Chapter 571 | Cocky Is What She’s Looking For

Chapter 571: 571 | Cocky Is What She’s Looking For

Sloane went the specific kind of red that meant her Aspect might start popping around the kitchen, so I decided to end the war before she took out the pizza boxes. I dropped the cheese slice back onto the empty tray and held up both hands.

"Truce," I said.

"You started it."

"I threw cheese back. You started it."

"You called me second-highest in my field."

"You are second-highest in your field."

Diane made a small sound that she disguised as clearing her throat, and Sloane turned the glare on her instead of me, which felt like a strategic victory. I ate the last slice of my meat pizza and let the two of them argue about whether the vegetable pizza counted as a real pizza or a salad with delusions of grandeur, and for a while nothing existed except a warm kitchen and two women who wanted me around for reasons I still hadn’t fully earned.

I circled back to it when I let myself, which was a controlled activity I rationed more carefully than gacha pulls. The System had built the scaffolding. Sloane’s gauge climbing without intervention. Diane’s gauge ticking upward at a rate she probably wasn’t tracking herself. The missions that put me in rooms I’d have walked past if the interface hadn’t made avoidance too expensive. All true. All documented. All architecture that existed before a single genuine moment did.

But the System hadn’t built the cheese throw. That was Sloane, too happy to commit to being angry. That was real. The interface hadn’t scripted Diane sitting across from me at breakfast asking if I’d slept, meaning it, saying it with the kind of ambient care that didn’t register as performance because it wasn’t one. That was just how she operated when the person in the chair was someone she’d decided counted. The warmth in this kitchen, the specific quality of existing in proximity to two women who wanted me around for reasons I still wasn’t certain I’d earned, none of that read like something the System had generated.

I didn’t know what to do with that. The math didn’t resolve cleanly. Something real had grown out of a machine that treated affection like currency, and I was still working out whether that made the real thing less real or just made me more of a bastard for accepting it.

The blue void thing hadn’t helped. Three seconds dead. Something older than the System reaching for me like it recognized what I was. Like it had found what it was looking for. I’d filed that next to all the other things I wasn’t prepared to examine yet, which was becoming a very large and increasingly concerning drawer in the back of my head that I was pretending didn’t have structural weight. That pretense was not holding as well as I wanted it to.

"You’ve gone somewhere," Diane said.

I blinked back. Both of them were watching me now, Sloane with the sharp attention she brought to everything, Diane with the flat reading stare that stripped whatever mask I’d put up. The bond hummed with Sloane’s spike of worry, quick and hot.

"Just tired," I said.

"You’re not tired. Juno cleared your stamina at a hundred percent this morning." Diane tilted her head. "You do the thing. The eyes go left and your lips move like you’re reading something the rest of us can’t see. You’ve done it since the morning you came downstairs and looked at Sloane like you’d never met her."

Right. She’d told me she knew about that in the garage weeks ago, and I’d been hoping she’d let it sit. Diane didn’t let things sit. She collected them, filed them, waited for the right moment to lay them on the table.

"It’s a habit," I said. "I think in words. Sometimes they leak."

"Mm." She didn’t believe me. She never fully believed me, and the terrifying thing about Diane was that she didn’t need to. She’d made peace with the gap between what I said and what she knew, the same way she’d made peace with building a federal document out of a lie. She’d decided I was worth the not-knowing. I hadn’t decided whether that made me lucky or a monster. Probably both. The overlap was larger than people gave it credit for.

Sloane’s hand found mine under the counter, fingers threading through, gripping like she’d caught me thinking about something and wanted to anchor me back to the room. Through the bond I felt the question she wasn’t asking out loud. I squeezed back. Fine. I’m fine. She didn’t fully buy it either, but she let it go, which for Sloane was its own kind of trust.

Diane stood and started clearing the boxes, and the sight of her doing something as ordinary as trash duty in a silk robe with her hair falling out of its pin did unfair things to my brain. I looked away before she caught me, which she caught anyway.

"Eyes to yourself," she said, not turning around. "You had your two hours."

"Two hours and forty-three minutes," Sloane muttered.

"I’m not counting."

"You literally set a timer."

"For your benefit, sugar. So you’d know when to knock."

I decided the safest place to be during a Fitzgerald mother-daughter skirmish was somewhere the shrapnel couldn’t reach, so I got up and helped Diane fold down the boxes. She let me. Our hands moved around each other at the trash can with the ease of people who’d shared a kitchen for nine years, and for a second the strangeness of everything we’d become sat quietly between us, acknowledged and set aside.

"Monday," she said, low, so Sloane wouldn’t hear the shift in her voice. "You’re going to be alone in that room with Park for part of it. I can be present as your guardian, but the Commission runs the questioning, and they’ll want you without me at some point. They always do. They like to see what a person does when the person managing them isn’t there to catch the ball."

"I know."

"Do you." She turned to face me, close enough that I could smell the perfume she wore for herself and not for me, the one that lived under the botanical cleanser like a secret. "You’re good, Lukas. You’re better than good. But Park has broken people who spent twenty years learning to lie for a living. You’ve had a few months. Don’t get cocky in that room. Cocky is what she’s looking for. Cocky is a boy who thinks he’s smarter than the process."

"I am smarter than the process."

"That’s exactly what I’m telling you not to say."