Chapter 582 | A Flag Captured in War

Chapter 582: 582 | A Flag Captured in War

Johnathan’s head turned slowly toward her. "You are threatening me with the Headmaster."

"I’m offering you a room with her," Misato said. "You flew a long way to have this conversation. She’ll host it."

That was when the novel finally paid rent. Two-thirds of the way through the book I used to trash in comment sections, there was a throwaway paragraph about how the Headmaster ran her hearings. Every Truth Enforcement session was recorded, and every transcript went to the IHC board as a matter of policy.

"Fun fact," I said. "Ross records those sessions. The transcripts go to the IHC board." I looked at Johnathan. "That’s the board you sit on, right?"

The name landed on the pad with physical weight. Aurelia Ross. Headmaster. Diamond-tier. The woman whose will was natural law on San Nicolas Island, whose Truth Enforcement meant you couldn’t lie in her presence, whose Reality Correction meant you couldn’t break her rules without physics itself correcting you.

A woman who could compel anyone in her domain to answer direct questions honestly.

Johnathan Davenport had flown here on a helicopter worth more than most houses to intimidate his daughter into rescinding a contract that protected a cleaning woman’s job. If Ross asked him why he was here, he would have to tell her. In front of his daughter. In front of Cassandra. In front of Vale. In front of me. And then a dozen people whose votes he needed would read his answer over coffee at the next board meeting.

I watched him do the math. Retreat cost him nothing today. Staying cost him the minutes of a hearing, in print, forever.

Vale said nothing at all. He stood by his lamppost with his WORLD’S OKAYEST HUNTER mug and let Johnathan work it out.

The folded contract in his hand suddenly looked less like a weapon and more like evidence.

"I see." Johnathan’s voice had lost one degree of temperature. Not much. Enough.

Cassandra’s hand tightened on her father’s arm. "We should go."

"We should." He did not look at Blair again. He looked at me, and for the first time, his gaze stayed longer than a passing assessment. He examined my face, my training clothes, the scars visible where my collar sat open, the silver ring on my right hand from a woman in Santa Barbara he’d never heard of. His eyes dropped to the bite mark on my throat and came back up without comment.

"Mr. Monroe." He said it the way a man takes a photograph of an address he plans to visit later. "We’ll meet properly."

"I look forward to it." I did not look forward to it. "I’ll wear a nicer shirt."

Johnathan Davenport turned and walked toward the helicopter. His shoes clicked on the wet concrete, and each click carried the authority of a man who had not lost this argument but had decided to postpone the result. Cassandra followed after one final glance in my direction. Her smile remained in place. Her tea remained untouched.

The helicopter’s door shut with the heavy thunk of very expensive engineering.

Blair stood on the helipad and watched the rotors begin to turn. Her bare feet remained planted in the circle of dry concrete, and her hands hung at her sides in my crew neck’s cuffs, and she did not look away until the helicopter lifted from the pad and banked south toward San Francisco, its silver belly catching the first real light of morning.

The silence that followed lasted about four seconds.

"Well," Vale said. "That was productive."

"I’m going to kill you," Misato told him. "You left a sticky note. You left a sticky note that said run."

"I did." Vale finished his coffee. "And you ran. And you arrived. And your field lead remembered a footnote, and you sent Johnathan Davenport home without me saying a single word." He set the empty mug on the lamppost’s base with a quiet clink. "Everything I write on sticky notes tends to work out."

Misato took three steps toward Vale with her fist cocked, and Vale spatial-jumped six feet to the left with his hands in his pockets. He reappeared at the helipad’s edge, adjusted his sunglasses, and pointed at the sky.

"You have training in fourteen minutes. I suggest sprinting."

He vanished. Not walked away. Not jogged. The air where he had been standing folded once, and he was gone, and the coffee mug sat on the concrete base of the lamppost without anyone to collect it.

Blair had not moved.

I crossed the helipad toward her. The wet concrete was cold under my boots, and dawn was coming in proper now, gold and orange cutting through the marine layer in long diagonal shafts that made the Pacific look like hammered copper. Misato stayed where she was, arms wrapped around herself, watching.

I stopped one meter from Blair. Her bare toes curled and uncurled on the scorch mark she’d made. Her red hair stuck to one cheek. The crew neck hung past her thighs, and the bleach spot from Naomi’s boba incident sat on her left cuff, a tiny imperfection that proved the sweater was real and stolen and hers.

"You didn’t have to come," she said.

"Misato grabbed me."

"You didn’t have to stay."

"Your dad’s a prick."

Blair made a sound that wanted to be a laugh and couldn’t commit. Her eyes were wet and her chin was level and her hands had gone still in the cuffs, and the seventh ring in my skull burned so hot I could feel it in the roots of my teeth.

"He’ll come back," Blair said.

"He’ll try."

"Cassandra saw you. She saw the ring on your hand. She’ll research it."

"Cassandra can research whatever she wants."

Blair’s breath caught, and for half a second her composure slipped sideways, and I saw the girl who had kissed me in a cave and whispered that it meant nothing. The girl who had read two hundred and fourteen romance novels in a false-bottom drawer. The girl who had spent her life being perfect because nobody ever told her she was allowed to be anything else.

"The contract still stands," she said. "Clause Fifteen is notarized."

"I read the whole thing."

"Even Clause Nine?"

"Especially Clause Nine. My clone filed a formal grievance."

Blair’s mouth did something it almost never did in public. The corners lifted, just barely, and the scorch mark beneath her feet stopped growing, and the steam coming off her shoulders thinned to nothing.

"Tonight," she said. "Seven o’clock. Summit House."

"I’ll be there."

"You will not bring clones."

"Clause Nine. I read it."

Blair nodded once. She looked past me at Misato, who stood in her hoodie with her scraped knees and her crooked ponytail, and something complicated and old and expensive moved between the two of them across the wet concrete.

"Ayame."

Misato’s jaw tightened. "Davenport."

"Your mother is at the bottom of the hill. He won’t take her. You made sure."

Misato swallowed. Her throat worked, and her lime green eyes were bright, and she nodded once without trusting her voice. Then she turned and walked toward the path that led down the switchbacks, her hoodie flapping behind her, her boots slapping the wet stone, going to meet the woman who cleaned his house for eight dollars above minimum and hadn’t taken a vacation in six years.

Blair watched Misato disappear down the hill. Then she looked at me, and the seventh ring in my skull went white, and something in her expression resolved from three question marks into something simpler and more dangerous and entirely hers.

"I need shoes," she said.

"I have extra boots in my apartment."

Blair Davenport looked at me for a long time. The sun crested the hills behind us, and the gold light hit her face and turned her red hair to copper and her ice-blue eyes to something warmer, and the crew neck with my name stitched nowhere on it hung from her shoulders like a flag she’d captured in a war she was still learning how to fight.

"Fine," she said. "But I’m keeping the sweater."