Chapter 622 | Episode Type C [GT BONUS]

Chapter 622: 622 | Episode Type C [GT BONUS]

A soft chime sounded at the edge of my vision.

〘Observation: Host dismisses the work when it is easier than admitting it mattered.〙

I stared at the notification until Caden waved a hand in front of my face.

"You’re doing the thing where your eyes go left and your lips move," he said. "Percy has a name for it in his notebook."

"The designation is Episode Type C." Percy didn’t even glance up from his oatmeal. "It correlates with deflection events at approximately seventy-one percent."

"You two need hobbies."

"You are our hobby, bro." Caden grinned and shoved another fistful of cereal into his mouth. "Also, a raccoon counts as a case. I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise. It had a victim and a motive, and there were pastries."

The stairwell door banged open hard enough that Percy flinched and his spoon rattled against the bowl. Camille Ortega came through it straight from a run, her orange sports bra soaked dark down the center and her black compression shorts clinging to thighs that looked sculpted by somebody who hated the rest of us. Sweat ran down the curve of her stomach in thin tracks that caught the overhead light, and her two-tone braid hung heavy and damp against one shoulder. She’d wrapped fresh tape around both hands, and the tape on her right knuckles had split where the heavy bag had fought back and lost.

She walked straight past the coffee pot and took the mug out of my hand.

"You owe me," she said, and drank half of it in one swallow. She made a face like I’d personally brewed the liquid in a gym sock. "This is disgusting, Belmont. You drink this on purpose?"

"I drink it because it’s the only option on this floor."

"Then your options are garbage." She kept the mug anyway, leaning a hip against the island close enough that the heat coming off her skin reached my arm. She smelled like cardamom under the sweat, and I realized she had put on her lip balm before running. Her brown eyes dropped to the yellowing smudge on my collarbone, lingered there for exactly as long as it took her jaw to tighten, and then came back up to my face.

"Fitzgerald’s marks fade fast on you," she said.

"Everything fades fast on me."

"Not everything." She set the mug down in front of me, empty now, and flicked my forehead hard enough to sting. "Thursday at five, Field Epsilon. If you’re unconscious again, I’ll drag you out of bed myself, and I won’t knock."

She walked away toward the West Tower elevators with her shoulders squared, and every set of eyes in the common room tracked her until the doors slid shut. Finn, who I had not even noticed sprawled across the far couch, opened one eye long enough to say that the tension in the room had just dropped by forty percent and then went back to sleep.

"She drank your coffee," Caden said slowly.

"I noticed."

"She drank your coffee and then she said she’d come into your room without knocking." He turned to Percy with the delight of a man watching his favorite show get renewed. "Percy, please tell me there’s a word for that in the notebook."

Percy flipped a page and wrote something down in tiny cramped letters. "There is now."

I checked the clock on the microwave and grabbed a protein bar out of the cabinet, which Grandma Lin would have considered a personal insult to her entire bloodline. The contract said Wednesday meant back to the Eastside, and the laminated schedule said Route 14 left the ridge stop at 7:11. Missing it meant a fifty-minute wait and a dragon who had very clearly memorized my arrival times.

Percy capped his pen and looked up at me for the first time all morning.

"Your blink rate is normal again, your pupils are symmetric, and your gait is within one percent of baseline," he said. "I adjusted my model overnight to reflect that you’ll probably come back from the Eastside intact. I would like you to keep proving the model correct."

"You say the sweetest things, man."

"I say accurate things, Lukas, and occasionally they overlap."

The walk down the ridge took nine minutes in cool grey morning light that made the eucalyptus look silver. The WARDEN pillar at the gate scanned me and told me it was glad I had survived, then added that I had been flagged as a regular commuter to District Seven and it would say a small prayer on my behalf. I told it that machines don’t pray. It told me it had been updated.

The rock-skinned Hero at the checkpoint gave me a nod that contained two days of watching me walk past his post in the same jacket. His winged partner lifted a coffee cup at me in salute, and I felt weirdly like I had joined a club where the membership fee was sleep.

Route 14 wheezed up to the stop at 7:11 exactly. For Verano Metro, that level of punctuality was a documented miracle.

The same driver sat behind the wheel, her reading glasses dangling from the beaded chain and her grey curls pinned under a transit cap two sizes too small. She looked at the silver crest on my chest, then at my face, and reached into the insulated lunch bag by her seat. She held out a hard-boiled egg wrapped in a paper napkin, still warm from wherever she’d cooked it.

She didn’t say anything at all.

I took the egg and she waved me past the fare reader, and I sat in the front seat she’d put me in on Monday. The crack in the vinyl pinched the back of my thigh right on schedule. Somebody’s forgotten newspaper lay folded on the seat across the aisle, and the headline under the fold still talked about the gold figure in the dome. I peeled the egg carefully over the napkin, picking off shell in little white flakes while Creston Hills slid past the window in tiers of hedges and German cars.

This was my commute now.

Forty minutes each way, twice a week, from a hill full of billionaires down through Central Station and across the river into a district that doesn’t make the tourism renders.

The Eastside had a dragon with a coffee can for insurance, a goth girl running up a negative score I would never climb out of, and a thief who left lipstick on sticky notes. It also had forty-seven families who had opened their doors to me at one in the morning because they’d been waiting eighteen months for somebody to knock.

I ate the egg in three bites. The driver watched me in the big mirror above her seat, and when I lifted the empty napkin to show her I’d finished, she nodded once and eased the bus onto the highway ramp.

Under my sternum, the second heartbeat stirred awake and pressed outward, patient and steady, pointed east toward the river before the skyline even came into view.