Diane answered in ninety seconds, which meant she’d been holding her phone.
The good heels are for closings, sugar. Is this a closing?
It’s a meeting where somebody’s going to try to open something.
Then it’s a closing. A pause, long enough that I watched the three dots appear and vanish twice. Who’s in the room.
Odette Reyes. Me. You. Petra Lang.
The dots stopped entirely for eleven seconds.
You got the daughter to sit at the table.
She volunteered.
Lukas Belmont, I have been in this industry for twenty years and I have never once gotten a Lang to volunteer for anything that did not have their name on the building. Another pause. We are going to have a very long conversation about how you did that.
Friday.
Friday, she wrote. Eat something with protein in it. Sleep. I love you, and if you smirk at Odette Reyes I will end you in front of witnesses.
I put the phone face down on the desk and lay back on the bed with my shoes still on, and the interface finally decided to say something, which it had been politely not doing for the last forty minutes like a butler waiting for me to finish crying.
TEMPTATION GAUGE UPDATE
Petra Lang: 9% → 21% (Curious)
Notes: Subject experienced sustained proximity, direct confrontation, and an offer of future disclosure. Subject’s internal model of Host has been forcibly revised twice in one hour. Subject also held Host’s hand for twelve seconds and does not know how to file that.
NEW HEROINE FLAGGED
Maribelle Kennedy — Branded (Apathy Toxin, Epic)
Gauge initialized: 4%
Notes: Subject is amused by you. Amusement is a load-bearing structure.
Twelve percent off one argument on a concrete path.
I lay there and did the math I’d been avoiding, which was not the fun kind. Sloane at a hundred and locked. Diane at whatever Diane was, which the interface had stopped reporting sometime after the second week and I’d never asked why. Felicity at thirty-eight and climbing every time I so much as held a door. Camille somewhere in the twenties and processing me like a stress fracture. Rina at twelve and trusting me to hold onto her Saturday morning while she found out what her own exhale could do. Petra at twenty-one, with a mother who had federal database access and a legal department built to make problems stop existing.
And now a demon girl with a flashlight and eleven dollars of winnings.
The correct move was to stop. The correct move had been to stop about six women ago, honestly, and I have never once in either of my lives taken the correct move when a funnier one was sitting right there with its legs crossed.
I fell asleep with the light on.
Steele ran us through partner carries at six with the specific joy of a woman who had slept eight hours and knew none of us had. Thursday morning tasted like wet grass and whatever cheap body spray somebody had decided was acceptable before sunrise, and by the fourth rotation Caden had stopped talking entirely, which was the closest thing to a medical emergency he was capable of producing.
"I’m dying," he informed the ground.
"You’re not dying," Marco said. "You’re just poorly built."
Rina finished the circuit. Last, again, forty seconds behind Eden, and she was purple in the face and her tail was hanging straight down like wet rope and she finished it, and when she came off the line I watched Percy hand her a water bottle without saying a word about it and without writing anything down, which for Percy Mendoza was practically a sonnet. She took it with both hands and looked at him the way you look at a priest who just said you were forgiven.
Percy went red and muttered something at his feet. Rina drank half the bottle and smiled and went even more purple than the running had made her. I was watching this happen twelve meters away and nobody was looking at me while it happened, which is how I learned you can witness a love story starting and still be utterly invisible to everyone involved.
Steele caught my eye across the field and tapped her tablet once.
Which was how I knew the conditioning schedule complaint had landed somewhere, and that she wanted me to know it had landed, and that she was not going to tell me anything else about it until it suited her.
I love that woman in the way you love a wall you keep running into.
Maribelle Kennedy found me at ten past eleven in the second floor corridor of Building D, between Hero Law and the vending machine that had been eating people’s cards since Tuesday, and I want to be clear on something. She did not sneak up on me. She came down the hall like weather.
"Beeeeelmont."
Crimson skin under the corridor lights, which are that awful institutional white that makes everybody look sick except apparently her. She’d modified the Halloran uniform the way the housing office pretends it doesn’t allow. Blazer over her arm instead of on her shoulders. White shirt with the top two buttons gone and the tails knotted at her waist so a band of crimson stomach showed above the skirt. The skirt itself sat higher than regulation by an amount you could measure with a ruler if you were the kind of person who wanted to be expelled. Her horns caught the fluorescents in two smooth black curves. Her tail was already going, swishing back and forth in a way that looked casual and probably wasn’t.
Golden eyes. Long lashes. Nails like lacquered blades, and I’d read her file, so I knew exactly what came out of the tips of them.
She walked right up to me, and I’m six-two, and she was somehow at eye level anyway, or maybe that was the confidence closing the gap.
"You," she said, and jabbed one of those nails into my sternum without breaking stride, which forced me to walk backward or get perforated, "are the most interesting problem in this entire building and I have decided we’re friends now."
"Have you asked me."
"Nope!" She kept jabbing. I kept backing up. "That’s not how this works. I decide, and then you find out, and then eventually you’re grateful. Ask Eden. He’s been grateful since we were nine."