Chapter 596 | Lukas Belmont Fine

Chapter 596: 596 | Lukas Belmont Fine

I left him to his adjustments and went to my room, where the terrible mattress and the photograph of Marcus and Reina waited in the same positions they’d occupied since orientation week.

The window showed the training grounds stretching toward the dome, where construction lights had come on as the sun dropped and workers continued their slow stitching of the wound the Twilight Society had torn open twenty-two days ago.

I sat on the bed and pressed two fingers against my sternum.

The second heartbeat was there. Offset and patient, the way Vivienne had described it without ever touching me, the way Juno had measured it through tissue samples she still wanted more of.

It hummed when I paid attention to it, like a dog lifting its head at the sound of its name, and it settled when I stopped pressing, and it existed in a space the System had looked at and said source not system-originated, which was the most honest thing the System had ever told me and also the least helpful.

I closed my eyes and felt for it the way you feel for a light switch in a dark room. Not grabbing. Just reaching. The hum grew louder, and something behind my ribs shifted, and for half a second I felt warm in a way that had nothing to do with the California evening, warm in a way that tasted like salt and bronze and a sun I had never stood under in this body.

Then it settled, and I was just me again, sitting on a bad mattress in a dorm room that smelled like sage candle and Diane’s opinions about lamp cord placement.

The Eastside. Eight weeks. A Rank C hero named Dralun who supervised a district that responded to emergencies fourteen minutes after they happened, in a part of the city where fourteen minutes was the difference between a rescue and a recovery.

I pulled up the System interface. Twenty-seven thousand four hundred and thirty Scumbag Points sat in the corner of my vision like money in a savings account I was afraid to touch. Below the point count, the mysterious entry persisted.

Question mark, colon, one. No description. No rarity. No editorial commentary from a System that had opinions about everything including my romantic decisions, my wardrobe, and the frequency with which I checked out my own reflection.

The System remained silent, which was the part I hated most, because the System being quiet meant the System was either satisfied or scared, and I couldn’t tell which was worse.

My phone buzzed. Diane.

Six o’clock. My office. Wear the navy blazer I bought you in August. Your mother would have wanted you to look professional for this.

She never invoked Reina unless the stakes were real.

I texted back: I’ll be there.

Then Sloane: Stop being alone with your thoughts. I can feel you from here and your brain is doing that thing.

What thing?

The thing where you go quiet and start processing something you should be processing OUT LOUD with ME. That thing. The thing I hate. Stop it.

I smiled. Not because the situation was funny, but because Sloane Fitzgerald had spent nine years watching me from across a kitchen and two months loving me from inside a bond that neither of us fully understood, and she could feel my spiraling from three buildings away and was angry about it, and her anger was the most honest form of love I had ever encountered in either of my lives.

I’m fine, I sent.

You are NOT fine. You are LUKAS BELMONT fine which means you are actually NOT fine but you have decided to perform fineness until the performance becomes indistinguishable from the real thing and by then the crisis has either resolved itself or killed you.

I stared at the message. That was, genuinely, the most accurate description of my personality anyone had ever produced, including the System, which had literal access to my neurological data.

Okay that’s fair.

I KNOW IT’S FAIR. I have nine years of data and a supernatural bond that tells me when you’re lying. Come over after Diane’s meeting. I’ll be in my room. Bring food.

The specific food or any food?

RAMEN. The good one. Extra chashu. And the egg.

Yes ma’am.

Don’t call me ma’am. That’s a mom thing and my mom already used you up for her allotted time this week.

I laughed, alone in my room at five-thirty in the afternoon, because Sloane Fitzgerald had just referenced the rotating schedule of women in my life with the same tone she used to complain about my hoodies, and the fact that my girlfriend could reference my sexual arrangement with her mother while simultaneously being jealous about a French toast invitation from a blonde girl she had grudgingly agreed to share me with was either the most evolved relationship dynamic in human history or evidence that the universe had broken something fundamental about reality when it dropped me into this body.

I set the phone down and looked at the photograph on my desk.

Marcus and Reina Belmont in their hero costumes with the sun behind them. Two mid-tier California heroes who ran into a building that was coming down and didn’t come out. I had watched the footage of Radiant talking about them on national television, speaking about symbols and sacrifice with the practiced grief of a man who had arrived ninety seconds too late and spent nine years carrying the weight of that tardiness on a body that was coming apart from the inside.

The Eastside was where they died.

And someone in this building, someone with amber eyes and a wooden training staff and a file on me that was already longer than most, had decided that the Eastside was where I needed to go.

I pressed my fingers against my sternum one more time. The second heartbeat was still there. Still patient. Still waiting for something I hadn’t figured out how to give it yet.

"Alright," I said to the empty room and the fish-eyed photograph and the System that wouldn’t talk and the heartbeat that wouldn’t explain itself. "Let’s go be the delivery boy in a district that ate my parents."

The ceiling offered no wisdom. The System offered no notifications. The Bond hummed warm from three buildings away, Sloane’s presence steady and bright and furious on my behalf.

I stood, grabbed the navy blazer from the closet where it hung between four identical black hoodies, and headed for the door.

Diane was waiting.