Chapter 80 - Watermelon and Territory

The four o'clock sun slanted through the broad leaves of the Brazil nut trees, casting long shadows across the pasture's red clay.

Dante sat in the folding blue canvas beach chair, his satellite-linked tablet resting across his thighs. He toggled between an itemized cost estimate for corrugated steel roof panels and an engineering paper detailing the shear strength of western Amazonian clay soils, his stylus tapping against the glass screen in rapid, measured strokes.

Nicole padded out of the warehouse kitchen on quiet, bare feet through the grass.

The huntress wore a clean gray tank top and sweat shorts, her dark hair falling loose and swaying in the warm jungle breeze.

In her hands, she carried a deep white porcelain bowl filled with chilled slices of ripe mango, carved into millimeter-perfect cubes she had peeled using the needle tip of her trench dagger. The fruit had chilled for two hours in the freezer of the new refrigerator, venting a sweet, frosty mist that smelled of fresh orchard harvest.

Nicole walked into the shade of the copaiba tree, sitting on the soft grass right beside the right leg of Dante's chair, holding the bowl toward him with a stainless-steel fork.

"I diced up that yellow mango from the crisper drawer, Dante," Nicole said in a gentle voice, the chitin mandibles beneath her lips resting in a calm, relaxed posture. "It's sweet and cold."

Dante didn't even pull his eyes from the tablet screen right away.

Reaching out with his right hand, he took the fork, brought a cube of chilled mango to his mouth, and chewed slowly.

"Thank you, Nicole," Dante said, his tone carrying its customary practical approval. "The glucose concentration is optimal for restoring morning stamina. Zero stringy fiber in the pulp."

Nicole rested her chin on the back of her left hand, all four amber slit-pupils glinting with gentle amusement as she watched the rows of his spreadsheet.

"Are you calculating the septic depth again?" she asked, tilting her head close to his elbow.

"Recalculating the rear stormwater drainage," Dante answered, tapping his stylus on a circular plot on the screen. "Yesterday's squall dropped an inch and a half of rain in thirty minutes. If we don't trench a perimeter swale lined with gravel around the slab, the red clay will pool runoff against the workshop foundation the minute we rotate back to the Capital."

Nicole chuckled softly through her nose, drinking in the engineering breakdown as though it were the most captivating story in the forest.

Sixty feet away, by the woodpile beside the truck bed, Maria arrested her iron axe mid-swing.

The Sentinel's broad torso was sheathed in a light sheen of sweat from splitting eucalyptus logs, dressed only in faded denim cutoffs and her black athletic top.

She lowered the axe slowly, resting the hardwood handle against the packed earth, her narrowed brown eyes zeroing in on the tableau beneath the copaiba tree.

Maria looked at the white porcelain bowl.

She looked at the mango cubes diced with surgical dagger precision.

And she looked at Nicole nestled in the grass less than a foot from Dante's knee, giggling over drainage equations as though the boy were the most fascinating creature to ever walk the earth.

A dry, prickly heat, bearing no relation to the primordial fire in her marrow or the ninety-degree Amazonian weather, surged straight up Maria's neck.

Look at this little snake.

Cutting mango into neat little cubes with a sewer-worm skinning dagger.

Since when did this gutter scout turn into a devoted farmwife?

Maria dropped the axe handle with a snap that left the steel bit toppling into the dirt.

Wiping sweat from her forehead with a corded forearm, she marched with thunderous strides toward the concrete warehouse.

She barged into the kitchen, stalked straight to the corner of the pantry where the municipal market goods were stored, and locked her eyes onto a massive twenty-six-pound watermelon they had hauled from the Cruzeiro do Sul fruit stand.

The fruit was a dark green, striped boulder of a melon with a rind two inches thick.

Maria hoisted the twenty-six-pound melon with both hands, lifting it to her chest with the casual ease of thirty-three Strength, and stormed out of the warehouse, marching across the red clay with long strides that snapped the grass under her bare feet.

She cut a beeline across the clearing.

She did not go around the tree.

She pushed straight through the gap between Dante's chair and where Nicole was sitting on the lawn, planting herself directly in front of the boy.

Without asking permission and without uttering a single syllable, Maria slammed the twenty-six-pound watermelon straight onto Dante's lap.

THUD.

The impact of the chilled melon struck the youth's lap with a crushing thud that set the chair's aluminum frame groaning at the hinges.

Dante wheezed, the air punched from his lungs, his hands darting out to catch the green rind before the bowling-ball weight shattered his tablet screen against his knees.

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"Maria!" Dante hollered from the chair, gray eyes wide in shock. "What on earth are you doing with this watermelon?!"

Maria folded her heavy arms over her athletic top, anchoring her bare feet in the dirt with the immovable stance of a bridge footing.

"Watermelon," she growled, her jaw setting hard. "Holds three times more water than mango. Your mouth is dry from staring at that computer glass all day. Eat it, bighead."

Nicole lifted her head slowly from the grass.

The huntress looked at the colossal watermelon wedged in Dante's lap, then looked up with all four amber eyes at the towering six-foot-three figure of Maria eclipsing the afternoon sun.

"The watermelon is uncut, Maria," Nicole pointed out gently, gesturing with her fork at the thick rind. "He can't even carve that skin sitting in a canvas lawn chair."

Maria glared down at the huntress with a stare loaded with forty-eight pounds of forged steel.

"He has hands and he has a pocketknife, girl," Maria countered instantly, thick mockery coating her voice. "Or do you want to take that rat-sticking sewer shiv of yours and carve twenty-six pounds of rind into precious little cubes for him too?"

