"That’s not music, that’s what plays in a coffee shop while somebody journals about their feelings."
"You have this in your library."
"I have that because my mom put it on my phone in a moment of weakness and I never deleted it." She flopped back down. "Leave it. It’s fine. It’s whatever."
I turned around and caught her mouthing along to the second verse.
I did not say anything about it. I would be saying something about it for the rest of my life, but not right then.
"Homework," I said.
"You’re the worst boyfriend in the history of boyfriends."
"I’m the most responsible boyfriend in the history of boyfriends. Dravid’s analysis is due and it’s two thousand words minimum."
Sloane pushed herself up into a sitting position, cross-legged, and her black dress rode up her thighs in a way that was going to make the next two hours a specific kind of penance. She dragged her hair back off her face with both hands.
"Wait," she said. "You have Dravid?"
"Combat Theory. He teaches both cohorts."
"Which archive engagement did he assign you?"
"Sigma versus Monolith. Sacramento intersection. Four minutes seventeen seconds, no offensive output on the win, she herded him into a compromised wall."
Her eyes lit up. Not metaphorically. There was heat coming off her hands, that faint shimmer she got when her Detonation ran ambient without her noticing, and the air over her knuckles went wavy for half a second before she pulled it back in.
"Shut up," she said. "That’s mine. That’s my assignment."
"We have the same homework."
"We have the same homework." She was already scrambling off the bed toward her desk, and I watched her go with the specific appreciation of a man who had been told no and was choosing to suffer with dignity. "I’ve been staring at that footage for three days trying to figure out how she knew about the wall. Like, how do you look at a building mid-fight and know the northwest corner is compromised. She’s a Channeler, she doesn’t have a structural read, she doesn’t have Precision Read like Camille."
"She scouted it."
Sloane spun around with her tablet in one hand. "That’s what I said. That’s exactly what I said in class and Hale told me I was projecting."
"You are projecting. You’d have scouted it. That’s why you got there first."
"That’s not a criticism, that’s a compliment, why does it sound like a criticism when you say it."
"Delivery."
She came back to the bed and dropped down onto it and immediately made her position an imperial one, back against the wall, pillows stacked behind her, one leg straight out and the other bent, and then she reached over and dragged both my ankles until I turned sideways and she could put her calves across my lap.
Which was fine. Which was completely fine.
"Don’t get weird," she said, not looking up from the tablet.
"I’m not the one who put her legs on me."
"You’re going to be weird about it. I can feel you deciding to be weird about it." She tapped the screen. "Okay. Three moments. What are yours?"
"The wall’s the third one. It’s the obvious one. Everyone in that class is going to write about the wall."
"So?"
"So Dravid doesn’t want the wall. He wants the moment before the wall. He wants the moment she stopped fighting Monolith and started fighting the intersection."
Sloane went quiet. Her thumb stopped moving on the screen.
Then she said, slow, "Minute one forty. She teleports and lands on the same side she came from."
"Right."
"She wastes a jump. Everybody writes it off as a cooldown error." She sat up straighter, and the tablet came down onto her thigh. "She’s not wasting it. She’s checking her angle. She’s confirming the geometry."
"She’s measuring."
"She’s measuring." Sloane looked at me and her whole face had changed, that thing that happened when she stopped performing at anyone and just got interested, mouth slightly open, blue eyes bright, and it was significantly worse for me than the dress. "Okay, that’s the second moment. What’s the first one."
I leaned over her leg to see her screen and she made a noise of protest that had nothing behind it.
"First one’s before the engagement," I said. "It’s not in the footage."
"You can’t write about something that isn’t in the footage."
"Sure you can. You write about the fact that Monolith picked that intersection and Sigma let him keep it."
Her pen stopped over her tablet.
"She could have relocated the fight," I said. "She had fifteen meters of instant repositioning and a three second cooldown, she could have led him nine blocks in any direction. She didn’t. She fought him in the place he chose because the place he chose had a bad wall, and he didn’t know that, and she did."
"So he thought he had home field."
"He did have home field. She just read the field better than the guy who picked it."
Sloane wrote something down. Actually wrote it, on paper, in the notebook she kept in the drawer for things she didn’t want on a device. Her handwriting was terrible. It slanted hard right and every letter looked like it was trying to escape.
"I hate that that’s good," she said.
"You love that that’s good."
"I hate that it’s good and I didn’t think of it, and I love that it’s good, and those two things are happening simultaneously and it’s your fault." She pointed her pen at me. "Also you’re not allowed to write it exactly like that because then Dravid gets two identical papers from two different cohorts and he already looks at you like you’re a math problem he’s mad about."
That was accurate enough to be uncomfortable. Cole Dravid had been watching me since the first Aspect Development Lab with those cool grey eyes and the tablet he never showed anyone, and I’d been sitting at sixty percent output for two straight weeks specifically so his notes stayed boring.
"I’ll structure mine around civilian exposure," I said. "Steele’s been drilling it. Environments have people in them."