Sloane’s eyebrows went up. "Steele said that to you?"
"Camille said it to me. Steele repeated it back like it was hers."
"Ortega." She rolled the name around, and I felt the bond spike, that flare of territorial heat, and then felt her put a lid on it with visible effort. Her calves tensed on my lap. "Fine. She’s right. Annoying, but right."
"You’d have caught it too."
"Don’t manage me."
"I’m not managing you, I’m telling you that you’d have caught it, because you would have. You’ve been running rescue metrics since Radiant pulled two hundred and sixteen people off a flooded street when you were seven."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she kicked me. Not hard. Her heel just sort of thumped against my thigh.
"Two hundred and sixteen," she said quietly.
"I remember what you tell me."
The bond went warm in a way that had nothing to do with anything physical, that slow spreading thing that came through her when she stopped defending herself, and she stared very hard at her notebook until it passed.
"Okay," she said. "Different homework. What did Crane give you? Because Crane gave us something insane and I need to know if she gave you the same insane thing."
"Hero name and brand positioning statement. Workshop next week. She said some of us are going to cry."
"She said that to my block too. She said it and then she smiled." Sloane made a small strangled noise. "Lukas, she wears a mask to a lecture. To a lecture. She has a face and she covers part of it with purple satin and then teaches us about authenticity."
"That’s the joke. She’s demonstrating the thesis."
"I know it’s the joke. I hate that it’s the joke." She flipped to a page in her notebook and then covered it with her hand.
I looked at her hand.
"No," she said.
"You have it done."
"I have a draft."
"You have it done and it’s been done since you were fifteen and you’ve revised it eleven times."
The silence lasted about three seconds.
"Seventeen." Her ears were actively red now. "And that’s not even the assignment, the assignment is the positioning statement, the name is just context. I already had the name. Everyone already has their name. Stop acting like this is weird."
"Everyone does not have their name. I don’t have my name."
"Yeah but you’re you. You showed up to Halloran without a training suit and with a file that says you were Unmarked until last year. Having your entire identity mapped out at fifteen would break the brand."
"What brand?"
"The disaster competence thing. You walked into an S-rank exam site with no preparation and came out third in the country looking like you’d gotten lost on your way to a library. That’s the brand. You can’t also have a hero name picked out in advance. It ruins the vibe."
"I don’t have a name."
That got her. Her hand came off the page and she stared at me.
"You don’t have a hero name."
"I’ve been slightly busy."
"You’ve been at Halloran three weeks and you’re a class rep and you gave an interview on national television and you don’t have a name."
"The interview didn’t need a name. The interview needed a face and a decent jawline and a quote from Radiant."
"That is such a you sentence." She dragged the notebook up against her chest. "Okay. Okay, fine. We’re doing this. I’m helping you."
"You’re going to be terrible at this."
"I’m going to be excellent at this." She flipped to a clean page and clicked the pen twice, which she always did when she’d decided something. "Aspect. Go."
"Force manipulation. Registered as Phantom Touch."
"Which is a terrible name for a hero and a great name for a Rank C guy in Portland who does insurance fraud."
"Diane picked it."
"My mother picked it because it was legally convenient, not because it was good. There’s a difference and she’d tell you that herself." She was already writing. Her tongue appeared between her teeth, which meant she was working on something and not performing working on something. "Constructs are amber. Range is fifteen feet officially. What else? Okay, so, angles. Amber’s a warm palette, that’s good, warm reads trustworthy, that’s Crane’s whole module three. Constructs mean structure, control, precision over power. What about Warden."
"Sounds like a prison guard."
"You’d be great at that."
"Next."
"Anchor."
"I’m not a boat."
"Anchors are stability, Lukas, they’re the thing that holds when everything else drifts, that’s a whole brand. That’s you standing in the middle of a crisis zone holding the line while everyone else is scattered."
"It’s also the thing that sits on the bottom of the ocean doing nothing."
She threw her pen at me.
I caught it.
She threw the second pen at me.
I caught that too. Reflexes were the one part of the Demigod trait I never had to hide, because everybody assumed a Channeler with a projection Aspect would be twitchy. Quick reads, quick hands, occupational baseline. Nobody questioned it.
Sloane narrowed her eyes. "Show-off."
"You threw two pens."
"Because you caught the first one."
"So you’re rewarding me."
"I’m testing your theory about how good you are."
"My theory is correct."
"Your theory is annoying." She held out her hand. "Give me the pen back."
"Make me."
"I’m sore," she said, with real menace, "and I will still put you through that wall, and then we’ll both have to explain it to facilities."
I gave her the pen back.
She tapped it against her lower lip and looked at the ceiling and I watched her think, which was one of my favorite things and one I’d never tell her about because she’d get self-conscious and stop doing it in front of me. Her nose scrunched. Her foot bounced against my leg in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the guitar coming out of the speaker.
"Sentinel," she said.
"Taken. Rank forty-one, Houston."
"Damn it." She scribbled it out. "Okay, that’s the problem, all the good ones are taken by mid-tier guys who are never going to break top thirty and won’t release the trademark. Castillo did a whole unit on it. There’s like two hundred names sitting in registration limbo because a Rank B in Ohio won’t let go."