Chapter 30: A Day Off (Allegedly)

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 30: A Day Off (Allegedly)

"No," Mia said, arms crossed in the kitchen doorway, blocking his path to the door with the specific immovability of someone who'd clearly been planning this ambush since breakfast. "You are not investigating anything today. You are not touching your neck, calling Dana, or brooding on the fire escape. Today you're a normal eighteen-year-old."

"I haven't been normal since March."

"Fake it. For one day. I'm begging you." She held up a flyer, slightly crumpled, advertising the district's annual Founders' Festival in cheerful, oversized lettering that felt aggressively optimistic given everything happening around it. "There's a festival. There's fried dough. There's a dunk tank that I intend to put Reeve in at least twice. You're coming, and you're going to enjoy it, and if I catch you filing anything away today I will personally throw your honey jar off the roof."

"That's an empty threat and we both know it."

"Try me."

He studied her a moment, the specific stubborn set of her jaw that meant negotiation had already closed before it opened, and weighed the actual cost of resisting. Not high, in the end. Just pride, and pride had gotten considerably cheaper to spend this month than it used to be.

He went. Mostly because arguing with Mia when she'd already committed to a bit cost more energy than simply losing gracefully, and partly because some small, tired part of him actually wanted a day that didn't involve grief-fueled philosophers explaining why he should stop existing as an individual person.

The festival occupied six blocks of downtown, food stalls and game booths crammed shoulder to shoulder, a cover band butchering a song from twenty years ago with real enthusiasm if not real skill. Reeve found them within ten minutes, dragging Marek along by the sleeve like a man presenting a prize he'd personally hunted down.

"He wanted to come," Reeve announced. "I'm just facilitating."

"I live two blocks from here," Marek said. "I was already coming."

"Facilitating," Reeve repeated, unbothered by the correction.

Vesper trailed a step behind them both, notebook conspicuously left at home for once, wearing an oversized jacket that Cole was fairly sure belonged to Mia and had simply migrated through the apartment's ecosystem the way clothes did in a house with more people than closet space. She looked, for the first time since he'd met her, genuinely unguarded — shoulders loose, gaze soft instead of scanning, the particular ease of someone who'd decided, for one afternoon, to let the world be exactly as boring as it appeared.

"You clean up nice for someone who spent last night getting hit by a philosophy major," she said.

"He wasn't a philosophy major. He was worse. A philosophy major with combat training and forty years of conviction behind it."

"Comforting distinction."

"I contain multitudes."

"You keep saying that like it's still funny."

"It's always funny. You just haven't built up the appropriate tolerance yet."

They wandered the stalls together, and Cole found himself, against every instinct trained into him this year, actually relaxing — the specific unclenching of shoulders he hadn't realized he'd been carrying since Ranking Day, loosened by fried dough and a cover band's enthusiastic mangling of a chorus everyone half-remembered but nobody could quite name.

The dunk tank booth drew a genuine crowd, mostly because the volunteer sitting in it happened to be the district's least popular assistant principal, and Mia's aim, once she got a softball in hand, turned out to be considerably better than her hand-to-hand technique currently was.

"Where did you learn to throw like that?" Reeve asked, watching her sink her third dunk in a row, water splashing high enough to soak the front row of onlookers, who cheered anyway.

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"Rage," Mia said, accepting a stuffed animal prize with the calm satisfaction of someone collecting a debt long overdue. "Pure, focused rage. Turns out it's an excellent training tool when the target's a man who gave me detention for correcting his math."

"He got the math wrong?"

"He got the math catastrophically wrong. In front of the whole class. And then doubled down, in writing, on my detention slip." She lined up another throw, tongue poking out slightly in concentration. "Some grudges are just worth maintaining. Consider it my version of Verdict. Slower. Cheaper. Equally satisfying."

It was at the ring toss booth, of all places, that Cole's afternoon stopped being entirely ordinary, though not in the way anything else this month had stopped being ordinary — this time, blessedly, the disruption was entirely his own fault.

