Chapter 546 | I’m The Captain, Jace

Chapter 546: 546 | I’m The Captain, Jace

The ferry docked at San Nicolas a little after eight, and by then the sky over the island had gone dark purple with a thin line of orange still bleeding along the mainland behind us. The harbor lights came on in a long row down the pier. Jordan had to be physically extracted from his bench by Javier, who held him under one arm and kept saying "you did great, man, fourteen confirmed" while Jordan made the noises of a man being carried to his own grave.

Naomi woke when the engines cut. She sat up slowly, blinked at me through the mess of pink and black hair stuck to her cheek, and reached up to fix her necklace before she did anything else. The Gold buff still glowed under her skin in faint lines along her wrists, like someone had traced her veins with a highlighter and forgotten to turn the lamp off.

"Did I drool on you?" she asked.

"A little bit," I said. "It was a tactical amount."

She shoved my shoulder, which hurt, because the shoulder capsule was still knitting itself back together. I made a face. She saw it and immediately turned into a nurse.

"Medic said it’s fine," I told her before she could start. "B-rank Endurance handles it overnight, and I’ve got seven cups in the Vault if it doesn’t."

"Seven," she repeated. Her eyes slid across the cabin to Belle, who was shutting her laptop with the satisfied click of a woman who had just billed someone. Naomi’s mouth twitched. "So that’s what the twenty-three minutes were."

"You were asleep for that."

"Javier told me at the dock in Monterey before I passed out. He showed me the column in his notebook." She stood up and stretched, and her torn suit, which she’d covered with an academy hoodie three sizes too big, rode up enough to show the long scratch along her ribs from the alpha’s teeth. "I’m not mad about it. You needed the cups, and Belle needed to yell at you in private."

"She did a lot of yelling."

"I heard," Naomi said, and the tips of her ears went pink. "Everyone heard, Jace. The ferry captain made a face."

We filed off the ferry onto the pier in a broken line. Blair went first and fast, coat buttoned to her chin, and she didn’t look back once, which was impressive given that I could feel the heat coming off her from ten meters away.

Hikaru drifted after her like a shadow that had decided to pay rent. Belle linked her arm through Jordan’s and steered him toward the shuttle stop with the grip of a parole officer. Javier trailed them with his notebook open, still writing.

Misato stood at the bottom of the gangway with her tablet and her arms crossed.

She’d changed back into her academy tactical jacket over the black compression top she wore under everything. Her lime green ponytail was still damp at the ends, and there was a thin scrape across her jaw I hadn’t noticed on the bluff. She checked each person off as they passed her. When I reached the bottom, she didn’t check me off, which felt like a bad sign.

"Love, go with Fox," she said without looking at me. "Make sure Wayne actually reaches his bed and doesn’t sleep in the stairwell again."

Naomi glanced between us. Something passed over her face, and she read the whole situation in about half a second, because Naomi Love had B-rank Perception and a degree in Jace Monroe that nobody had ever officially awarded her. She squeezed my hand once.

"Don’t get killed by your captain," she said, and then, lower, "she was really scared today."

"I know."

"No, I mean really scared." Naomi pulled her hood up over her messy hair. "She stood on that ridge and didn’t summon a single clone for like four seconds when you went under. I’ve never seen her stop like that."

She kissed my jaw and jogged after Belle. Her staff case bounced against her hip, and I watched until the shuttle stop lights swallowed her.

Then it was just me and Misato on an empty pier, with the water slapping the pilings underneath us and a gull screaming somewhere out in the dark.

"Walk," she said.

"Am I running laps right now? Because I can do that, but my shoulder is going to file a complaint."

"Walk, Monroe."

So we walked. She didn’t take the shuttle road. She took the long path up from the harbor, the one that switchbacked along the cliffs with no lights except the ones coming off the dorms far above us.

The salt air was cold now that the sun had dropped, and I could hear her boots hitting the gravel slightly harder than they needed to. She kept a half step ahead of me the whole way, her ponytail swinging, her shoulders tight.

Halfway up, she stopped so suddenly I nearly walked into her back.

"You climbed onto its face," she said. She still didn’t turn around. "You stood on a shelf that was flooding, you looked at a monster the size of a building, and you decided the correct move was to go climb it."

"The core was in its head."

"I know where the core was!" Her voice cracked on the last word and bounced off the cliff. She spun to face me. "Fox told everyone where the core was. The plan was Love hits it from below, the core surfaces, and Davenport burns it from the shelf. You were supposed to call it from the rear with your stupid spear."

"I lost the spear," I said.

"I saw." Her hands were shaking. She shoved them into her jacket pockets. "I saw it fall into the kelp, and for about four seconds I didn’t know if your arm was still attached to it."

There was nothing funny to say to that, so I didn’t say anything funny. I stepped closer. She didn’t move back. Up close, in the dark, her green eyes were wet at the corners, and she was very obviously furious about that.

"The heal would’ve taken too long," I told her. "Hikaru’s cut closed in two seconds. If I’d stayed on the shelf and made a nice clean call, the flesh closes, Naomi is under the water with that thing’s mouth over her head, and the tide eats the rest of us in eight minutes. So I made the call I made."

"You could have told me."

"There was no time to explain it."

"You could have looked at me," she said. "That’s all. Once, before you jumped. You looked at Belle, you looked at Love, and you looked at Davenport. You didn’t look at me at all, and I’m the captain, Jace."

Okay. That one hit somewhere under the leopard scars, in the spot where the graft lived. The lime ring in the back of my skull flared hot and bright, and I could feel exactly how much it had cost her to say that sentence out loud on a dark cliff path.

"I’m sorry," I said. "Next time I’ll look at you first."

"There shouldn’t be a next time where you climb monsters."

"There’s always going to be a next time, Misato, and you know that better than I do."