Chapter 720 | Don’t Die Tomorrow

Chapter 720: 720 | Don’t Die Tomorrow

Tomorrow I’d be following a van full of stolen biology through the district that killed my parents, and trying not to think about whether whatever made Nexo had also made the thing that tore through the Eastside ten years ago, while a boy sat at a sleepover with no idea he was about to become an orphan. The material in those boxes would travel up a chain to somebody who could build monsters out of children’s teeth. I was going to track that chain because twenty-three names sat in a blue spiral notebook in a grandmother’s kitchen. Fourteen of those names belonged to kids who still lived here and still shed, and who needed somebody to show up before the man in the navy windbreaker did.

My phone vibrated one last time.

It wasn’t anyone I’d been expecting.

Ophelia: mr stitches says you left the office light on again. he is reporting you to the electricity board. also you owe me two lattes and an apology for breathing near my desk. also don’t die tomorrow.

I read it twice.

The last three words sat at the end like something she’d typed and deleted and retyped and deleted again, before deciding that sending them was less embarrassing than not sending them and having to explain why if something went wrong.

Lukas: mr. stitches can report whatever he wants. i’ll turn off the light. two lattes, oat milk, lavender, extra shot. i’ll apologize to your desk in person.

Ophelia: that’s four points for compliance and negative six for being weird about my desk. you’re at negative eight hundred and forty-nine. goodnight.

Lukas: goodnight, ophelia.

Ophelia: that’s my name don’t say it like that.

Lukas: like what?

Ophelia: like THAT. stop. mr stitches is going to bed. this conversation is over.

The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Came back.

Ophelia: be careful.

I turned off the office light. The scanner blinked green in the dark, patient, counting whatever it counted in the hours when nobody was listening. The radiator clanked twice and settled. Mr. Stitches sat on Ophelia’s desk with his X-stitched eyes on the door, one arm dangling and the other caught in a position that looked almost like a wave, if you squinted and had been awake for twenty-one hours and had a habit of projecting feelings onto stuffed animals.

I left through the side door and eased it shut until the oiled hinges caught and the lock clicked soft behind me. Halverson Avenue ran north and south under its scattered streetlights. The air had that November cold you only get in a district wedged between a river and a highway, soaking up the worst of both.

Route 31’s last westbound run had left forty minutes ago. The rideshare app quoted seventy-three dollars with surge pricing, which was roughly one-sixth of Dralun’s monthly insurance budget. I closed the app.

I walked.

The nephew boots hit the sidewalk in a rhythm I’d learned over three weeks of conditioning and midnight rooftop runs. The steel caps made a sound that was mine now, in a way Dralun’s nephew the dentist had never needed them to be. The blisters had healed. The laces still held Ophelia’s double bows with their bunny ears and perfect loops, tied once and never retied, because her knots were structural and didn’t come undone.

The bridge over the river was empty at that hour. The water moved heavy below me toward the ocean, carrying whatever the city dumped in it during the day and giving it back as smell at night. On the far bank the Strand’s glass towers threw light into the sky in columns bright enough to erase the stars. Somewhere in those towers, agency scouts were asleep in apartments that cost more than Dralun made in a year. In the morning they’d wake up and pull files on first-year students, and never once look at the district across the river where a dragon fixed railings on weekends and he and a grandmother kept a ledger of children in a notebook they guarded like scripture.

I ran the bridge and the long flat miles after it, then dropped to a walk on the approach to campus, because running there would’ve tripped the checkpoint sensors. Coming back up the ridge at two in the morning at a sprint pace would generate questions I didn’t want to answer. The checkpoint Heroes waved me through without scanning, and the rock-skinned one held out a fist that I bumped without stopping. The WARDEN pillar at the main gate told me it was glad I’d survived and recommended hydration.

I recommended that WARDEN find a new hobby.

The walk to Prometheus House took seven minutes in the cold. Caden’s phone charger glowed on the common room couch, and Rina’s sheep mug sat clean and empty on the drying rack, its cartoon face smiling at the ceiling. Percy’s door was closed and dark. He was finally asleep.

Room 204.

The door opened. The mattress waited. The photograph of Marcus and Reina lay face down on the desk where I’d left it, carrying its impossible gold residue, the stuff the System couldn’t categorize and the second heartbeat couldn’t stop reaching for.

I dropped onto the bed without taking off my boots.

Sloane’s bond hummed from across campus, warm even through four hundred meters of walkway and dorm wall. Her side of it ran in the deep, slow pattern of real sleep. She’d waited up for my all-clear text and counted the seconds until it came. She’d asked if Lamia was okay, because Sloane Fitzgerald cared about the people I cared about whether she wanted to or not. That reflex lived deeper than her jealousy, deeper than the sparks that crackled around her knuckles whenever the universe asked too much of her patience.

Two hours until the alarm.

Two and a half until I needed to be dressed and moving.

No buses at that hour, which meant rooftops the whole way back to the Eastside.

Three and a half hours until Lamia would be up on a roof with the pre-dawn light on her scales, her anger finally pointed at a target that deserved it.

I closed my eyes.

The second heartbeat pressed outward once, warm, and settled into the space between waking and sleep, where the gold lived and a voice that sounded like the sea called a name I could almost remember.