Chapter 19: Who Promoted the Soup Above Me?

Dante wanted to ask who sold tickets to somebody else’s life, but the nurse made him walk to the bathroom first with Rhea waiting outside. Returning to the side room left him tired enough to resent whoever had advertised the exciting version.

Anika handed back his cracked phone, which he passed to Miss Vale so she could inspect the theater advertisement. Posey sat beside the bed with her tennis bag under the chair, and Mom remained close enough to object to anything expensive or stupid.

"They put a girl on a collection order because she visited me," Dante said, looking at the blue ribbon against Posey’s hair. "If I leave, does that actually stop them coming for her?"

Miss Vale couldn’t promise it did while security checked the dispatcher and ward photographs. She offered supervised transport home after medical clearance, emphasizing that staying was his choice.

He wanted to go home until he pictured eating dinner while Anika sat alone waiting for news about Jett. He had let her believe he could help, and disappearing now would leave her with the bill for his performance.

"I want to give you everything I remember," he said, which sounded disappointingly small beside the speeches on his laptop. Anika pulled his blanket back over the foot he had started lowering and told him that remembering could happen horizontally.

He glanced beside him, imagining Anika explaining the benefits of lying down while he failed every practical assessment. She caught him and touched the rail. "Keep that thought to yourself unless you’ve remembered a room number," she said. "Injuring yourself doesn’t earn a private lesson." Mom asked whether common sense cost extra here, and Dante studied the blanket while Posey laughed.

Bell arrived with his tablet and black shadow bird perched on his shoulder beside his bald head. Dark wings folded beneath the mothman’s coat, while the bird inspected an ink stain instead of Dante.

Posey mentioned the rumor that it caught students texting, and Bell said it mostly caught crumbs. Dante doubted a charger held together with tape qualified as his magical animal companion.

Bell explained that the scholarship trust was the donor fund paying for student placements and hiring services around Blackwell, including the wing where Jett had been held. Paying for those services didn’t make it the university. It had booked the theater weeks ago, but Dante’s face had only appeared that morning. Vale called theater management while Bell saved the advertisement and asked security to preserve the booking and transport records.

Mom asked about ordinary homework, and Bell said he’d been trying since Saturday. Dante couldn’t defend lessons that ended with somebody stealing the recording.

The nurse required overnight observation, settling the argument about leaving. Rhea accompanied Posey to the ward kitchen while Anika waited beside the door. Mom stayed by the window, and Bell read updates at the foot of Dante’s bed while Vale finished her call.

At school, boys had repeated his words in stupid voices whenever he entered the lunchroom. He remembered checking nonexistent messages outside until the bell saved him from admitting he had nowhere to sit.

Posey shouldn’t have to learn which doors were safe because she had held his hand. He understood that without understanding the cube or university contracts.

Anika forwarded Bell’s booking details to the family contact checking the trust. "Money doesn’t make a missing person appear, but it makes someone answer the phone on Sunday," she said, then asked Dante to stop watching the corridor as though guilt could summon her brother.

A porter stopped with a meal cart while the nurse checked his badge against the kitchen list. He waited without arguing, unlike the collector who had demanded cooperation.

Rhea returned with sandwiches while Posey carried soup in a warming bowl. When she set it beside his water, little legs unfolded beneath it and started marching toward the glass. She turned the dial down and apologized for ordering something ambitious.

"Your dinner has career plans," Anika said, catching the bowl before it reached the mattress. Mom suggested putting it in charge of his laundry, and Dante complained that everyone was remarkably willing to promote soup ahead of him.

Posey settled back into her chair and opened his sandwich wrapper. Dante asked whether she wanted him to stop discussing the threat to her, and she said she wanted him to keep asking rather than deciding for her. She offered the sandwich, then smiled when he raised his good hand, explaining she could stay close without him pretending to be helpless. He regretted demonstrating independence immediately.

Bell waited until he had eaten before explaining that the four rescued patients’ pads had been removed under medical isolation. Artemis’s dish no longer showed their four repeated pulses, but Jett’s connection remained unresolved and Dante was still forbidden to cast.

He asked whether refusing the demonstration would cost those patients their treatment. Bell said it would continue regardless, and Dante requested that in writing before another donor tried making him responsible for somebody else’s bed.

Miss Vale added the request to her report and read it back. It wasn’t a rescue, but it was something he could do without picturing a spell and hoping the person paying for it was only himself.

Security had seen a visitor carrying a tray near the old bed, although the camera hadn’t caught a clear face. The collector’s order came through a trust contractor, which connected the attempts without identifying who took either photograph.

Anika noticed yellow plastic beside the curtain in the image. Its color differed from the collector’s badge, so Miss Vale sent Iris the detail without declaring a match.

Mom left with security after Miss Vale returned Dante’s phone to his bag. She thanked Posey, promised to return in the morning and warned him that hospital staff were allowed to tell her when he became an idiot.

Rhea brought a blanket with the nurse’s permission, bending to cover Posey’s knees. Two small wine-red horns showed through her dark hair, and Dante realized he had spent days noticing everything beneath them.

"Patients don’t get to lend out half their bed and call it hospitality," Rhea said when he glanced at the blanket. Posey retrieved her notebook and read beside him while Anika checked her phone, leaving him surrounded by people he very much wanted to keep.

Iris called with the badge comparison before he could say anything foolish. Its number matched a cart removed from Jett’s wing during the alarm, listed as empty equipment and booked onto a collection van due at the loading gate in twenty minutes.