She was right. She was catastrophically, structurally, load-bearingly right, and the part of me that wanted to argue was immediately overruled by the part of me that had watched Sloane Fitzgerald run diagnostics on my emotional architecture since the morning I woke up in this body and found her standing at the refrigerator in compression shorts with her pink hair up and her blue eyes already suspicious.
I sat back down. I put my hands on the table where she could see them, palms up, fingers open, the universal posture of a man who has lost and knows it.
"You’re right."
"Obviously I’m right."
"The bruise is from Lang."
The silence that followed was not empty. It was the kind of silence that happens when you pull the pin and the grenade doesn’t go off immediately and you have to stand there holding the thing while it decides whether to detonate now or in three seconds, and either way your hands smell like cordite.
"Lang," Sloane said.
"Lang."
"Petra Lang."
"There’s only one Lang."
"The girl who thinks her planner is a personality trait."
"That’s the one."
Her jaw moved twice. Left, right, left. The bond transmitted a sequence of emotions that arrived in layers: the sharp heat of jealousy, the colder burn of betrayal, the unexpected pressure of something that lived underneath both and did not have a name I was willing to assign to it, and then, at the very bottom, the flat bedrock certainty that she had known this was coming because she always knew.
"In this room."
"In this room."
"During the meeting with the agency woman."
"After the meeting."
"While I was forty minutes away reviewing Hale’s training footage and texting you about the Crucible and thinking about what I was going to wear to the bathhouse tonight."
"Yes."
She closed her eyes.
I watched her process it. I watched the bond carry her through the sequence: anger that crested and fell, hurt that swelled and held, possessiveness that dug its claws into the base of her spine and refused to let go, and then the thing I loved and feared about Sloane Fitzgerald in equal measure, the thing that made her different from every other person the System had flagged in my orbit. She decided.
Not in the way most people decide, gradually and with revision and with the option to change their minds. Sloane decided the way she fought: forward, committed, and with the full understanding that the decision carried consequences she would pay in full when they arrived.
She opened her eyes.
"You’re not getting the bathhouse tonight."
"I understand."
"You’re not getting my robe or my lap or the sounds I was going to make in your ear, and for the record those sounds would have made Caden’s kettle corn burn from two floors up."
"I believe you."
"Good." She stepped forward and put both hands flat on the table, leaning down until her face was level with mine, her pink hair falling forward to frame cheeks that carried the flush of someone operating at the intersection of rage and reluctant arousal. Her breath was warm and close and tasted like the mint gum she chewed between classes and her eyes were the exact shade of blue that had been following me through every decision I’d made since the morning I opened them in a dead boy’s bedroom.
"And you better not fuck another bitch tonight."
The words landed with the precision of a Detonation charge set at the lowest viable output, enough force to crater the conversation without collapsing the building.
"This is your punishment," she said. "Not the bathhouse. Not me. Not anyone else. You sit in your room and you think about what you did and you look at your ceiling and you remember that I had a plan and you ruined it."
"I ruined it."
"You ruined it." She straightened and stepped back and adjusted her blazer with the same aggressive efficiency she applied to reloading her Aspect between strikes. "Wednesday. After your thing with Lang. You come to my room and you tell me everything that happened, every word, every touch, every stupid French noise she made because Maribelle already told me about the French and I want your version before I decide how angry I’m going to be about it."
"Maribelle told you."
"Maribelle told Koda, Koda told Dash, Dash told me during tactical positioning because Dash has no sense of operational security and I’m going to train that out of him by the end of the semester if I have to beat it out."
The information cascade that started in a locker room had traveled through three people and two cohorts in less than ninety minutes, which meant by dinner every student in Prometheus House would know that Petra Lang made sounds in French in a conference room on the fourth floor while sitting on a table that Diane Fitzgerald had used to close a federal inquiry four hours earlier.
I rubbed my face with both hands.
"Are we okay."
Sloane looked at me for a long time. Long enough that the afternoon light shifted by two degrees across the floor and the distant sound of someone running conditioning drills floated up through the window from Field Epsilon.
Then she flicked me on the forehead, hard, with the casual accuracy of nine years of practice.
"Ow."
"We’re okay." She walked toward the door, her hips moving in the specific rhythm that meant she was holding back from saying something and also knew I was watching and did not care about either of those facts. "We’re always okay. That’s the problem."
"That’s the feature."
"It’s both." She reached the door and put her hand on the handle and turned back, and in the angle of her jaw and the brightness of her eyes and the way her choker sat against the column of her throat I saw the girl who had watched a man part floodwater when she was seven years old and decided that was who she would become. "Lukas."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"I love you too."
"And if I find out Lang marked you anywhere below the collar I will detonate her entire bloodline and blame it on a training malfunction."
"That’s fair."
"It’s not fair. It’s jealousy." She pulled the door open. "But my jealousy is a Legendary-tier explosive Aspect attached to it, so it’s functionally the same thing."