Chapter 626 | A Small Tilt in the Air [GT BONUS]

Chapter 626: 626 | A Small Tilt in the Air [GT BONUS]

The answer landed in my chest and stayed there, which annoyed me, because I had been fully prepared to argue. I had a whole speech loaded about clinic backlogs and response windows and how two seconds of Suppress would have saved Carmen eleven stitches. The speech died somewhere behind my teeth, and I stood next to the scanner holding a dead argument and a palm covered in phone numbers.

Dralun slid the incident form into a manila folder and dropped it on my desk, right on top of the June pile.

"You can type that one up later," he rumbled. "Keep it to seven sentences, since those seven are the true ones."

"The IHL wants two hundred words minimum for any logged incident."

"Then the IHL can come sit on that floor for eleven minutes and write the other hundred ninety."

I opened my mouth, found nothing clever in it, and shut it again. Ophelia giggled from behind the parasol, and Mr. Stitches swayed on her knee in silent mockery.

Dralun leaned back until the chair screamed. He picked up his WORLD’S OKAYEST UNCLE mug, found it empty, and stared at the bottom like it owed him rent.

"You made that woman a promise in my hallway."

"I’m aware of that, since her number is written on my wrist."

"Down here people remember a promise longer than they remember your name." He set the mug down on the filing cabinet. "The hill kids come through twice a year for photos, and every one of them says they’ll call. Not one of them has ever called."

"I plan to call her."

"Good, then call her," Dralun said, and his tail thumped once against the desk leg. "That’s the whole lecture, Belmont, and you earned about half of it."

I decided half a lecture from a dragon counted as a gold star in this district, and I took the win. Then I sat down at the ancient laptop and waited four full minutes for it to finish wheezing, which gave me plenty of time to realize that I had absolutely no idea how kindergarten worked in this world.

The transmigrant part of me remembered crayons and a hamster named Biscuit. The original Lukas had spent kindergarten in a Creston Hills academy prep program where the teachers had master’s degrees and the snacks were organic. Neither version of me had ever wondered what happened when a five-year-old showed up to class growing bone out of his shoulders.

I typed a search into the Verano Unified portal. The page loaded in pieces, top half first, and then it froze on a picture of a smiling cartoon apple holding a pencil.

"It’s frozen on the apple," Ophelia said without looking up from her phone. "That apple has been frozen since I was in eighth grade."

"Do you know another way into the district portal?"

"I know a much better one." She snapped her parasol shut and hooked it over her elbow. "You ask the girl who got kicked out of first grade at Delancey Elementary for making Mrs. Pruitt cry into her lunchbox."

I turned my chair around. Ophelia had her chin tipped up and her grey eyes half-lidded, the same bored look she gave everything, but her fingers had stopped moving on the phone.

"Your bats surfaced in first grade?"

"I was six, and Mrs. Pruitt told me my drawing of Grandma looked like a potato." She sniffed and adjusted one satin bow on her thigh-high. "The drawing did look like a potato, but she didn’t have to say it in front of everybody. One bat went right through her chest, and she sat under her desk for twenty minutes apologizing to the class hamster."

"That feels proportionate to me."

"Minus three for encouraging violence against educators." She slid off the desk, and her platform shoes hit the floorboards with a heavy clunk. "The district made Grandma pay for a special aide after that. It cost her four hundred dollars a month for two years, and she had to sell her mother’s jade bangle to cover it."

The office got quiet for a second, apart from the radiator knocking in the corner. Dralun had gone still in his chair, and his eyes were on Ophelia now instead of the empty mug.

"Nobody told her about the Accord accommodation clause," Ophelia said, lifting one shoulder. "It came out in 2014, so it existed the whole time. The school just didn’t bring it up, because families east of the river never know to ask."

"So what exactly is the accommodation clause?"

"Section Eleven of the education provisions says any public school has to build an Aspect plan for a registered minor, and the school pays for it." She walked over and leaned down behind my chair, close enough that her pink curls brushed my ear. "It works like one of those learning plans, except it’s for kids whose bodies do weird stuff. The clinic writes a letter, and the school has thirty days to make it happen."

Her perfume reached me before the words finished, baby powder and five-spice and a dark floral note I couldn’t name. She reached over my shoulder and started typing on the laptop, and the corset put her chest about four inches from my cheek. The square neckline had given up on its job entirely, and the black velvet pushed up two pale curves while a thin line of wine-red lace framed them.

I kept my eyes on the screen, because I’m a professional and also because I enjoy having a functional nervous system.

The interface popped up in the corner of my vision anyway.

\[Heroine Proximity Detected: Ophelia Lin\]

\[Ecchi Logic probability field: ACTIVE\]

\[Recommendation: Do not look left.\]

For once the interface and I agreed completely. I looked straight ahead at the frozen cartoon apple and held my breath until Ophelia pulled up a PDF from some backdoor on the county website.

"There, you’ve got Section Eleven with the whole clause," she said. "You’re welcome, and that one’s free because it’s for Mateo."

"You could have helped Dralun type up all two hundred reports this whole time."

"That’s different, because those forms are ugly." She straightened up and planted one hand on her hip. "I help children, and I help Grandma, and I help myself, but I don’t help paperwork."

She turned to go back to her desk, and her platform heel caught on the rolled edge of the rug by my chair.

I felt the probability field shift before anything happened, a small tilt in the air that I have learned to fear more than black fire. Ophelia pitched sideways and flung out both arms. The parasol flew off her elbow and bounced off the filing cabinet, and Mr. Stitches went sailing toward the window.

Her whole weight came down into my lap.