Chapter 687 | Three Hours Until The Music Box

Chapter 687: 687 | Three Hours Until The Music Box

Not the saving people part. The saving people part was fine. The saving people part was the only part that made any sense, because when you stripped away the rankings and the sponsorships and the celebrity machine and the IHC bureaucracy and the legal frameworks and the licensing requirements, what you had left was a five-year-old in a dinosaur hoodie whose bones were growing wrong and a six-year-old whose hands burned through furniture and a pocket watch that belonged to an old man who sat on a bench every morning missing his dead wife.

The system did not care about any of that. The system cared about rankings and metrics and quarterly reports and whether your social media engagement was trending upward. The system cared about brand deals and sponsorship revenue and whether your costume silhouette was distinct enough to trademark.

Dralun had spent eleven years in this district fixing stoops for free and walking kids home from clinics and drinking terrible coffee from a woman who kept a ledger of every Branded child who surfaced within her radius. He had a C-rank and a converted laundromat office and one part-time employee who deducted points from people for breathing too loudly near her desk.

He was doing more good than half the top hundred combined.

And in three hours, I was going to put on a mask that erased my face from every scanner in the city and help a girl in a neoprene suit steal a music box from a pawn shop because the ranking system had decided that this district was not profitable enough to service and somebody had to fill the gap.

Me: I’m in.

I put the phone down and stared at the ceiling.

The water stain was still there. Gerald, Felicity had called it. Gerald the water stain, witness to confession and collapse and the specific kind of intimacy that happened when someone showed you their loneliest childhood memory by accident and then had to figure out how to keep existing in the same room as you afterward without pretending it didn’t happen or acknowledging it too directly either.

My second heartbeat pressed outward once, slow and patient, and settled back into its usual rhythm beneath my ribs. The sensation had stopped being foreign somewhere around the third week. Now it was just there, ambient confirmation that the Lightning Cloak was sleeping but functional.

Three hours until midnight.

I had time.

I pulled up the Hero Network on my laptop and started scrolling through the activity reports for District Seven, looking for anything that connected shed material buyers to pawn shops to cards with nine Branded signatures layered deep enough to feel like a body count. The search function was clunky but comprehensive once you learned which filters to stack. I filtered by date range, by district, by incident type, by material classification when that yielded something useful.

The trail went cold after six reports. Either nobody was filing, or nobody was looking, or both were true simultaneously in the specific way that happened when a district stopped being worth the administrative effort. The Eastside had one licensed Hero and one provisional student and one girl in a wetsuit who thought she was a master thief but was actually just very good at sliding through spaces that shouldn’t have accommodated a human body.

The rest of California had Sovereign and Luster and Grande Dame and the entire top fifty, but they were busy with The Strand and the press cycle and the quarterly rankings push that determined who kept their sponsorship deals and who got shuffled down to regional coverage.

Nobody was coming.

The realization should have felt heavier than it did.

I closed the laptop and lay back on my bed, staring at Gerald, waiting for midnight.

My phone buzzed again.

Sloane: You’re thinking too loud. I can feel it from here.

Me: Just processing.

Sloane: Processing what?

I thought about the card in Dralun’s vest pocket. I thought about the nine traces and the old gold on the photograph frame and the pink dinosaur drawn in gel pen next to Mateo Reyes’s name. I thought about Nayeli watching Dralun fix a stoop from her kitchen window for four years without saying anything.

Me: Whether I’m actually making a difference or just rearranging the furniture.

Sloane: Both. That’s how it works.

Me: That’s depressing.

Sloane: That’s accurate. Come to dinner. I’m hungry and you promised to explain the egg tarts.

I got up, grabbed my jacket, and left Room 205 with the photograph still face-down on the desk and three hours left until a roof and a girl who smelled like strawberries and a music box that belonged to someone who would never know my name.

The hallway was quiet. Percy’s muttering had stopped. Caden’s microwave hummed through its eternal cycle.

I took the stairs down and walked toward the dining hall, where Sloane was waiting with her arms crossed and her temptation gauge at a number I had stopped checking because the number had stopped mattering.

She saw me coming from twenty feet away. The bond opened between us like a door, and I felt her irritation and her hunger and the warm steady pulse underneath both that said she had been waiting for me to get back since the moment I left.

"You look tired," she said.

"I watched a dragon eat a pastry under social pressure. It was emotionally exhausting."

"That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said to me, and I’m including the time you called my mother’s risotto aggressive."

"Her risotto is aggressive. It has opinions."

Sloane grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the food line. Her grip was warm and firm and her ponytail swung behind her with the specific energy of someone who had already decided what we were both eating.

"Tell me about the egg tarts," she said. "Start from the beginning. Leave nothing out."

I told her.

She laughed at the baby daddy part so hard she had to put down her tray, and the students around us stared, and I watched her face light up with something that had nothing to do with temptation gauges or system mechanics or the careful architecture of emotional manipulation.

She was just happy.

So was I.

Three hours until midnight. Until the roof and the mask and the music box and whatever came after.