Chapter 653 | Sad Everybody

Chapter 653: 653 | Sad Everybody

"Good answer, Belmont." Steele set her coffee down on the podium, and the scarred hand stayed flat beside it while she looked at me for longer than I liked. "Most people walk into their first real call and try to be the most important body in the room, so remember that you stood in a doorway and nobody died."

"I’ll put it on a mug, Ms. Steele."

"Put it in your head, because mugs break." She tapped the tablet once and the screen went dark. "That goes for all of you, so get out of my room and go be useful to somebody who isn’t me."

Chairs scraped across the floor in a wave of sound that felt louder than it had any right to be, twenty people standing at once like someone had pulled a fire alarm they couldn’t hear.

Caden kicked my seat on his way past without breaking stride and told me he was adding a horn song to the second act, which I accepted as both a threat and a promise I wasn’t prepared to negotiate.

Felicity didn’t move right away. She leaned over until her braid brushed my shoulder and stayed there, her voice dropping low enough that only I could hear it under the ambient noise of everyone else clearing out.

"The dragon line was good, but the horn kid is going to absolutely ruin me, and I need you to know that I’m going to cry about it in a bathroom later, like an actual unhinged person."

"You could cry about it now and save yourself the walk."

"No, I’m busy." She squeezed my wrist once under the desk and let go immediately, like the contact had a timer on it. "I have a meeting before lunch that you aren’t allowed to attend, and I want to look cute for it, so I need to go fix my hair and pretend my life isn’t actively collapsing." ℯ𝔴ℯ

She stood and walked up the stairs toward the door, hips swinging under the pleated skirt in a way that suggested she was aware of the angles and comfortable with all of them. The interface chimed in my ear before she reached the top row, which was its favorite time to arrive.

[Heroine Status: Felicity Hardy. Temptation Gauge 58%. Current emotional state reads as confident, with a sharp spike of nerves she has decided not to mention. Advisory: two heroines are meeting to discuss the Host without the Host. Historical data suggests this is bad for the Host.]

I closed it before it could get comfortable.

Petra came down the stairs in the opposite direction, planner tucked under her arm, and she stopped beside my desk without looking at me. Her ears were still pink, and she seemed to have made a decision about them, because she wasn’t hiding them.

"Eleven requests, Belmont, and four of them came from outlets with legal departments that I have personally been afraid of since I was nine years old."

"Thank you, Lang."

"Don’t thank me, because I didn’t do it for you." She adjusted the planner against her ribs, and her emerald eyes finally slid sideways to meet mine. "I did it because a provisional file has no public incident history, and the law is very clear about that, and I enjoy being right in writing."

"So it was a legal thing."

"It was entirely a legal thing." She started walking again and paused at the end of the row, voice going softer on the next sentence. "Also, you mentioned the receptionist twice, and I’d like a full report on why a goth girl with a bear is getting more airtime than my eleven denials."

Then she was gone, and I sat there for a second longer while my brain tried to work out whether I’d just been complimented, threatened, or claimed.

Percy appeared at my elbow, notebook open, pen already moving.

"You have forty-one minutes until Route 14 leaves the ridge stop, and the coffee kiosk on the Spine has a line of nine people, which means you have time if you stop looking at the door Lang just walked through."

"I wasn’t looking at the door, Percy."

"Your head turned eleven degrees left and stayed there for four seconds, so I’m going to write that you were looking at the door."

Rina came up behind him and handed me a paper bag with a grease stain on the bottom, holding it out with both hands.

"It’s a breakfast sandwich from the good station, and it’s for Sloane, because Percy told me about the rule." Her purple eyes dropped to the floor and came back up. "I thought you’d forget, and then she’d be sad, and then Percy would be sad, and then everybody would be sad."

I looked at the bag, then at her, and then at Percy, who had become intensely interested in the margin of his notebook.

"Rina, that’s the nicest thing anybody has done for me before lunch this week."

"It’s not for you, it’s for her." Her tail gave one happy twitch behind her. "Go give it to her before you get on the bus, and tell her I said hi, but not in a weird way."

There was no way to tell Sloane Fitzgerald anything without it being weird, but I took the bag anyway.

Sloane was standing outside the 1-A homeroom with Koda, and the bond lit up hot in my ribs before I even rounded the corner. She saw the bag first and me second, which felt correct based on what I had done to deserve her.

"That had better be real food."

"It’s egg, cheese, and bacon on a croissant, from the station you said doesn’t taste like a lawsuit."

She took it, opened it, smelled it, and looked up at me with a face that wanted to stay angry and was losing the argument with the bacon. Koda leaned around her shoulder and whistled low.

"He got you the croissant one, Fitzgerald, which means he’s scared of you, and I respect it."