Chapter 690 | The System Wants It First

The laundromat alley smelled like industrial detergent and old brick, same as Wednesday night, the last time I’d taken the Veil off back here. I crouched behind the same dumpster, checked the street both ways and pulled the mask off.

The bond snapped back into focus like a radio finding its station.

Sloane came flooding through all at once, her heartbeat falling into step with mine across all the miles between the Eastside and campus. She’d been waiting. Nothing else, no homework or fake sleep for cover, just her attention fixed on the fuzzy patch where I should’ve been, counting minutes until the static cleared.

I had my phone out in four seconds flat.

Lukas: mask off. home soon.

Her reply came in six. One word.

Sloane: good.

I started toward the bus stop, the nephew boots heavy on the cracked sidewalk. At a quarter to one the Eastside was quieter again than it had been at midnight. The last bars had killed their neon hours ago, the last stragglers had found whatever corner or couch was home tonight, and the only things moving were stray cats working the dumpsters and the odd delivery truck cutting down side streets to dodge the Strand traffic that never really stopped.

My phone went off again, eleven seconds after the first one.

Sloane: you smell happy. stop it.

I could feel her clearer with every block I put between me and the shed district. Irritation sat on top, with something warmer underneath that she’d never admit to. She knew I’d pulled it off. She knew I was safe and headed back to a part of the city with working streetlights and bus schedules that sometimes matched reality. And she was annoyed that knowing it made her relieved, because relief meant she’d been worried, and worried meant she’d spent three hours staring at her ceiling while I ran rooftops with a girl who smelled like strawberries and moved like she’d been born in zero gravity.

The bond carried all of it. The irritation and the relief kept trying to sit in the same spot in her chest, and neither one would give up the seat.

Lukas: can’t help it. the music box is relocated. the kid gets it back tomorrow.

Sloane: i don’t care about the music box.

Lukas: you care a little.

Sloane: i care about YOU coming HOME.

The capitals landed even through a screen. I could feel the emphasis on the other end, her frustration spiking on certain words and leveling out on others. It wasn’t quite anger. It was closer to the exasperation of somebody who’d decided what mattered to her and now had to live with every inconvenient feeling that decision dragged along.

Lukas: twenty minutes. bus schedule permitting.

I stared down the empty street like I could summon the bus through willpower.

Sloane: the bus schedule is terrible.

I could feel exactly how flat she meant it. It was the voice she used for facts that annoyed her because they were true and she’d have preferred otherwise. The Eastside buses ran on a timetable designed by someone who’d clearly never needed one past ten on a weekday, and maybe never needed one at all.

Lukas: the bus schedule is a public service.

I was testing the deflection.

Sloane: the bus schedule is what happens when nobody important uses public transit.

She wasn’t wrong. The routes out here ran at intervals that suggested the city planners had consulted a coin flip and a dartboard before signing off. The pause after that went long enough that I figured she was done, the bond easing down to a steadier baseline as her frustration cooled toward resignation.

Then:

Sloane: text me when you’re through the checkpoint.

Lukas: yes ma’am.

I was tired, and it came out on autopilot.

Sloane: don’t call me ma’am.

Lukas: yes, sloane.

Sloane: better.

I pocketed the phone and kept walking. The sidewalk ran ahead in uneven slabs, the kind of maintenance that happened every five years whether it was needed or not, leaving a surface that existed in some liminal state between functional and lawsuit territory. The concrete had that particular texture that came from decades of half-measures and budget allocations that always went somewhere else first. Cracks ran through the sections where tree roots had decided the underground was negotiable, and the repairs patched over them looked newer but not better.

The bus stop came up out of the dark about three blocks later, a concrete bench under a flickering streetlight that threw an orange circle on the pavement and left everything past it in shadow. The light had that particular quality of struggling infrastructure, the kind that suggested the bulb was hanging on through sheer spite and city negligence in equal measure. Route 31 was due in seven minutes if the schedule held. It wouldn’t. The schedule never held past midnight on a weekday, which was a fact I’d learned the hard way over the last month of Eastside routes and late shifts. My phone said twelve forty-three, which matched the growing ache behind my eyes that told me I’d been awake for nineteen hours straight and my body was starting to invoice me for the decision.

I sat down to wait. The concrete was cold through my jeans, the kind of cold that seeped in fast and settled. The streetlight overhead hummed like the bulb was fighting for its life and losing, a sound that filled the space where other city noise should have been and wasn’t. This late, the Eastside went quiet in a way the Hills never did. Out there, quiet meant sprinklers on timers and expensive security systems humming in standby. Out here, quiet just meant empty.

I leaned back against the bench and let my head tilt up toward the streetlight. The orange glow washed out everything past ten feet, turning the rest of the block into shapes and shadows that could have been anything.

Somewhere in this city, someone was collecting Branded children piece by piece. Mateo Ibarra was five years old, with bone spurs that would start shedding in a few years when his Aspect really kicked in, and his bedroom window opened onto a fire escape any halfway athletic adult could reach from the alley. His mom worked night shifts at a clinic six blocks from here. His sister was thirteen and Unmarked and probably already tired in the way kids got tired when they had to be the adult too early.

I sat with that for a while and didn’t like any of it.

?SIDE QUEST GENERATED?

?SUNDAY DINNER?

?Ophelia Lin extended an invitation three days ago, aloud and then by text, to serve as her emergency plus-one for Sunday dinner at Lin’s restaurant. The text included three skull emojis and the words “mandatory attendance.” The invitation has received no acknowledgment, no declination, and no response of any kind.?

?OBJECTIVE: Accept the invitation. Attend the dinner.?

?REWARD: 800 SP, +5% Temptation Gauge (Ophelia Lin), unlocks [FAMILY DYNAMICS] event chain?

?TIME LIMIT: 1 hour remaining?

?This unit notes that Grandma Lin’s culinary reputation is exceptional by documented consensus across fourteen review platforms and twenty-two years of continuous operation. This unit further notes that the heroine in question recently shared a formative childhood trauma while physically pressed against the Host’s chest in circumstances neither party has addressed since. These observations may contain causal correlation. This unit is not making suggestions. This unit is presenting data.?

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