Chapter 675 | She Knows Everything

Chapter 675: 675 | She Knows Everything

I leaned down and picked up the card while everybody was looking at the dragon. Nobody noticed. I slid it into the inside pocket of my jacket and kept my face pleasant and bored, the face I used in Mercy’s lecture when she started talking about municipal indemnification.

Then I turned on Residue Sight for exactly four seconds, just long enough to look at the card against my chest through the fabric gap.

The card glowed.

I turned Residue Sight off and looked away.

The card had glowed in every direction at once. His signature was thin, oily tan like dishwater. Underneath it were colors that didn’t belong anywhere near him.

Slate grey streaked one corner, dense as river stone. Coral pink pooled bright and layered along the bottom edge. Mossy brown smeared a thumbprint at the center. Cold pale blue ran a thin line along the side, sharp as frost on glass.

I counted five fainter traces underneath those. Nine total, maybe ten if the smudge in the upper corner came from two people instead of one.

Every single trace carried the heavy, saturated quality the interface flagged as repeated contact or intense manifestation. Branded residue was supposed to spread through the whole body instead of pinning to a single Core. Every color on that card had that diffuse, everywhere quality.

This card hadn’t just been handled by nine Branded people.

It had been sitting in a pocket, or a box, or a bag, next to nine separate pieces of nine separate Branded bodies. He had been carrying shed material in the same space as his business cards.

I realized I had stopped breathing at some point, which was irritating because breathing was something I usually managed without conscious effort. I fixed that. I set my face to neutral and bored again. Nobody was looking at me anyway.

The card sat in my pocket and felt heavier than three cents of cardstock should have felt.

The second heartbeat under my sternum pressed outward once, slow, and a cold thought followed after it, the kind that arrives fully formed and doesn’t ask for permission. Three weeks ago in the dome, Director Park had called Nexo a multi-Aspect entity with no Core, durability beyond Branded baselines, and a body built out of parts that bent wrong. Somebody, somewhere, was paying cash for pieces of Branded kids.

I did not like the shape those two facts made when I put them next to each other.

The younger nurse with the braids came out from behind the glass and called Mateo’s name. Carmen stood. Mateo grabbed his triceratops off Dralun’s knee and then, after visible deliberation, set it back down again.

"You can hold him," he told Dralun. "He doesn’t like doctors."

"I’ll keep him safe," Dralun said, and closed one huge claw around a toy the size of his thumbnail.

The appointment took thirty-four minutes. Dralun did not move once during any of them. The old man in the bowling shirt turned around twice to stare at the dragon holding the triceratops, and both times Dralun stared back with the same flat, unblinking attention he probably used on shoplifters. The old man faced front again. Both times. I sat in my chair and tapped my boot against the row ahead until Dralun’s eyes shifted to me without his head moving. I stopped.

When Carmen came out she was holding a manila envelope pressed flat against her chest with both hands, the way you hold something you’re afraid might disappear if you loosen your grip. Her eyes were wet. Mateo trotted ahead of her at a faster pace than he’d walked in with, a cartoon dinosaur sticker on the back of his hand, bright green and purple against his skin, and a lollipop in his mouth that he was working through methodically.

"She wrote it," Carmen said, and her voice came out thin and high and ready to crack. "The doctor. The letter for the school, the Section Eleven thing, she wrote it right there in the room while we waited. She said the district has thirty days to respond." Her voice broke on the number and she swallowed hard. "She said I don’t pay anything. Not for today, not for any of it."

"Told you," I said, which was a lie, since I hadn’t told her anything. Ophelia had. I had merely relayed it with the confidence of someone who understood how bureaucracy worked when you knew which lever to pull. I was choosing to accept partial credit anyway.

Mateo climbed back up next to Dralun, boots hitting the seat edge, and retrieved his triceratops from where it had been sitting in Dralun’s claw. He inspected it carefully, turning it over in both hands, checking the legs, the tail, the little ridges along its back. Then he nodded once, satisfied with the inspection results. Then he leaned his whole body sideways and wrapped both arms around as much of Dralun’s tail as he could reach, which wasn’t much because the tail was thicker than Mateo’s torso. His face pressed against the scales. The bone spurs on his shoulders were carefully angled away so they wouldn’t scratch.

Dralun went extremely still again, a different stillness this time, the kind that wasn’t tactical.

"Thank you for keeping him," Mateo mumbled into the scales, muffled and serious.

Dralun didn’t say anything. He lifted one claw, slow and deliberate, and set it on top of the green felt spikes of the dinosaur hood. Very lightly. He left it there for a while. His expression didn’t change. His eyes did something I wasn’t going to try to name.

I looked at the vault door for the remainder of that moment, and nobody in that waiting room could make me explain why.

Lin’s at five-forty smelled like five-spice and frying garlic, and Grandma Lin was murdering a duck with a cleaver when we came through the door, thwack, thwack, thwack, each stroke landing exactly where the last one did. She looked at Dralun, then at me, then at the triceratops sticker someone had slapped on Dralun’s vest without his knowledge.

She said something in Cantonese. Dralun answered in Cantonese, a single gruff sentence, and Grandma Lin made a sound in her throat and went back to the duck.

"She asked if the boy was okay," Dralun said, heading for the stairs. "I told her the boy is fine."

"How did she know there was a boy?"

"She knows everything, kid, and she always has."