Chapter 531 | A Tax I Owed

Chapter 531: 531 | A Tax I Owed

The ferry chewed across the channel hard enough that Jordan turned green by the second mile. He spent the rest of the crossing draped over the stern rail, dictating his will to anyone within earshot, and Javier wrote every word of it in the waterproof notebook. Belle informed him that nothing he owned was worth inheriting. Jordan thanked her for the feedback and then threw up into the Pacific.

I stood at the bow and let the wind try to peel my face off. Seventeen days and change glowed at the edge of my vision, and the vault held four cups of Belle’s butterscotch from last night, which Misato had already called irresponsible twice this morning. The graft sat warm under my scars. Eight rings burned steady in the back of my skull, and the ninth flickered somewhere behind me on the deck in a leather jacket, refusing to commit to anything.

Naomi came up beside me and leaned her elbows on the rail. The wind grabbed her braid and threw it over her shoulder, pink and black strands whipping across her cheek, and she didn’t bother fixing it.

"You’re making the face again, Jace."

"I have one face, and it’s the good one."

"You have the face where you’re counting everybody. I watched you do it four times since the dock."

I had done it five times, and I kept that to myself. Seven heads on the deck plus mine, and every one of them breathing. That was the only number I cared about today, and the interface didn’t track it, which meant I had to.

"Keep counting if it helps," she said, and bumped my hip with hers. "Just don’t forget to count yourself in there."

"I’m the most important number. I’m offended you’d suggest otherwise."

She laughed into the wind, and the sound got carried off toward the mainland before I could keep it.

The staging area sat on a bluff south of Monterey, a squat government building wearing a satellite dish and a parking lot full of white vans that had never known joy. A handler named Deluca met us at the door holding a clipboard against his chest. His face had stopped reacting to teenagers a long time ago, and he looked at the eight of us the way a bank teller looks at a stack of bills he has to count twice.

That last sentence broke a rule I’d set for myself, and I let it slide, because the man honestly deserved it.

"Composite neoprene, mana-lined, rated for four hours of saltwater contact," Deluca said, handing folded black bundles down the line. "Your standard tactical gear will dissolve in the kelp zone. Your file says you learned that in the swamp."

"We lost a sleeve and most of a pant leg to frog mucus," Belle said. "I still have opinions about it, and I would like them entered into the record."

"There is no record, Miss Fox."

"There’s always a record, Mr. Deluca. Mine is color-coded."

He moved on without answering, which was the smartest thing anyone had done all day.

The changing rooms were split by gender, which meant Hikaru walked into the men’s side with me and Jordan and Javier and disappeared into a stall before anyone could register her existence. I heard the stall lock click. I heard nothing after that, because Hikaru Tanaka could put on a suit over a chest binding in total silence while Jordan couldn’t open a zipper without narrating his feelings about it. I zipped my own suit to the collarbone and checked the fit in the mirror. The neoprene hugged every inch of muscle Vale had beaten into me over six weeks, and the four pale ridges across my chest showed through the thin black material like a signature.

"You look like a superhero," Javier said, then flushed. "I mean that from a tactical standpoint."

"Mendoza, I’ll take it from any standpoint you’ve got."

Then we walked out, and the women walked out of the other room, and I had to find a spot on the ceiling to study for a full second while my dignity reassembled itself.

The suits were black and cut to the body with zero mercy. Naomi came first, all five-foot-ten of her poured into neoprene that ran from her throat to her ankles and left nothing to guesswork, her long legs going on for a geological age and her chest pulling the seam taut across the front. The Gold buff I’d put in her last night still shimmered under her brown skin, faint and warm, and her shell necklace sat tucked beneath the collar where I could see its outline pressing through the fabric. She tugged at the hem near her hip and caught me staring and turned a color her pink eyes matched.

Belle came out adjusting her blue combat braid, and the zipper on her suit had stopped a solid three inches short of where Deluca intended it to stop. She hadn’t forced it. The neoprene simply surrendered at her sternum, leaving a deep line of pale cleavage that the government had not authorized, and she shouldered her crossbow like the view was a tax I owed.

"Stop doing math on my chest, Monroe. I can see the numbers in your eyes."

"I’m assessing gear integrity. It’s field lead stuff."

"It’s pervert stuff wearing a field lead hat."

Misato walked out behind her with her lime green ponytail pulled so tight it looked painful, and the suit turned the athletic curve of her into a problem I’d have to think about later in private. The collar sat snug against her throat. Her tablet rode against her hip and her eyes swept the lobby and landed on me and held for exactly one beat longer than a captain’s eyes should, and then she looked away and started barking about shuttle timing.

Blair came out last, because Blair Davenport would rather drown than walk in anywhere second.

She hadn’t worn the government suit. She’d brought her own, black and deep red, stamped with the Davenport crest in thread that probably cost more than Deluca’s house, and it fit her like her father’s company had poured her into it at birth. The zipper ran from her collarbone to her navel and had given up somewhere in the middle, leaving her split open halfway down in a way that no reasonable tailor would have allowed. Her short red hair was slicked back. The burn scar along her left side and throat showed pink against pale skin, and she didn’t cover it, which told me more than anything she’d said all week.

Her frost-blue eyes caught mine and narrowed to slits.

"If you say one word about the zipper, I will cook you in that suit."

"I wasn’t going to mention the zipper, Davenport."

"You were thinking about it."

"I’m always thinking about it. That’s a different crime."