Chapter 593 | The Doctor Will See You Now

Chapter 593: 593 | The Doctor Will See You Now

The walk to Theory Towers took six minutes, and every one of those minutes felt like a perp walk for a crime I was extremely proud of committing.

Students noticed my neck before they noticed my face. A Ruby sophomore outside the east doors stopped talking halfway through a sentence, stared at the left side of my throat, then the right side, and moved his lips while he tallied the damage. He gave up and looked at Blair’s shoes instead. That was worse for everyone, because Blair Davenport in rubber-soled housekeeping flats was a sight the academy had not prepared its students to process.

"He’s staring at my feet," Blair said, eyes forward.

"Everybody is staring at your feet, Princess."

"Call me that again in this hallway and I will boil the water in your spine."

"You said that about my blood last week."

"I’m diversifying my portfolio," she snapped, and Belle snorted so hard behind us that she had to stop walking for a second.

Jordan caught up at the stairwell, rice ball wrapper still clutched in one fist like a holy relic. His hair stuck up on one side where it had been pressed against the cafeteria table for twenty minutes, and he had the glazed face of a man who had found religion through seaweed.

"I’m going to marry Ayame-san," he announced to nobody.

"She’s fifty-three," Belle told him.

"Love doesn’t care about numbers, Fox."

"Love absolutely cares about numbers. I have a whole tab about it." Belle tapped her laptop bag twice. "You’d be Misato’s stepfather. She’d make you run laps at Christmas."

Jordan thought about that for the entire second flight of stairs. At the landing he sighed and said he would settle for adoption, and Naomi laughed into her sleeve so the sound wouldn’t carry. Her hand found mine on the railing and stayed there, warm and rough at the palm, and I let her steer me up the last steps because my brain had decided to spend all its remaining bandwidth on the girl walking ahead of us.

Blair took the stairs two at a time even in those ugly flats. The blazer pulled tight across her shoulders when she climbed, and the hem of her skirt swung higher than it should have every time she lifted a knee. The grey cuff of my crew neck peeked out of her left sleeve. She tugged it down twice before we reached the third floor, then gave up and let it show, and that small surrender did more to my pulse than the cave had.

The seventh ring was still ringing in my skull. It had stopped detonating and settled into a steady white burn behind my eyes, hotter than the others, and every few steps it flared when she glanced back to make sure I was still behind her.

She glanced back four times. I was absolutely counting.

Room 204 was half full when we got there, Sapphire blue on the right side and Obsidian black on the left, the usual demilitarized strip running down the middle where the brave and the lost sat together. Thirty heads turned at once. I heard the exact moment the room found my neck, because it sounded like a balloon losing air slowly through a very small hole.

Dr. Vivienne Cross was already at the desk.

She sat on the edge of it instead of behind it, legs crossed at the knee, purple hair loose down her back today in waves that caught the light from the windows. The blazer she wore was tied off under her chest, and the white shirt beneath had been buttoned by someone who considered buttons a vague suggestion from cowards. Her glasses were pushed up into her hair. Her violet eyes tracked us across the room from the door to the middle row, and the slow smile she gave me made my ears get hot for reasons I refused to examine before lunch.

"Mr. Monroe," she said, warm and amused, loud enough for the whole room. "You’ve added to your collection since Monday."

I sat down. Blair sat on my right. Naomi took my left and pressed her knee against mine under the desk, and Belle settled one row back so she could see all three of us at once, which was the most Belle Fox seating decision possible.

"Training accident," I said.

"Four of them?"

"I train very hard, Doctor."

"I can see that." She stood up from the desk and walked a slow lap across the front of the room, heels clicking on the floor, and every boy in the Sapphire section suddenly found his notebook fascinating. "For those of you wondering, Monroe’s squad cleared a Tier Two aquatic biome on Sunday in fifty-eight minutes. Some of you are going to read about it in the report I’m about to assign. Monroe is going to read about it out loud, because Monroe owes me a thousand extra words on what he did to a Silver alpha’s forehead."

My stomach dropped into my boots.

"Now?" I asked.

"Now, sweetheart." She pointed at the front of the room with one finger, nail painted dark red, and there was no version of that gesture I could argue with in public. "Stand up here so the Sapphire side can see the bites better."

Belle made a noise behind me that sounded like a kettle having a religious experience.

I pulled my laptop out and walked to the front. The room got very quiet, and I could hear Jordan whispering something to Javier that ended with the word funeral. From up here the whole class spread out in rows, and I could see every face looking at my throat and then looking at Blair, and then looking at Naomi, and then doing math that nobody in this school had the tools to finish.

Blair had her chin up. Her ears were the color of a fire truck.

"Whenever you’re ready," Cross said, and sat back on her desk two feet from my elbow.