"It was closer to twelve. She’s got a good grip, though. Firm. Confident. You’d think all that money would come with a limp handshake and it really doesn’t."
"Belmont."
"That’s a compliment," I told Petra. "That one’s genuinely a compliment. You can have that one."
"Wait wait wait." Maribelle took three steps closer, and the tail was going properly now, whipping, and she had that particular energy of a woman who had discovered a live wire and intended to hold it with both hands. "Okay so, and I’m asking as a neutral third party who is very normal about gossip, is this like a thing thing, or is this a we-hate-each-other-so-much-it-came-out-the-other-side thing, because those are extremely different and I have money on the second one."
"You have money on it," Petra said flatly.
"Eleven dollars. Nyx said you’d rather die."
"Nyx is correct."
"Nyx is never correct about this stuff, she thinks people are data." Maribelle waved a hand, and something gold flashed on her wrist, and her nails caught the light, long and glossy and sharp enough that I remembered abruptly what she could do with them. "Okay but seriously, and I love this for you both, but you should know the acoustics out here are insane. Like the north stairwell window is right there and it’s cracked because the latch is broken and Finn has been complaining about it since Monday. Whatever you were saying, half of Prometheus heard the tone if not the words."
That landed differently.
I watched Petra process it, and the processing was fast and thorough and it took every single drop of color out of her face on the way through. She had not thought about the window. She had come out here in cashmere and heeled boots with her hair pushed back and her sleeves rolled up to have a conversation she’d already decided would be private, and now there was a broken latch in it.
"What tone," she said.
Maribelle’s grin lost about a third of its width, and she looked at me instead of Petra, and for a second the socialite went somewhere and something considerably more careful took the seat.
"Yours was the quiet one," she said. "His was the quiet one that’s actually worse."
"Wonderful," Petra said.
"I mean it’s kind of hot?"
"Kennedy."
"I’m being supportive!"
"You are being"
"Look." Maribelle put both hands up, and the tank top did some things during the gesture that I chose not to catalog, mostly because Petra was watching my face. "I’m not going to say anything. Genuinely. I do gossip, I’m known for it, it’s a whole brand, but I don’t do the kind that ends up in somebody’s file. Ask Rina."
Which was, I noticed, a real answer.
"That said," she went on, brightening straight back up, "if you two are going to keep doing this, you should do it in the fourth floor conference room like professionals, because that room’s soundproofed for faculty and nobody’s ever in it after four."
Petra made a sound.
I’ve heard a lot of sounds out of a lot of people. This one was small and high and got strangled about halfway out, and it was not anger, and every single one of us on that path knew it wasn’t anger, and Maribelle’s tail froze mid swish like she’d just watched a bird fly into a window.
"Oh," Maribelle said. "Oh, wow. Okay."
"That is not." Petra had gone from crimson to something almost gray. "That was not."
"Nope. Nuh uh. That’s between you and God."
"Kennedy, I will conjure something."
"You’d never, your form is too good." Maribelle picked her flashlight back up and put the beam on the path in front of her feet, and her horns dipped as she looked between the two of us one more time, and the last of the theater dropped out of her voice. "Belmont. She’s had a rough night, yeah?"
I hadn’t expected that either.
"Yeah," I said.
"Cool." She flicked the light off. "Then don’t be clever at her anymore tonight. You get like four clever things a day and you’ve clearly spent them all."
She went past us without waiting for an answer, and her shoulder brushed mine on the way, deliberate, and about six feet down the path her voice floated back over her shoulder, bright as a bell.
"Twelve seconds!"
The stairwell door swung shut behind her. The latch didn’t catch, and I could hear it not catching, and somewhere up above us the broken window let a fragment of somebody’s laughter down onto the concrete.
Petra had not moved.
She stood in the yellow pool with her arms wrapped across her stomach, and her hair had come forward out of the push she’d given it, and she was breathing in the careful measured way of a person doing math on how many people they were going to have to look at tomorrow.
"That was Maribelle Kennedy," she said.
"Yeah."
"She sits two seats from Calloway, who documents everything, and she is friends with half the building, and she opens conversations with strangers on purpose."
"She also just told you she wouldn’t say anything, and she meant it, and I’d know."
"You’d know."
"I read people." I rolled my left shoulder, which hurt in a way that Demigod would erase by breakfast. "It’s the one thing on my file that’s actually true."
Petra’s laugh escaped before she could stop it. Short, ugly, entirely unlike the practiced one she deployed when she’d won something, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth immediately like she could put it back.
"I am going inside," she said.
"Okay."
"Friday. Fourteen hundred. Early. Collar."
"Collar. Got it."
She got four steps this time before she stopped, which was a personal record.
"Belmont." Her voice came out level, and she did not turn around, and the whole line of her shoulders was doing something I’d need a better vocabulary to describe. "The thing you said. About telling me what you actually are."
"When it’s safe."
"When." Not a question. A correction. "Not if."
"When."
"Good," Petra said, and the door took her.
I got out my phone and typed a message to Odette Reyes with the Lang Agency, confirming Friday, fourteen hundred, on campus, room to be provided, and noting that Ms. Lang would be present in her capacity as class representative.
Then I typed a second one to Diane.
Bring the good heels.