Chapter 555 | Target Invalid

Chapter 555: 555 | Target Invalid

Belle was laughing so hard she had to kneel. Jordan stood frozen in the middle of a shadow cast and stared at me in open horror. Javier was writing so fast his pen tore through the page.

Blair turned around and looked at the scorch mark where the clone had been about to hit her. Then she looked at me with ice-blue eyes that couldn’t decide between murder and gratitude.

"I didn’t need your help," she said.

"I know that, Davenport."

"Then why did you send him over?"

"He wanted to go," I said, and I shrugged. "He’s an idiot, and I let him make his own choices."

The ninth ring at the back of my skull flared white for a heartbeat. The air between us got about ten degrees hotter, and I swear the sweat on my neck turned to steam. She spun away before I could say anything else, and the grass under her heel caught fire for a second.

Misato called the drill. Her face was still pink, and her ponytail had gone slightly crooked for the first time since I’d met her.

"Fifteen minutes of break, then we run it again," she said. "Monroe, put away the poles in the equipment shed."

"By myself, Captain?"

"That’s an order, field lead."

The equipment shed sat at the far end of the field behind a row of eucalyptus trees. It was a wooden building with a tin roof and a single bulb on a pull chain, and it smelled like rubber mats and old sweat. I hauled an armful of practice poles inside and began racking them against the back wall.

The door clicked shut behind me.

I turned around, and a Misato stood with her back against it. She wore the same tight black shorts and the same training top, and her ponytail sat crooked in the exact same spot as the original’s. Her cheeks were still flushed. The single bulb threw yellow light across her collarbone and the purple bite mark sitting there.

"Captain, you followed me out here," I said.

"I’m not the Captain." She reached behind her and turned the lock. "I’m a clone, and clones don’t have rank."

"Then who sent you to find me?"

"Nobody sends clones anywhere." She crossed the shed in three steps and grabbed the front of my hoodie in both fists. "We just go where the original wants to go but refuses to go herself."

She kissed me hard enough to push me back into the pole rack. Wooden staves clattered to the floor around our feet, and she didn’t care at all. Her mouth tasted like electrolyte drink and that sharp buttermilk sweetness underneath, and her hands slid under the hoodie to drag her nails down my ribs.

Out on the field, through the gap in the eucalyptus, I watched the real Misato stop mid-sentence while talking to Belle. Her whole body went rigid. Her hand came up to her own mouth and pressed there.

The clone pulled back half an inch and grinned against my lips.

"She can feel every bit of this," she murmured. "She’s standing next to Fox right now and pretending she has a cramp."

"That seems cruel to her, Captain."

"She made you run twenty-eight laps, Jace." The clone pressed her hips into mine and ground down slow. "Consider this payback on her behalf."

I picked her up by the backs of her thighs and set her on the stack of folded mats. She wrapped her legs around me immediately, and the mats creaked under us. I pushed her training top up over her chest, and she wasn’t wearing the compression bra. She had nothing under there except skin, and those dark nipples went hard the second the shed air touched them.

I couldn’t resist the urge to test something. I wrapped my lips around her left nipple and pulled.

Nothing came out at all.

A notification popped into the corner of my vision in polite gray letters. TARGET INVALID: CONSTRUCT ENTITY. ESSENCE EXTRACTION UNAVAILABLE. The graft behind my sternum made a sound I can only describe as a disappointed sigh.

The clone felt me freeze and started laughing, her whole chest shaking against my face.

"Did you think you’d get milk from me?" She grabbed my hair and tugged my head up. "I’m made of mana and spite, field lead, not dairy."

"A man has to run the experiment, Captain."

"Then run a different one."

She took my hand and shoved it down the front of her shorts. She was soaked through, hot and slick against my fingers, and she rolled her hips into my palm before I even moved. Her head fell back against the shed wall with a thunk. The sound she made came out low and ragged, and it echoed off the tin roof.

Through the trees, the real Misato grabbed Belle’s shoulder to stay upright. Belle looked at Misato’s face, then at the equipment shed, and then her mouth fell open in pure delight. She raised her laptop like a trophy and started typing.

I slid two fingers inside the clone and curled them the way I’d learned the night before. Her thighs clamped around my waist, and she bit down on the hood of my sweatshirt to muffle herself. On the field, the real Misato sat down hard on the grass and put her head between her knees.

"You have to stop soon," the clone gasped into the fabric. "She’s going to dispel me in front of the entire squad."

"That sounds like her problem to solve."

"Jace, I swear to god."

I pressed my thumb against her clit and worked it in slow circles, and the clone came apart on the gym mats. Her legs shook against my hips. Her nails dug into my back right over Belle’s shower scratches and Addison’s older marks, and Euphoric Feedback turned the sting into a hot line of light down my spine. She held on to me through every wave, gasping my name into the hoodie that had her own name stitched across the back.

Then her edges went fuzzy and lime green. She looked up at me with wide eyes, red-cheeked and wrecked.

"She’s pulling me back now," she whispered. "Run fast, field lead, because she’s coming."

The clone burst into sparks in my arms, and I was suddenly holding nothing but warm air and a faint smell of lavender.

I stood alone in the equipment shed with one hand still out in front of me and the poles scattered across the floor. Through the gap in the trees, I watched the real Misato get to her feet very slowly. She brushed off her shorts. She picked up her tablet. She fixed her ponytail with two sharp tugs, turned toward the shed, and started walking.

She wasn’t walking at a normal pace either.

I grabbed the nearest practice pole and racked it in a hurry, because a man has to have an alibi. The second pole went up beside it, and I had just reached for the third when the door handle rattled.

The lock held.

"Monroe, open this door right now," Misato said through the wood, and her voice shook.

"I’m putting the poles away like you ordered, Captain."

"You’re putting something away, and I don’t think it’s poles."

The handle glowed a dull orange and then a bright one. The metal sagged in the frame, and the lock dripped onto the floor in a puddle. The door swung inward, and the person standing there was not Misato.

Blair Davenport stood in the doorway with her hand still wrapped around the melted handle and her red hair lifting in her own heat. Her ice-blue eyes went from the scattered poles to the crushed mats, then to the scratches on my stomach where my hoodie had ridden up.

Misato stood two steps behind her, pink to the hairline, holding her tablet against her chest.

"The Captain asked me to unlock the door," Blair said. "I decided to take it off instead."