Chapter 544 | The Ninth Ring Flares

Chapter 544: 544 | The Ninth Ring Flares

Belle walked out of the shower trailer like she had just closed a hostile takeover. She wore a dry academy hoodie that hung to her thighs and nothing I could see underneath it. Her blue hair was wrapped in a towel turban, and her mascara had been scrubbed off so hard her cheeks still glowed pink. She also limped, and she made zero effort to hide it.

I came out two steps behind her with a towel around my neck and my dignity somewhere back in the drain.

Jordan sat on an overturned crate ten meters away, still wearing half his wetsuit. Javier crouched beside him with a stopwatch in one hand and his waterproof notebook in the other. They looked up at us at the same time, and Javier clicked the stopwatch with a little ceremonial flourish that made me want to throw him into the Pacific.

"Twenty-three minutes and forty seconds," Javier announced. "Jordan, you owe me forty credits."

Jordan stared at Belle’s limp for a long moment before he turned his head and looked at me like I had betrayed the entire male gender. "I said twelve because I respected you as a person, Monroe. I thought you were a reasonable man with a ferry to catch."

"You thought wrong," Belle told him, and she patted his wet head on her way past. "Pay the man, Jordan, and learn to never bet against me."

"I bet against him, not you."

"Same account. Different line items."

Javier wrote something down in his notebook and underlined it twice. I leaned over to read it, because I am a petty person with no shame, and he had written the time next to a column labeled Field Lead Endurance Metrics. He snapped the notebook shut before I could see the rest, and his ears turned the color of a stop sign.

"That’s for research purposes," he said.

"Research into what, Javier?"

"Team cohesion under stress conditions," he answered, and then he walked away toward the medic tent faster than any man who wasn’t hiding fan fiction had ever walked.

The ferry horn blew down at the dock. Misato stood at the top of the gangway in a fresh black tactical shirt with her lime green ponytail tied so tight it probably gave her a headache. She held her tablet against her hip and watched every one of us file aboard. When I passed her, she looked at the towel around my neck, then at Belle’s limp, and then back up at my face. She did not say anything. Her silence weighed about four hundred pounds and landed directly on my spine.

"Laps," she said finally. "Tomorrow you run double laps, Monroe, and you can thank your shower for them." ℴ

"I’ll thank Belle, since she picked the stall."

Belle shot me a finger over her shoulder from the deck without even turning around.

The ferry pulled out into open water just as the sun started dropping toward the horizon. The whole channel went copper and gold, and the spray off the bow caught the light and turned into a thousand tiny sparks every time we hit a swell.

Jordan claimed a bench inside the cabin and fell asleep sitting up in under ninety seconds. Belle curled up across from him with her laptop open, already adding a new tab to her spreadsheet that I could see from the doorway.

The header said Monterey Losses (Core), and she had highlighted the whole column in red.

Naomi had collapsed against the far window with her staff case hugged to her chest. The Gold buff still lit her skin from the inside, faint and amber along her throat and wrists.

Her hair had dried into wild pink and black waves, and her mouth hung a little open in sleep. Hikaru sat two seats down from her with a paperback manga and a cup of ferry tea. Every few pages, Hikaru glanced over at Naomi to make sure she was still breathing, which was the most Hikaru thing I had ever witnessed.

I decided everyone looked safe enough to survive without me for ten minutes, so I went back out to the stern to stare at the water and think about my life choices.

The deck was empty. The wind tugged at my damp hair and the engine thrummed through the soles of my boots. I leaned on the rail and pulled up the interface behind my eyes.

The Vault sat at seven cups of Belle’s butterscotch, full and glowing, which meant I could Overclock four more times before I had to beg anyone for anything. My lifespan counter read twenty days and change.

Twenty whole days, which was more than I’d ever had at one time since waking up in this body.

The rings burned in the back of my skull in a lazy circle. Pink for Naomi, amber for Belle, green for Aurora, purple for Addison. Misato burned lime and hot, and Hikaru sat pale blue and cold. The ninth one, out at the edge, flickered red and ice white like a broken neon sign outside a bar nobody should walk into.

"You’re doing the face again," a voice said behind me. "The one where you think you’re alone and nobody can see you grinning."

I didn’t turn around. I already knew the temperature on the deck had climbed six degrees.

Blair Davenport walked up to the rail and stood a full meter away from me. She had changed into a long black wool coat over a fitted grey turtleneck, which hid her burn scar completely and also hid every other part of her that I had absolutely not been staring at an hour ago. Her short red hair whipped around her face in the wind. Her ice blue eyes stayed fixed on the horizon like the ocean owed her money.

"I don’t have a face," I said. "This is just how I look when I’m thinking about world peace."

"You were thinking about Fox in that shower," she said flatly. "Everyone on this boat heard her, including the captain of the ferry, who is a sixty-year-old man and probably needs therapy now."

"Belle has great lungs."

"Belle has no shame, and apparently neither do you." She finally turned her head to look at me, and her jaw locked so hard I heard her teeth click. "You stabbed a Silver core, Monroe. You stood on that thing’s face and drove a scythe through twenty-two thousand credits of pristine core like it was a cheap watermelon."

"It was trying to eat Naomi."

"Love was fine. Love was flying." Blair gripped the rail, and the paint under her palm blistered and peeled up in a little curl of smoke. "You weren’t fine. You were hanging off its eyeball by one arm, and a tentacle had you around the waist, and it was pulling you into the water."

"You burned that tentacle off me."

"I’m aware of what I did."

"I’m just saying thanks, Davenport."

"Don’t thank me." Her voice came out sharper than the wind. "I didn’t do it for you. I did it because if you die, the bet is void, and I refuse to let a sea monster rob me of my winnings."

The ninth ring in my skull flared so bright that I had to blink.

I turned my body toward her and rested one elbow on the rail. She tracked the movement like I was a hostile entering her detection range. The heat coming off her made the air between us wobble, and steam curled up off the wet railing where her hand sat.

"Your winnings," I repeated. "You still think you’re winning that bet?"

"I don’t think anything. I know we won’t finish top five."

"We just cleared Monterey with zero casualties. We beat Sapphire’s projected time on a Tier Two by almost twenty minutes, and you know it because you checked the boards in the changing tent."