Chapter 621 | The Note, The Texts, and The Ancient Coffee [GT BONUS]

Chapter 621: 621 | The Note, The Texts, and The Ancient Coffee [GT BONUS]

Sloane’s alarm went off at 5:47 in the morning, and my first four seconds of consciousness were spent convinced that a smoke detector had developed a personal grudge against me.

The phone sat on the nightstand next to Marcus and Reina, blasting a K-pop chorus at a volume that could only have been chosen out of spite. I slapped it silent with a construct before my eyes finished opening. The amber hand slid back into my palm, pleased about the whole thing in a way I did not appreciate at that hour.

The other half of the mattress was cold. Sloane had left for Hale’s drills at 5:30, and she’d left evidence of her exit everywhere I looked. Her blazer was gone from the floor, her shoes were gone from wherever she’d kicked them, and the dent in the sheets beside me was shaped like a girl who sleeps diagonally and treats her boyfriend’s ribs as a footrest. The pillow still smelled like her vanilla shampoo, and I lay there breathing it in longer than any self-respecting future number two Hero should admit to.

A square of folded notebook paper sat on my bare chest, right over my sternum where her ear had been.

I unfolded it with fingers that were still mostly asleep. Her handwriting slanted hard to the right, aggressive and messy, and three lines filled the page.

You slept through three alarms.

I counted your heartbeat for eleven minutes.

Don’t die today.

Below that she’d signed a single S, pressed so hard that the pen had torn a little hole through the paper.

Eleven minutes at sixty-two beats per minute works out to six hundred and eighty-two heartbeats. I did the math immediately because the alternative was having a feeling before coffee, and I have standards. The image of her sitting up in the dark with her ear pressed to my chest, lips moving while she counted, lodged itself somewhere behind my ribs and refused to leave. I folded the note back up and tucked it into my wallet behind my student ID, which was the most sentimental thing I had done since transmigrating into a dead kid’s body.

The interface blinked awake in the corner of my vision, clearly delighted to have an audience.

〘Heroine Bond Status: SLOANE FITZGERALD. Distance from Host is 1.4 kilometers and increasing.〙

〘Note: Heroine spent eleven minutes counting cardiac events before departure. Host is advised that this behavior falls outside standard attachment metrics and inside what humans refer to as love.〙

"Thanks for the translation," I told the ceiling tiles. There were still ninety-six of them.

My phone lit up with three texts that had arrived while I was unconscious, and every one of them came from Camille Ortega.

At 5:00 she’d written that it was five o’clock at Field Epsilon and I was not there. At 5:04 she’d sent a second message informing me that I was a coward and she was telling Zara. At 5:11 the final text arrived, and I could hear her voice in every letter of it. She’d given up waiting and hit the heavy bag instead while pretending it had my face, and she’d noted that the bag had better manners than me.

I typed back an apology, deleted it, and typed that I had been unconscious under orders from a man with a borrowed cane. She read it in six seconds and didn’t respond, which from Camille is roughly equivalent to a declaration of war with a bow on top.

The shower took nine minutes and felt like being reborn by a benevolent plumbing god. The last traces of pink glitter finally surrendered down the drain along with a grey film of Eastside soot I had apparently missed yesterday. When I wiped the fog off the mirror, the bruise on my collarbone had faded to a yellow smudge, because the Demigod trait refuses to let anybody mark me for longer than a day. Sloane was going to take this personally. She was going to consider it a challenge, and I was already dreading and craving the renewal session in roughly equal amounts.

Every finger-shaped mark she’d left on my wrist had vanished completely.

I pulled on the field kit, the charcoal utility jacket and reinforced trousers the support track had tailored after the dome turned my old suit into a crime scene. Diane had called the outfit tolerable on Saturday, which from Diane is a Nobel Prize. The silver crest caught the light from the window, and I looked at my reflection for two seconds longer than necessary because I am, in fact, as vain as everybody claims.

The common room smelled like burnt toast and a coffee pot that had been on the warmer since the Cretaceous period. Percy sat at the kitchen island, spine straight, notebook open, and a bowl of oatmeal portioned out so neatly beside it that the oats looked terrified of him. Caden sprawled across two stools in a hoodie and pajama pants covered in cartoon ducks, eating dry cereal from the box by the fistful. His blonde hair stuck up on one side like he’d slept on a live wire.

"Look who survived," Caden announced through a mouthful of frosted flakes. "The Eastside’s golden child returns to civilization. How was the jungle, dude? Did the natives accept you as their god?"

"The natives fed me pork buns and a grandmother threatened me with a cleaver."

"So yes, they accepted you as their god."

I poured myself a cup of the ancient coffee and immediately regretted every choice that had led to that moment. Percy slid his notebook across the island toward me without looking up from his oatmeal. Taped to the inside of the front cover, laminated and squared to the page edge, was a printed copy of Dralun’s report.

Belmont did not break anything. Returned forty-seven people before dawn. Needs to eat. Send him back Wednesday with coffee.

"You laminated it," I said.

"I laminated it because the paper would degrade from repeated handling otherwise, and I intend to handle it repeatedly." Percy set his spoon down beside the bowl at a right angle. "This is the most economical professional documentation I have ever encountered, and I would like to study him. Nineteen words convey outcome, damage status, and a welfare concern. They also carry a scheduling directive and an implied logistics request. The coffee clause alone contains more operational information than most of the IHL guidance I read last week."

"The coffee clause means he wants me to buy him coffee, Percy."

"I understand that, and I am choosing to interpret it as a masterwork anyway." He took the notebook back and smoothed the laminate with his thumb. "Mercy would give him full marks. Castillo would try to hire him. I have already drafted three questions for him if you would be willing to deliver them."

"He’s going to grunt at your questions, man."

Caden leaned forward on his stools until they tipped at an angle that should have killed him, his hazel eyes going wide and bright. "Hold on, dude, rewind. You worked an actual case on your very first day. Everybody else in 1-B spent orientation learning where the bathroom is and signing liability waivers. Theo spent his entire afternoon getting a laminated badge photo retaken because he blinked. You were out there doing Hero stuff before anybody even taught you the paperwork, and that’s not supposed to happen until second year."

"It wasn’t a case." I drank more of the coffee to prove to myself that I could. "It was forty-seven knock-and-returns and a raccoon."