them split off her body in a wet green light, each one a fraction of her durability, each one carrying a wooden practice weapon, each one already moving into ambush positions around the field’s edge with the coordination of a person who could think from six heads at once and had trained her whole life to make it look easy.

"They’re going to come at you like Crawlers," Misato said. "Fast, coordinated, testing the weak point. And the weak point is whoever breaks first. So don’t break first."

"That’s Monroe," Blair said. "He’s the weak link. It’s in the reports."

I glanced at her over my shoulder. "It was in the reports six weeks ago. You want to update your intel or you want to find out the hard way?"

Her eyes narrowed. The flames at her knuckles climbed higher.

"Both of you shut up," Misato said. "Go."