Chapter 692 | My Hoodie with the Loose Thread

Lukas: i’m fine. nothing broke. nobody got hurt. the kid gets the music box.

Sloane: I KNOW. i can feel you being smug about it from here.

Lukas: that’s satisfaction.

Sloane: it’s smug.

Lukas: satisfied people can be smug. they’re not mutually exclusive.

Sloane: i hate you.

The bond said something completely different, loudly enough to turn the text into a lie, and I laughed hard enough that the driver glanced at me in the mirror.

The checkpoint came up at the bottom of the access road, concrete barriers under floodlights, with two Heroes in costume standing in the cold because the Commission had decided almost four weeks ago that being seen was the same as being safe. The rock-skinned one lifted two fingers off his forearm when he spotted me through the window. His partner with the folded wings didn’t look up from her tablet.

Nobody scanned me. Somewhere around the second week I’d graduated from stranger to fixture, which was either a sign of trust or a sign that the security theater had holes in it the size of a provisional student.

Probably both.

Lukas: through the checkpoint.

Sloane: good. don’t stop to talk to anyone.

Lukas: who would i talk to at two in the morning.

Sloane: I DON’T KNOW LUKAS. THAT’S THE PROBLEM.

The WARDEN pillar at the main gate hummed as I passed and greeted me by name in its pleasant voice, the one some focus group had decided would make eight hundred traumatized teenagers feel counted instead of catalogued.

“Welcome back, Lukas Belmont. Your core temperature is two degrees above baseline and your heart rate is elevated. Hydration is recommended.”

“You say that every time.”

“It is recommended every time.”

The thing about WARDEN was that it had never once asked where I’d been. It read my biometrics, flagged the anomaly in my Aspect signature the way it had since day one, noted the Commission advisory that said observe but do not restrict, and wished me goodnight. A machine with federal clearance and a direct line to the IHC, and the only question it had ever asked me was whether I wanted the hydration advisory repeated.

Four hundred million dollars of security on this campus, and the gap in the wall was a kid who knew which rooftops to take.

The walk from the gate to Prometheus House normally took seven minutes.

It took four, because Sloane was standing on the path about halfway there with her arms crossed, wearing an oversized black hoodie I knew was mine. I owned four of them, and she’d stolen the one with the loose thread at the cuff. Compression leggings, bare feet shoved into unlaced trainers. Her pink hair was down and unbrushed, which meant she’d rolled out of bed and come straight out the door without stopping to think about what she looked like.

At thirty meters the bond slammed all the way open, and everything she’d been sitting on for three hours hit me at once.

The fear came first, and right behind it a relief hot enough to sting. Fury was already piling up on top of both to hide them, because Sloane Fitzgerald had never in her life let a soft feeling walk around without an escort.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I’m early. You said twenty minutes an hour ago, and I beat it by four.”

“That’s not how time works.”

She closed the gap before I could answer, grabbed the front of my jacket in both fists and hauled me down to her height hard enough that my weight shifted before my feet caught up. Her knuckles dug into my sternum, right over the second heartbeat, which picked that moment to push outward against her hands like it knew whose they were.

She felt it. I watched her feel it. Her eyes narrowed in the dark.

“That’s doing the thing again.”

“It does that.”

“It does it when you’re happy.” Her jaw worked. “I felt you go quiet for three hours. Not gone. Quiet. Like you were in the next room with the door shut and I could hear the water running but not the words.”

“That’s the Veil.”

“I know what it is.” She said it flat, and then something cracked under the flatness. “That’s worse than you being gone. If you were gone, I’d know. I’d get in a car and go find you and break something. Fuzzy means you’re alive and I still can’t get to you. I sat in my room for three hours with my hands on fire, because my body kept deciding you were in trouble and my brain kept telling it to shut up.”

The streetlight caught the side of her face, and she let me see it. That was the part that got me. The anger was armor she could put on in half a second and wear forever. Letting me see what was under it took work, and it cost her something every single time.

“I texted you the second it came off,” I said.

“Four seconds.”

“You counted.”

“I count everything about you,” she snapped. Then her ears went pink, and she shoved her forehead into my chest so I couldn’t see her face. “Shut up. Don’t say anything about that.”

I put a hand on the back of her neck under all that hair. She was warm the way she always ran warm, an engine idling at temperatures that would send a normal person to urgent care, and she made a sound into my jacket that she’d deny with her last breath.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay what.”

“Okay, I won’t say anything about it.”

“You’re already saying something about it.” Her fists tightened in the fabric. “You’re doing the thing where you’re quiet in a way that means something. I can feel it. It’s loud.”

“The bond goes both ways, Sloane.”

“I KNOW it goes both ways. That’s the whole problem with it.”

We stood on the path between two buildings at twenty past two in the morning while a drone whined somewhere over the Academic Spine and the security lights turned everything the color of old teeth. Against my chest her breathing slowed a little at a time. The bond came down out of its spike and found something lower that hummed instead of burned.

Then she pulled back, looked up at me, and bit me.

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