Chapter 600 | Ready to be Collected

Chapter 600: 600 | Ready to be Collected

"You’re the one making noise, Explosion Girl."

"Don’t call me that while your hand is on my ass."

I moved my hand higher, thumb brushing the edge of her bra through the polo, and she stopped arguing entirely. Her breath went ragged against my neck. Tiny amber sparks popped at her knuckles where they gripped my waistband, snapping like popcorn in a cold pan, and I felt the heat of them against my stomach without the sting. Sloane’s Aspect had a bad habit of editorializing whenever she lost her temper or her composure, and right now she was losing both.

"You have to come back in one piece," she whispered. Her lips were swollen and her eyes had gone glassy and blue. "Every day for eight weeks, you come back, and you text me from the bus, and you don’t jump in front of anything."

"I can’t promise the last part."

"I know you can’t, which is why I’m so angry."

She kissed me again, slower this time, her fingers loosening in my waistband until her palm rested flat over my heart. She counted. I felt her counting through the bond, the same number she’d been tallying since the plaza, and it hurt worse than the shoulder. Then her phone buzzed against my hip, and she pulled back with a curse that would have gotten her disinvited from Diane’s Christmas party.

"Bartholomew’s early," she said, reading the screen. "He’s early, and I hate him."

"He’s a professional who respects your time."

"He can respect it from the curb." She tugged her polo straight, glared at the new wrinkles, and gave up. Her ears were bright pink. "Put a shirt on before you walk out there, or Hardy will have a stroke."

"Felicity has survived worse."

"I’m not worried about Felicity surviving." She paused at the door with one hand on the frame and looked back at me, and for a second the combat girl and the scared girl stood in the same spot wearing the same polo. "Text me when you get there. Do it the second you arrive."

She left without waiting for an answer. The bond stayed hot and prickly for the next four minutes while I got dressed, which was the Fitzgerald equivalent of slamming a door.

The Student Services loop sat at the south end of the Academic Spine, a curved drive of white concrete framed by eucalyptus and two new WARDEN pillars that glowed faint blue when anyone came within ten feet. When I arrived at twelve twenty-eight, the loop was a car show.

Percy stood beside a silver sedan with Financial District Safety Education stenciled on the door. A woman in a grey blazer held his door open while he explained something about compliance forms to her, and she listened with the glazed patience of a person realizing her intern was already better at the job than she was. Percy saw me and lifted his notebook in greeting, and I watched him mouth a timestamp to himself.

Camille leaned against an open-top jeep in Waterfront Athletic Initiative orange, arms crossed, while a sunburned guy in board shorts loaded her duffel into the back. Her two-tone hair was braided tight, and she wore a fitted black compression top under an unzipped windbreaker that she hadn’t bothered to zip for a reason I suspected was about me. Her brown eyes found mine across the loop and held for a count of three before she looked away, jaw working, palms dark.

Felicity’s ride was a hand-painted van covered in murals of cartoon children holding paintbrushes, with Arts District Youth Mentorship scrawled across the side in rainbow cursive. She stood in front of it in a cream cardigan buttoned over a pale pink camisole and a pleated skirt that ended exactly where regulation said it should and not an inch lower, which on Felicity counted as a statement. Her blonde hair fell in soft waves over one shoulder, and when she spotted me she lit up like somebody had flipped a switch behind her freckles.

"Bestie!" She jogged over, cardigan flapping, and grabbed my forearm with both hands. "Where’s your car? I want to see your car. Is it sleek? Does it have tinted windows and a brooding driver?"

"I don’t have a car yet."

"Maybe they’re late." She craned her neck toward the drive. "Eastside agencies run on a different clock, I bet. That’s very gritty of them."

A student services clerk approached from the kiosk under the covered walkway, a thin man in a Halloran polo holding a tablet and one laminated card. He checked my face against his screen, then checked it again, the double take of someone who had seen four million posts about a guy in gold and was trying to reconcile that guy with the one in front of him.

"Belmont, Lukas, provisional contract, Metro Seven?"

"That’s me, and I’m ready to be collected."

"Right." He handed me the laminated card. "Your placement agency didn’t request transport, so this is your route." ℯℯ𝑙.

I looked at the card. It was a bus schedule. Verano Metro Transit Route 14, departing the Creston Hills stop at twelve forty-one, connecting at Verano Central to Route 31 Eastside Express, which the card noted in cheerful blue type was express only on weekdays before ten in the morning. Total estimated travel time was one hour and six minutes. Someone had stapled a sticky note to the corner in blocky marker.

Don’t be late. Don’t break anything I can’t afford to fix. — D.

"He sent you a bus schedule," Felicity said. She said it slowly, the way a person reads a word in a foreign language. "Everyone else got a driver, and you got public transit."

"I got public transit and a threat from my supervisor."

"That’s not a threat, that’s a sticky note." She took the card out of my hand and turned it over. "Oh, he wrote on the back too. It says ’Bring your own coffee.’ Lukas, I think your boss hates you."