Chapter 680 | The Reading Carpet

Chapter 680: 680 | The Reading Carpet

I closed the notification with prejudice.

Ophelia had gone rigid beside me. She grabbed my sleeve with one hand, her nails digging through the fabric, and she leaned up to whisper with real violence.

"Oliver?"

"It’s his name," I whispered back.

"I know it’s his name. I’ve seen it on his tax forms. Nobody says it. Grandma doesn’t say it. His sister calls him Ollie on the phone and he hangs up on her." Her nails dug harder. "She said it like she’s said it a lot."

"Baby daddy," I breathed.

"Shut up, shut up, I’m going to scream."

Dralun crossed the restaurant in four steps. The customers at the other tables leaned out of his way, a teenager and his grandmother and two guys in construction vests eating noodles. He didn’t look at any of them. He crouched down beside the burning table, his tail sweeping wide behind him to clear the chair legs, and he got low enough that his head was level with the girl’s.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, look at me for a second."

The girl looked at him. Her face was wet and red and blotchy, and her nose was running, and she stared at his horns with the round open shock of a kid who had just found out monsters were real and lived above restaurants.

"Your hands are hot," Dralun said. "That’s okay. That’s normal for right now."

"It hurts," the girl hiccuped. "It hurts and it won’t stop and the table’s going to break and Mama’s going to get in trouble."

"Nobody’s getting in trouble." Dralun glanced up at Grandma Lin, who narrowed her eyes and lowered the cleaver one inch. "That table was ugly anyway. My aunt’s been wanting to replace it for six years."

Grandma Lin said something in Cantonese that made one of the construction guys choke on his noodles.

"She agrees," Dralun said.

"She doesn’t agree," Ophelia muttered. "She said the table cost forty dollars and she wants it back in pork buns."

The girl’s hands flared brighter, and the laminate under them cracked with a sharp pop. A thin line of flame licked up from the edge of one palm print and caught a paper napkin. Nayeli made a sound and reached for it, and Dralun put his claw over the napkin and smothered it flat against the table without even looking. The flame went out. When he lifted his hand, a black smudge sat on his scales and nothing else.

"Fire doesn’t bother me," he told the girl. "See? I’m made of rocks."

"You’re not rocks," the girl sniffed. "You’re a dragon."

"Rocks with a tail."

She laughed. It came out wet and broken and lasted half a second, and then she started crying again, but the laugh had happened and everyone in the restaurant had heard it.

Dralun settled back on his heels and started breathing.

I knew this part. I had watched him do it on Moss Street with Mateo, eleven minutes of slow loud breaths in and slower breaths out, his chest rising under the vest and his ribs flexing beneath the scales. He didn’t tell the girl to breathe with him. He didn’t tell her anything. He just sat there on the greasy restaurant floor and breathed like it was the most important job anyone had ever given him.

Nayeli watched him do it. Her hand had stopped moving on her daughter’s back.

I moved to the wall by the counter, out of the way and out of the light, because that was where Dralun had told me to stand two weeks ago and nobody had given me different orders since. Ophelia followed me. She stood close enough that her shoulder pressed into my arm, and her breathing had gone shallow and fast, and she was gripping her own skirt in both fists hard enough to crush the lace.

"He’s doing the thing," she whispered.

"I know. I’ve seen it."

"I’ve seen it nine times." She swallowed. "He did it for me, when I was eight. In Mrs. Pruitt’s classroom, after the bat. I was hiding under the reading carpet and he sat on the floor of a first-grade classroom in his construction boots and breathed for forty minutes until I came out."

I looked down at her. She was staring at Dralun and the girl with her jaw locked, and the pink in her cheeks had spread down her throat and into the top of the corset, and her grey eyes had gone glassy.

"Don’t look at me," she said.

"I’m looking at the table."

"You’re looking at me. I can feel it. Negative a hundred."

"That puts me at negative five hundred and ten."

"I know what it puts you at. I’m the one doing the math." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she turned her face into my shoulder for exactly one second before she pulled it back out and went right on glaring at the room like nothing had happened.

? Temptation Gauge: Ophelia Lin. 9%. Status: Curious. Note: The subject has disclosed a formative memory to the Host unprompted. The interface considers this the highest-value event in the Gauge’s history and notes that the Host did not make a joke about it. The interface is surprised. ?

I closed that one gently.

The girl’s glow had started to fade.

It went slow, from the fingertips back toward the wrists, the orange deepening to red and then to a dull brown and then to plain little-girl skin with ash smeared across the knuckles. Her shoulders came down. Her sobs turned into hiccups and the hiccups turned into long shaky breaths that came closer and closer to matching Dralun’s.

After a while she lifted one hand off the table. She did it carefully, the way you pull a bandage, wincing ahead of time. The laminate made a sucking sound as her palm came free, and she held the hand up in front of her face and stared at it.

"It stopped," she said.

"It stopped," Dralun agreed.

"Will it come back?"

"Probably. Next time you’ll know what to do."