Chapter 651 | My Lovely Survivors

Chapter 651: 651 | My Lovely Survivors

She turned back to the front, and her jaw worked once, and I filed that under things that were none of my business until they suddenly were.

Petra sat in the top row in a blazer that fit her better than the institution deserved, leather planner open, emerald pen parallel to the spine. Her black waves sat perfectly in place, and her lipstick was a dark wine color that looked expensive enough to have a legal department. She didn’t look at me when I sat down, which meant she had looked at me eleven times before I reached my seat and stopped right before I could catch her.

Rina was already beside Percy, sheep mug in both hands and steam curling up past her horns, which caught the overhead light and turned purple deep in the black. When I passed her row, she lifted the mug an inch and her tail did a small happy swish against the chair.

"You look tired," she said, her voice soft and dry. "Percy says you’re more than okay, though."

"Percy has a lot of opinions this morning."

"He has a lot of data this morning." She smiled into her tea, and next to her Percy’s pen stopped moving and his entire neck went red.

Felicity took the seat on my right with a little bounce that made the whole row shake, and her knee pressed against mine under the desk and stayed there. Caden dropped into the row behind me and planted his feet on the back of my chair, and Maribelle slid in next to Nyx two seats over, crimson skin glowing against her white shirt, her tail flicking lazy circles in the aisle. She caught my eye and mouthed three minutes twelve seconds, and Nyx elbowed her hard in the ribs without looking up from her own notebook.

The door opened at eight fifty-eight.

Steele came in with her coffee in her left hand and her tablet tucked under her right arm, and the black burn scarring on her forearm caught the overhead light all the way up to her elbow. She wore the gold athletic jacket with the sleeves pushed up, a cropped white top under it that showed a strip of hard stomach, and charcoal trousers that made her legs look a mile long. Her pale blonde hair fell down her back in that ridiculous sheet, and her pink eyes did their three-second sweep of the room before she set her coffee on the podium.

"Good morning, my lovely survivors," she said. "Half of you look like you slept, and the other half look like you were busy, and I’m not going to ask which half anyone’s in."

Her eyes landed on me for exactly one second on the word busy.

Felicity’s knee pressed harder.

"You’ve all had a few shifts at your placements now, and the reports are starting to come in from your supervisors." Steele tapped the tablet against her palm. "Some of those reports made me laugh, some of them made me want to drive to an agency and personally throw someone into a river, and one of them was about a raccoon. So today we’re going around the room, and you’re going to tell me one real thing from your placement, not a brochure answer and not a sentence you rehearsed in the shower."

Caden groaned behind me. "Ms. Steele, can it be a fake thing that sounds real?"

"Holt, you go first for asking that."

He took his feet off my chair so fast the whole row rocked.

"Okay, so I’m at the transit safety office on Meridian." Caden scratched the back of his neck. "My supervisor is a lady named Joyce who has a mustache, and I mean that respectfully, because she’s earned it. I spent four hours walking up and down the Green Line with a clipboard counting broken emergency call buttons, and there are thirty-one of them, and nobody’s fixed one since the summer."

"Did you write it up, Holt?"

"I wrote it up and I took pictures, and then Joyce sent the pictures to the city with my name on them." Caden’s voice dropped half a register and lost the joke. "A lady at the Fourth Street station asked me if the buttons were broken because nobody cared about her stop, and I didn’t have an answer, so I just stood there holding the clipboard."

Steele looked at him for a long second, and then she nodded once and moved on without a single wisecrack, which from her counted as a medal.

Percy went next, and he stood up without being asked, which caused a small ripple of shock through the tiers.

"My placement is the Financial District Safety Education office, and my supervisor is Ms. Hargrove, who handles evacuation compliance for nineteen office towers." He held his notebook against his chest like armor. "I found an error in the evacuation plan for the Calloway Tower, where the posted route sends the eleventh floor down a stairwell that was sealed for renovation in August, and nobody updated the signs."

Nyx looked up sharply. "That’s my uncle’s building, Mendoza."

"I know, I checked the ownership records before I filed it." Percy’s ears went red. "Ms. Hargrove said I was the first intern in six years who read the whole binder, and then she gave me a stapler as a gift, and I don’t know what that means."

"It means she likes you," Rina whispered, and Percy sat down so fast he nearly missed the chair.

Camille didn’t wait to be called. She leaned back with her arms still folded, and her voice came out loud and blunt.

"Waterfront Athletic Initiative, under a guy named Joshua, no relation to anyone." She shrugged one shoulder, and the blazer pulled tight across her chest. "He runs a youth boxing program out of an old cannery, and on my first day he put a twelve-year-old in front of me and told me to teach her how to throw a jab without breaking her own wrist."