Chapter 594 | Six Minutes. Alone.

Chapter 594: 594 | Six Minutes. Alone.

I read the first paragraph fast. It was the tide section, and Javier had fixed all my comma splices at midnight, so it went smooth. The second paragraph covered the shelf. The third paragraph covered the moment I looked at the alpha’s head and decided climbing it was a reasonable life choice, and I heard myself read the sentence out loud and realized how stupid it sounded with forty witnesses.

"The core sat behind the third eye from the right, and the only path to it ran up the creature’s face," I read. "I decided the face was a ladder."

Somebody on the Sapphire side laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.

"Keep going," Cross said, and her voice had gone smoky in a way I didn’t trust.

So I kept going. I read about the spear falling into the kelp and how I hung by one arm off an eye socket. I read about Naomi punching the jaw from underneath until the whole skull lifted out of the sea. I read about Blair burning the tentacle off my waist from forty meters away through ninety percent humidity, and I had written that part at one in the morning, so the sentence I wrote about her was honest instead of smart.

"Davenport made a shot through fog that most Platinum casters would refuse to take," I read. "Her fire bent around Ayame’s clone and around my hip and cut the tentacle clean, two meters below my belt. If her aim had been off by a hand’s width, I would be writing this essay from the bottom of the Pacific. Her aim was perfect."

I didn’t look up when I read it. I didn’t have to, because the corner of my vision caught a thin line of grey smoke rising off her desk.

Naomi reached over without a word and moved Blair’s notebook three inches to the left, away from the scorch.

"That’s enough, Mr. Monroe." Cross slid off the desk and came to stand next to me, close enough that her perfume hit me, something dark and expensive with vanilla underneath it. She took the laptop out of my hands and read the last line herself, then handed it back. "You may sit. Davenport?"

Blair’s head came up fast.

"Was his account accurate?" Cross asked.

The whole room turned to look at Blair Davenport in her housekeeping flats and her stolen sweater cuff. I watched her decide what to say. Her fingers flattened on the desk, and the smoke stopped.

"His account was accurate," Blair said, cool and level. "He left out that the fog had salt in it, which raised the conductive loss on my beam by another eight percent, so the shot was harder than he described."

"So you’re telling me he undersold you."

"He undersells everyone except himself." She paused. "And he climbed a monster’s face, which was idiotic."

"I agree on both counts," Cross said, and smiled at her with a warmth she never handed out to the Sapphire side. "That was excellent work, Miss Davenport. The kind of beam control you showed in that fog is going to keep people alive for the next twenty years. I’d like you to write me five hundred words on humidity compensation for Hellflame by Monday, because I’m going to steal it for next year’s syllabus."

Blair blinked twice. Her mouth opened, and nothing came out of it, and I realized I was watching someone receive a compliment from a teacher for possibly the first time in her life without her father’s name attached.

"Yes, Doctor," she said finally.

I sat back down next to her. Under the desk, her hand found my knee and squeezed so hard I felt it in my teeth.

The rest of the lecture was gate emergency protocols, which was the most useful hour of material I had heard all semester and which I absorbed at about forty percent efficiency because Blair’s hand never left my knee. She kept it there through recognition of destabilization markers. She kept it there through the slides on extraction priority and the part where Cross made a Sapphire boy cry by explaining what happens to a hunter left inside a collapsing fracture for longer than six minutes.

Around the fifty-minute mark, her thumb started moving.

It was a tiny motion, back and forth over the seam of my uniform pants, and I’m fairly sure she had no idea she was doing it. Her eyes stayed on the board. Her pen kept moving in perfect clean notes that would put Naomi’s color coding to shame. But her thumb drew slow lines on my leg that climbed a little higher each time, and by the time Cross reached the slide on emergency Sanctum protocols, those lines were sitting in a place that made it very hard for me to think about Sanctums.

Naomi noticed. Of course she noticed.

She leaned her head toward my shoulder like she was reading my notes, which was a hilarious cover because I didn’t have any notes. Her breath tickled my ear when she whispered.

"Davenport is going to set your pants on fire if she keeps doing that."

"I’m aware."

"Do you want me to stop her?"

"Absolutely not, under any circumstances."

Naomi bit her lip to stop a laugh, then put her own hand on my other knee, right where the fabric was already warm from Blair’s side bleeding across. She pressed down once. It was the gentlest possible way to tell me she knew what was going on and had decided to allow it, and the silver-pink ring flared so warm behind my eyes that my vision fogged for a second.

Belle’s keyboard clacked behind us in a tone that sounded like a war crime being documented.

Cross dismissed us at ten to the hour with a reading assignment long enough to kill a horse. The room broke apart into its usual flood of noise, chairs scraping and bags zipping, and somewhere in the middle of the scramble I felt a folded square of paper being pressed into my palm under the desk.

Blair was already standing. She slung her bag over one shoulder and walked out without looking back, flat shoes squeaking twice on the floor, chin up, ears flaming.

I opened the paper. Her handwriting was perfect, a clean slanted cursive taught by a private tutor who probably charged more per hour than my whole tuition.

Library. Fourth floor. Reference stacks. Six minutes. Alone.

Naomi read it over my arm. She didn’t even pretend not to.

"Go," she said.

"You’re sure?"

"I sat in your lap and kissed your hand in front of her on Monday." Naomi’s cheeks went pink, but she held my eyes. "She’s been running away from you since orientation, and today she stopped. You don’t get to make her chase you down a staircase, too."

Belle leaned over the back of my chair and plucked the note out of my hand before I could stop her. She read it, photographed it, and handed it back.

"Six minutes," Belle said. "I’m starting a timer, and I want a full verbal report at lunch. Use complete sentences."

"You’re unwell, Fox."

"I’m thorough, Monroe."