Chapter 600: Community Property

The cafeteria at noon hit different when you walked in wearing four women's teeth marks, with one woman wearing your stolen sweater under her blazer, and the invisible weight of seven burning rings behind your sternum.

I grabbed a tray and piled on everything the food line offered that contained protein.

Two chicken breasts, a mountain of scrambled eggs, three strips of bacon that Belle would steal before I sat down, a banana, toast, and two bottles of water because Keiko's voice still lived rent-free in my skull telling me to hydrate like she'd appointed herself my medical proxy through the sheer force of carrying an umbrella.

The cafeteria worker at the egg station gave me an extra scoop without being asked, same as every day this week, though today she also glanced at my neck and then looked away very quickly while fighting a smile.

The line moved. I paid with Aurora's emergency card because Naomi would want pancakes and I wasn't going to let the girl who carried my corpse on national television pay for her own syrup.

Our table sat in its usual spot by the windows. The Pacific stretched out beyond the glass in a flat plane of blue and silver that made the entire island look like somewhere people went on vacation rather than somewhere people occasionally died in other dimensions.

Jordan had arrived first and claimed the seat with the best wall support for sleeping, his face already buried in his forearms with the posture of a man who'd surrendered to gravity on a spiritual level.

Javier sat beside him with two notebooks open, one for Nishimura's ecology homework and one that I was ninety percent sure contained the Sentinel Vanguard business card pressed between the pages like a holy relic.

Belle's laptop occupied the spot at the table's head, screen up and glowing, with a color-coded spreadsheet visible from six feet away and a tab that I couldn't read but suspected had been updated within the last four minutes.

Belle herself stood at the coffee station with her back to me, blue braid swinging as she poured something into a paper cup. She wore the Obsidian uniform with her characteristic modifications.

Blazer open.

Yellow shirt with three buttons undone instead of the regulation one, the black lace of her bralette peeking out at the edge of her collar because Belle Fox believed dress codes were suggestions written by people who lacked her understanding of persuasion.

Her skirt sat higher than any reasonable administrator would approve of, and her thigh-high stockings caught the overhead light each time she put her weight on one heel then the other.

I knew what she tasted like. Butterscotch and ambition and the sweetness that came out when she stopped performing and started laughing. The amber ring hummed warm at the back of my skull as I walked up to the table.

Naomi appeared from the pancake line the exact moment I set down my tray, which meant she'd been tracking my location through whatever sixth sense she'd developed from sleeping in my shirts and watching my heartbeat on medical monitors.

Her pink and black braid hung down her back in the pattern I'd woven that morning while she sat between my legs on the bathroom floor and told me about a dream involving the ocean and her father's boat.

The shell necklace from her mother caught the light as she slid into the seat to my left and placed her own tray beside mine, unhurried, like territory she'd claimed weeks ago and felt no need to defend.

"I got you extra syrup." She pushed a small cup of maple across the table toward my tray. "Auntie says you eat like a stray cat and I should feed you rice instead."

"Auntie's met me once."

"Auntie's known you long enough." Naomi stole a strip of bacon from my plate without looking at me, which confirmed that the old Naomi who apologized for breathing near my food had been permanently replaced by a version who treated my protein as community property. Her knee found mine under the table and pressed. The silver-pink ring flared warm.

Belle dropped into the chair at the table's head with her coffee and pulled the laptop toward her. "Monroe. Thirty-seven seconds late. Documenting." Her amber eyes swept across my face, my collar, and the placement of every visible mark on my throat before going back to her screen. "Also documenting that Davenport's desk scorch mark from Cross's lecture has been confirmed by two independent witnesses and one photograph."

"You photographed her desk."

"I photograph everything. That's why I'm invaluable." Belle reached across the table and confiscated two of my three bacon strips without breaking eye contact with her spreadsheet. "Also, your essay had four comma splices until Mendoza caught them at midnight, and Cross will circle any he missed in red and read the corrections out loud because Cross enjoys watching you suffer. I would know, because I also enjoy watching you suffer, and I have better documentation."

Javier looked up from his notebook. "The comma splices were terrible. I corrected three of them, but the fourth one in paragraph six is load-bearing. You can't remove it without collapsing the sentence structure."

"A load-bearing comma splice." Jordan's voice came from somewhere inside his own arms. "I've heard everything now. I can die."

"You can't die until you finish the ecology reading." Naomi pointed her fork at Jordan's collapsed form. She'd been raised by a fisherman, and work came before rest.

"The ecology reading is what's killing me."

The table filled in layers. Javier went back to his notebooks. Jordan stayed horizontal. Belle typed. Naomi ate her pancakes and kept her knee pressed against mine and said nothing about the library or the stairwell or the fact that her boyfriend had kissed another woman in a reference section two hours ago because Naomi had already given her permission and didn't need a debrief to know what happened.

That kind of trust still caught me off guard every time I ran into it. The girl from the fishing village in Carolina who sent two thousand dollars home every month and slept with a shell necklace from her mother and carried two hundred and five pounds of dying man out of a dimensional collapse while her arm was broken.

She looked at me now with pink eyes that held no jealousy and no conditions and no fine print, only the steady warmth of someone who'd decided what she wanted and refused to let the world talk her out of it.

I ate my eggs and tried not to think about how six weeks ago I'd classified this woman as a Silver-tier prospect at thirty-four percent baseline attraction with moderate emotional complexity.

Past me would have filed her under acceptable risk and gone back to his eggs. I got as far as the second forkful.

The graft hitched. It wasn't a pulse. It was a catch, like a hand closing hard on a railing, and the gray line that had lived at the bottom of my vision since Tuesday turned gold and climbed to the middle of it.

[Graft upkeep recalculated. Field: 7 rings. Settlement: ?1 day.]

[Lifespan: 16 Days, 12 Hours.]

[Ongoing upkeep: 1 cup per 48 hours or outermost ring destabilizes.]

The clock didn't tick. It dropped. Seventeen days and twelve hours became sixteen and twelve between one bite of eggs and the next, in a crowded cafeteria, with syrup on the table. Eighteen had been a generous rounding for a week. Sixteen and a half wasn't rounding anything.

My fork hit the tray.

Naomi's knee went still against mine. She didn't ask. She looked at my face, then at the corner of my eye where she'd learned the clock lived, and her hand found my wrist under the table and held on.

Belle kept typing. Jordan kept sleeping. At the back of my skull, the outermost ring, white edged in ice blue, burned steady and expensive.

Summit House was in seven hours. Now I had to tell all of them what the seventh ring cost.