Nicole blinked her faceted corneas slowly.

A fresh, dangerous glint of cool composure surfaced in her vertical slit pupils.

"If Dante asks me..." Nicole purred in an unhurried drawl, her chitin mandibles clicking beneath her lip in a faint smirk that exposed the tips of sharp white teeth, "...I'll carve the entire melon for him in five minutes."

Maria took half a step forward, the breadth of her shoulders blotting out the light over Nicole entirely.

"He isn't asking you for a damn thing, girl. He's had arms to peel his own rations since he was ten years old."

Dante looked down at the melon in his lap, then up at Maria's fuming, flushed face, and over to Nicole's subtle, mocking smirk in the grass.

With thirty-four Intelligence and twenty-six Wisdom, his cognitive faculties could solve dimensional-fold theorems in fractions of a second, yet the social dynamic currently combusting beneath this copaiba tree operated on a chaotic calculus no arcane textbook could ever map.

"I am not eating a twenty-six-pound watermelon at four in the afternoon, Maria," Dante said, shoving the heavy fruit off his legs onto the grass to free his knees. "We had lunch two hours ago."

"Fine, let it rot in the dirt while the sun cooks the rind!" Maria snatched a second folding beach chair propped against the tree trunk, dragging its metal frame across the red clay with a shrill screech.

She popped the chair open so violently the canvas seams groaned.

She did not position it casually.

She jammed the frame four inches from Dante's left arm, dropping into the seat so that her broad shoulder was glued to his, cutting off any direct line of sight between him and Nicole.

Crossing her long legs, she planted her elbows on her knees and glared at his tablet screen.

"What were you saying about the drainage swale?" Maria barked, her voice drowning out the acoustic track playing from the speaker. "Keep talking. I know gravel and earthmoving a hell of a lot better than someone whose whole resume is crawling through dirty sewers."

Nicole let out a soft, crystalline chuckle from the grass, spearing another mango cube with her fork.

"The discussion was on structural calculations, Maria," Nicole said with infuriating calm, chewing slowly. "Dante was explaining soil engineering."

Maria turned her head with agonizing slowness, glaring at the huntress with sparks in her brown eyes.

"I've known this boy's engineering for seven years, Nicole," Maria ground out, every word falling like an iron pile being driven into bedrock. "Seven whole years. While you were still wallowing in sewer sludge eating rotten potato peels, I was already pounding out his armor dents, mending his coats, and listening to him drone on about Mana formulas every single day after lunch."

Nicole tilted her head, her smirk widening by a fraction of a millimeter.

"Seven years..." Nicole repeated in a silky purr. "...and you still have to kick his shins under the restaurant table just to get him to notice you?"

Maria's breath hitched in her throat.

The memory of kicking Dante's leg at The Canal Roaster struck her like an open-handed slap.

Crimson rushed up the Sentinel's cheeks with the velocity of an igniting furnace, burning all the way to her ears beneath her short hair.

"What did you just say, you sewer lizard?!" Maria roared, starting up out of her chair, her right hand dropping on reflex toward her hip where her hilt usually hung.

Dante snapped the tablet shut against his knee with an irritated clack of plastic.

"Can the two of you stop talking about my shins and pasture dirt?!" Dante yelled, glaring between them with the look of a man whose mathematical patience had run dry. "We came to this homestead to clear our heads! One of you is hurling watermelons into my knees, and the other is running forensic analysis on table kicks! What is your problem today?!"

Maria wheeled on him, her cheeks still flaming with defensive mortification.

"The problem is that you are completely blind, Dante!" Maria bellowed straight in his face, jabbing a rigid forefinger into his sternum. "A thirty-four-Intelligence blockhead who can't see past this glass screen!"

"How on earth am I blind?!"

"Because you are!" She offered no further explanation.

Instead, Maria grabbed the aluminum armrest of Dante's chair with her right hand and yanked the entire chair, with Dante sitting in it, a foot closer to herself in a single violent heave that stretched the blue canvas against its rivets.

Dante nearly lost his grip on the tablet again, clutching it to his chest with wide, bewildered eyes.

"Maria! You're going to snap the chair frame in half!"

"The sun shifted behind the branches, bighead!" she roared back, refusing to release her grip on the metal. "I'm dragging you into the shade so your corpse-pale library skin doesn't get fried to a crisp!"

Nicole pressed her hand over her mouth, giggling quietly in the grass as she watched the six-foot-three vanguard stake her territory by brute force, dragging the summoner's chair flush against her side like a merchant guarding an ore convoy against road bandits.

Dante took three deep breaths through his nose, adjusting his posture in the crooked chair with an expression of pure, clinical resignation.

Reaching for the fork Nicole had set on the edge of the bowl, he speared the last cube of yellow mango and chewed in silence, completely surrendering any attempt to comprehend the emotional physics governing this clearing.

The Amazonian twilight gathered softly over the canopy along the ridge, washing the cloudless sky in hues of amber and violet while the creek murmured over the riverbed pebbles.

The watermelon was cleaved open by Maria's boning knife half an hour later, and the three closed out the afternoon sitting along the sandbar, eating crisp red slices beneath the cool forest breeze.

Maria plowed through her portion in massive bites, her shoulder pinned against Dante's arm, leveling a gaze of undisputed victory at Nicole every time the huntress attempted to ask about the forest roads.

Nicole merely smirked behind her melon rind, winking an amber eye with the quiet, teasing amusement of someone who knew that their newly carved sanctuary in northern Brazil had just gained a dynamic far louder and far more entertaining than any military contract the Citadel could ever issue.