Chapter 595 | My Life is a Pornhwa

Chapter 595: 595 | My Life is a Pornhwa

The walk back to Prometheus House took twelve minutes because I took the long way through the faculty garden, the one Percy had mapped during orientation week when he still believed knowing every shortcut would protect him from whatever this place was going to do to us.

The eucalyptus trees were doing their thing, filling the air with that sharp medicinal smell that the university tour guides probably called refreshing and that I called the scent of an institution trying too hard.

I passed the koi pond. The fish were still alive, which felt like an accomplishment given everything else that had happened on this campus in the past month. One of them, a fat orange specimen with black spots that I’d privately named Gerald Junior after the hardware store guy, surfaced and looked at me with the blank judgment that only fish and IHL diagnosticians could manage.

"Same to you, buddy," I said.

My phone buzzed again. Felicity.

bestie lunch tomorrow i found a place that does french toast with mascarpone and if you say no i will take it as a personal attack on our friendship and also on france

I typed back: France has survived worse.

She responded in four seconds, which Percy would have noted was three seconds below her documented average and therefore indicative of heightened emotional investment.

thats a yes right

It’s a maybe.

a maybe from lukas belmont is basically a marriage proposal ill see you at noon wear the blue shirt

I pocketed the phone before the next message could arrive, because Felicity Hardy texting at frequency meant Felicity Hardy building toward something, and I did not have the emotional bandwidth to figure out what shape that something would take while also processing the fact that someone in Halloran’s administration had decided the son of two dead heroes should spend eight weeks in the district where those heroes stopped being alive.

The common room was occupied when I came through the front door. Caden sat on the modular couch with his feet on the coffee table, watching highlight reels on his phone with the volume turned up loud enough that I could hear the commentator’s enthusiasm from the stairwell. Marco occupied the other end of the couch, eating something from a bag that crinkled with each handful.

"Belmont." Caden didn’t look up from his phone. "You have the face."

"I have a face. That’s generally how it works."

"The specific face. The one you make when the universe has done something you didn’t authorize and you’re calculating whether to be angry or impressed."

Marco threw a chip at Caden’s head without looking. "Leave him alone. He just got assigned to the Eastside."

Caden’s phone lowered. His hazel eyes found mine with the particular sharpness that most people missed because Caden Holt had spent eighteen years convincing the world he was an idiot, and the world had bought it at full price. The goofball register dropped.

"The actual Eastside?"

"District Seven."

"That’s where your parents—"

"Yeah."

Silence. Not the uncomfortable kind where people avoid your gaze, but the kind where two guys who have been fighting side by side in a sealed dome decide that silence communicates more than anything verbal would.

Caden’s jaw worked once, and then he nodded, and then his feet went back on the table and his phone came back up and the goofball clicked back into place like a mask he’d worn so long it had become a second skin.

"Steele’s a psychopath," he said. "Respected psychopath. But psychopath."

"Ashby signed off on it."

Marco’s chip bag stopped rustling. "The principal personally approved your placement?"

"According to Petra, who knows these things because Petra knows everything, yes."

"Your co-representative is tracking your paperwork at the administrative level."

"My co-representative signed a federal document attaching her family name to my registration three weeks ago. Tracking my paperwork is the least invasive thing she does."

I leaned against the doorframe. "Also, knowing Petra, she’s probably got a color-coded file system for every Class 1-B student that would make the faculty look disorganized."

Caden grinned, slow and knowing. "God, your life is a pornhwa."

I didn’t dignify that with a response. Dignifying it would require acknowledging that Caden was right, and acknowledging that Caden was right about anything set a precedent I refused to establish. Some conversations ended themselves if you just didn’t feed them.

I left him and Marco to their philosophical debates about my life choices and took the stairs to the second floor. The elevator was backed up with three people trying to fit a mini-fridge through the door while debating load-bearing capacity in increasingly creative terms. I passed Percy’s room on the way to mine.

The door was open, which meant Percy was processing something and hadn’t remembered doors were optional closeable features yet.

Percy sat at his desk with his notebook open and a second notebook open beside it and a tablet propped against his monitor displaying what appeared to be the full text of the IHL provisional placement guidelines. The text was annotated in three colors of ink.

I could see margin notes from the doorway. Percy’s handwriting got smaller when he was worried, and the current font size suggested he was operating at about seventy percent baseline calm.

"You heard," I said from the doorway.

Percy’s pen stopped. "Steele distributed your placement designation at ten fifteen. Ortega texted the group at ten sixteen. Holt confirmed at ten seventeen. I have been reviewing the district incident reports for Metro Seven since ten nineteen."

His brown eyes lifted from the notebook. "The unresolved case rate is thirty-seven percent above the Verano average. The median response time for licensed Heroes in the district is fourteen minutes. The national average is six."

"Percy."

"I am not suggesting you refuse the placement. I am providing data so that your decision, whatever it is, accounts for the full picture."

"Percy."

He stopped. His pen hovered above the page, and his navy blue hair fell across his forehead in the specific way it did when his brain ran ahead of his body and his body hadn’t caught up yet.

"I’ll be fine," I said.

Percy wrote something in his notebook. I couldn’t read it from the doorway, but I knew it wasn’t a number or a statistic. Percy Mendoza only wrote without data when the subject was personal, and personal was a language Percy was still learning to speak.

"I know," he said. "I am adjusting the model anyway."