Chapter 693 | You Will Be Evaluated

Chapter 693: 693 | You Will Be Evaluated

She didn’t draw blood. She bit just hard enough to leave a dent in my collarbone that her Demigod-enhanced boyfriend would heal in four hours, which she knew, which meant she’d do it again at breakfast.

"That’s for going fuzzy."

"Noted."

"And this—" She grabbed my jaw with one hand and kissed me like she was still mad at me, tasting of mint toothpaste. She’d brushed her teeth at two in the morning before coming outside, so she’d planned this, which meant Sloane Fitzgerald had been lying in bed running tactical scenarios for the exact moment I walked through the gate. "—is for coming home."

She let go and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her blue eyes were red at the rims, and she looked furious about it.

"Bed," she said.

"Yours or mine?"

"Mine. You’re sleeping where I can feel you. And if you snore, I’ll detonate your pillow."

"I don’t snore."

"You did Tuesday. Percy has data."

She turned and walked toward Prometheus House with my stolen hoodie hanging to mid-thigh and her unlaced trainers slapping the path. I followed, because that’s what I did. Following Sloane Fitzgerald to a locked door at two in the morning while she pretended she wasn’t relieved to see me was the closest thing to normal my life had produced in three months.

Her room smelled like lavender dryer sheets and the protein powder she kept lined up by flavor on the shelf over her desk.

She pushed me down on the mattress and climbed on top of me with my jacket still on, pressed her ear to my chest over the second heartbeat, and was out cold in under ninety seconds.

I stayed awake another hour counting ceiling tiles. Ninety-six. Eight by twelve, same as mine.

Through the bond, Sloane sank into the deep warm register of real sleep, and the fist she kept clenched against my ribs slowly opened.

I texted Ophelia.

Lukas: sunday. five o’clock. what do i bring.

She answered at three forty-seven in the morning. She’d been awake the whole time.

Ophelia: lattes. two. oat milk. lavender. extra shot. and flowers for my grandmother or I will station twelve bats in your hallway and you will cry for a week.

Lukas: what kind of flowers.

Ophelia: the kind that say sorry i exist in your restaurant and please don’t stab me with your cleaver.

I put the phone down and pressed my face into Sloane’s hair. Citrus and lavender dryer sheets, and under that something that was only her, a frequency the System had floored at ninety percent and the universe had locked somewhere higher.

Outside, the WARDEN pillar told someone it was glad they survived.

I closed my eyes. Four hours until the alarm.

The second heartbeat pressed once against Sloane’s palm and went still.

Three weeks passed.

They were three weeks of Route 14 to Route 31, with the crack in the vinyl seat pinching my thigh on every pothole. Mornings were Grandma Lin’s congee and Dralun’s coffee, which tasted like a campfire that had personally wronged the concept of flavor, and Ophelia’s point system ran all day. There were incident reports and stoop inspections, and there was one more midnight run with Lamia that ended with a silver locket tucked behind the jade Buddha and absolutely no kissing, because I told her about Sloane’s bite and Lamia laughed so hard she nearly fell off the fire escape again.

The Eastside got under my skin in a way the Fitzgerald estate never quite had. Ten years in Creston Hills, and I never stopped feeling like a guest. Five weeks on Halverson, and Mrs. Petrosyan was saving me a plate of cookies every Thursday while Tomás stocked shelves at the bodega without being asked. Ramón at the barbershop had stopped making jokes about my jacket and started making jokes about my boots, which was apparently a promotion.

I picked up things about the district that no file contained. The streetlights on Fourth flickered in a pattern Grandma Lin swore predicted rain.

Dralun had fixed every railing and loose step in a seven-block radius without once filing a maintenance request with the city, because the city averaged fourteen months and he could do it in an afternoon.

The Eastside Community Board met every second Tuesday in the basement of St. Jude’s, and Dralun went to every meeting and never said more than six words. His six words carried more weight than every councilperson on the Strand put together.

The IHL had Dralun at Rank C, two hundred and forty-first in California. The ranking counted case resolution, public approval, media engagement and agency output. It didn’t count clinic rides, or eleven minutes of breathing on an apartment floor with a five-year-old who was growing bone spurs.

The card stayed in Dralun’s vest pocket. He made calls he hadn’t made in six years, quiet conversations in Cantonese and Spanish and English that I wasn’t invited to hear. Grandma Lin drew small crosses beside three names in his blue notebook.

Ophelia posted aggressively cute content on a careful schedule, none of it anywhere near the ledger or the pawn shops, because she understood better than anybody that the best way to protect something was to get everyone looking somewhere else.

The first Sunday dinner closed out the quest, and the System logged it the way it logged everything.

?Side Quest Complete: SUNDAY DINNER. Reward: 800 Scumbag Points. +5% Temptation Gauge (Ophelia Lin). [FAMILY DYNAMICS] event chain unlocked.?

Three weeks of lattes and borrowed chairs did the rest.

?Heroine Update: OPHELIA LIN | Temptation Gauge: 31% (from 23%). Stage: CURIOUS.?

On campus, the Invitational was coming.

Steele announced it in homeroom, standing at the podium with her burned forearm bare and her coffee in her good hand. In six weeks, she told us, nine hundred people would come to Halloran Academy for the biggest inter-academy showcase in the western hemisphere.

Scouts from every major agency in California and fourteen media outlets. Families who’d been promised their kids would perform in a controlled environment three months after a sealed dome tried to kill all of them.

"You will be watched," Steele said, and her eyes found me in the third row the way they always did. "You will be evaluated. You will be photographed and speculated about by people whose entire job is deciding whether you’re worth the investment before you’ve resolved a single case."