The game was rigged — obviously, structurally rigged, the kind of rigged that every carnival game had been since long before Convictions existed, rings slightly too small for the necks of the bottles they were meant to land on. Cole watched three kids in a row lose their allowance to a physically impossible task and felt something small and familiar stir behind his ribs, more curiosity than intent.

"Don't," Vesper said, immediately, correctly reading exactly what he was considering.

"I wasn't going to do anything."

"You were absolutely going to do something."

"I was going to win a stuffed animal. That's not a crime."

"You were going to use Verdict on a ring toss game, weren't you."

"...Maybe."

He did it anyway, because some temptations existed specifically to be failed at resisting, pressing two fingers briefly against the rim of a ring while pretending to examine it for quality control purposes, the same easy cover story he'd have used to check produce at a grocery store. Verdict answered small and easy, barely a whisper compared to what it had done to Bellamy's file or Ansel's footing — just a gentle correction, telling the ring exactly how it should fit around a bottle it was never designed to fit around.

It sailed through the air and landed clean, perfect, dead center.

The carnival worker's face went through several stages of confusion before settling on resigned defeat. "That's — huh. Okay. Pick your prize."

Cole selected the largest, ugliest stuffed bear available, purely out of spite for a childhood spent losing this exact game honestly, and presented it to Vesper with a small, theatrical bow.

"For you. Ill-gotten, but sincere."

"You cheated."

"I creatively reinterpreted the rules. There's a difference."

"There is not a difference." But she took the bear anyway, hugging it against her chest with an expression that fought hard against showing how pleased she actually was and lost, badly, the corner of her mouth curling despite her best efforts. "You're going to get us banned from a children's festival using an ability that could theoretically reshape reality."

"Worth it."

"You're ridiculous."

"Also worth it."

She didn't argue further. Just walked beside him toward the next booth, bear tucked under one arm, close enough that their shoulders brushed every few steps, and if either of them noticed how neither one moved away when it happened, neither said so out loud.

They found Marek and Reeve by the funnel cake stand an hour later, deep in an argument about whether a licensed duelist's Conviction technically counted as cheating in a carnival strength-test game, which Marek had apparently just demolished hard enough to bend the mechanism.

"It's not cheating if the machine can't tell the difference," Marek argued.

"It's absolutely cheating," Reeve said. "You used actual resonance force on a fairground game designed for regular human arms."

"Cole rigged a ring toss."

"That's different."

"How is that different?"

"Because Cole's ridiculous and you're supposed to have a reputation to protect."

Marek considered that, genuinely, chewing on a bite of funnel cake before answering. "Fair. My reputation currently involves losing to him twice publicly, so I think we're past the point where dignity's a factor. Might as well enjoy breaking things while nobody's filming."

"That's a concerning life philosophy."

"It's working out fine so far."

Reeve laughed, the real kind, easy and unguarded, and Cole watched him do it with something warm settling behind his own ribs — this was, he realized, the first time in weeks he'd seen Reeve laugh without some sliver of tension riding underneath it, without the specific watchfulness of a boy still waiting to find out if he actually belonged in the room. Whatever else this month had cost all of them, it had at least given Reeve this: a place where nobody forgot he was standing there.

They ate too much fried food, lost several rigged games on purpose for the comedy of it, and Cole spent the golden hour before sunset sitting on a curb with honey-glazed festival bread that wasn't quite his usual toast but scratched close enough to the same itch, watching his found family argue about nothing that mattered in the specific, precious way that only nothing-conversations ever really mattered.

The mark beneath his collar stayed quiet the entire day. No burning. No visions. Just an ordinary afternoon, held together by fried dough and a rigged ring toss and a girl beside him holding an ugly stuffed bear like it was worth considerably more than it cost him to win it.

He'd take it. Whatever came next, tomorrow could have it.

Today belonged to something smaller, and considerably harder-won than any of the fights he'd survived this month.

[End of Chapter 30]