Chapter 557 | Future Gate Fodder

Chapter 557: 557 | Future Gate Fodder

The door opened at exactly eight, and Dr. Vivienne Cross walked in like she was late for her own photoshoot.

She’d gone all black today. A cropped blazer tied under her chest showed a sliver of stomach above a pencil skirt that hugged her hips, and the skirt ended at the knee where fishnet stockings took over. Heeled boots clicked on the floor. Her long purple hair was pulled into a low knot, and the thin glasses sat halfway down her nose. Every male student in the room stopped breathing, along with about half the girls, and Jordan lifted his head off the desk for the first time all morning.

She set her bag down and perched on the edge of her desk. She crossed her legs slowly. Her violet eyes went across the room and stopped on me.

"Good morning, future gate fodder," she said. "I see we survived Monterey."

The Obsidian side murmured. The Sapphire side went still and attentive, the way a pack of wolves goes attentive at a dinner bell.

"For those of you living under a rock," Cross said, "an Obsidian strike element cleared a Tier Two aquatic biome yesterday. Sixty-one hostiles plus one Silver alpha, fifty-eight minutes, zero casualties. They beat Sapphire’s projected time by nineteen minutes."

A row of blue blazers turned around in perfect unison to glare at us. Belle smiled at them like a cat who’d been handed the canary on a silver tray.

Cross tapped her tablet, and the holographic screen behind her filled with footage. It came from a helmet camera, shaky and wet, and it showed a grey wall of monster flesh. Then a black kama sank into the edge of a giant milky eye, and a pair of boots scrambled for purchase on a slimy forehead. Somebody on the shelf screamed, and I recognized Belle’s voice instantly.

The camera tilted, and there I was, hanging off the side of a sea monster’s face by one arm with my legs swinging over thirty feet of empty air.

The whole room turned to look at me.

"Mr. Monroe," Cross said, and her voice dropped half an octave into something warm and amused. "Would you care to explain to the class why you mounted a Silver-class alpha?"

Jordan made a choking sound into his sleeve. Two Sapphire girls in the front row covered their faces. Belle typed something fast, and I knew in my bones she’d just named a new tab.

"The core was in its head, Professor," I said. "I needed to get closer."

"Most hunters solve that problem with a ranged ability."

"Most hunters didn’t lose their spear in the kelp."

Cross laughed, a real laugh that made her shoulders shake. She uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way, and three rows of boys forgot how to blink. She pointed a pen at me.

"That, class, is called adaptive engagement," she said. "It is brave and effective, and it is also how most hunters die before their twenty-fifth birthday. Please do not imitate Mr. Monroe."

"I wasn’t planning on encouraging anyone, Professor."

"Yes, you were. I can see it in your face."

She turned back to the screen and started breaking down the fight. She paused on frames and drew circles around tentacle sweeps. She talked about tide surge and hostile density in transition zones, and she explained why an alpha holds deep in kelp until a disturbance draws it up. She spent four full minutes on Javier’s buoy data and called it the smartest piece of field prep she’d seen from a first-year in three years.

Javier went red to the tips of his ears. He wrote "SMARTEST" at the top of a fresh page and underlined it twice, then looked around to make sure nobody had seen him do it.

I tried to pay attention, because Cross was legitimately good at this. The problem was my left side.

Blair’s knee had closed the two inches at some point during the tide surge lecture. Neither of us acknowledged it. Her thigh pressed warm against mine through her tights and my uniform pants, and the heat came off her skin in slow pulses, like a stove somebody kept turning up and down. When Cross paused on the frame of Blair’s fire burning through the tentacle at my waist, Blair’s leg went rigid against mine.

"Ms. Davenport," Cross said, "that beam was threaded through heavy saltwater humidity at forty meters. Your efficiency loss should have been close to half."

"It was forty-two percent, Professor," Blair said.

"And you still hit a moving target the width of a car tire while your field lead dangled two meters above it."

"He was in the way," Blair said, very flat. "I had to be careful not to hit him."

"You could have hit him," I murmured, too low for anyone but her.

"I considered it, Monroe."

"You considered it and decided you’d rather have me around."

Her pen cracked in half in her fingers. Blue ink ran down her knuckles and onto the desk. She stared at it for a second, then pulled a handkerchief out of her blazer pocket and wiped her hand clean without a word, and her ears went the color of a stop sign.

On my right, Naomi leaned close enough that her braid brushed my shoulder.

"Her ears are red again," she whispered. "That’s the third time today."

"You’re counting too now, Naomi?"

"Belle made me a column, so I have to."

Cross let the footage run to the end. It finished on the shot of the alpha’s head falling into the ocean, and on the tiny figure of me dropping off its face into the water. Then a blue-white streak of Wave Motion came up from the waves and caught me under the arms. The camera shook, and Naomi’s voice came through the speaker loud and furious, calling me an idiot twice.

The room went quiet.

Naomi buried her face in her notebook. Her ears turned pink, then crimson, and she slid down in her chair until only the top of her braid showed above the desk.

"That, class, is called a support catch," Cross said, and her tone went gentle. "It is the most important skill any of you will ever learn. Ms. Love, that was beautiful work."

Naomi made a sound into her notebook that might have been a thank you.

Cross clicked the screen off and walked to the front edge of her desk. She leaned back against it and folded her arms under her chest, and the tied blazer did a lot of heavy lifting.

"Here is your assignment," she said. "Two thousand words on adaptive engagement in transition biomes. Use Monterey as your case study, and cite the buoy data. Due Monday."

The whole room groaned at once.

"Mr. Monroe," she added, and every head swung toward me again. "You will write three thousand, since you were the case study. I want your firsthand account of the forehead."

"That seems unfair, Professor."

"Life is unfair, Mr. Monroe. You of all people should know that by now."

She smiled at me over her glasses, slow and amused, and then she winked. It lasted half a second. Half the room saw it, and the half that didn’t see it heard the gasp from the half that did.

Belle’s typing went from fast to frantic. Jordan sat all the way up in his chair for the first time in recorded history. Naomi lifted her head out of the notebook, looked at Cross, looked at me, and then went back into the notebook with her ears on fire.

Blair’s thigh went still against mine. The heat coming off her climbed another notch, and the paper of her notes curled at the edges. A thin line of smoke rose from the corner of her desk.

"Davenport," I murmured, "your homework is on fire."

"I’m aware of that, Monroe."