Finn Walsh leaned against the gate’s right pillar with the boneless structural integrity of a person held together by apathy and invisible filament rather than conventional skeletal tissue.
His warm brown hair fell across half his face, his brown eyes carried the permanent suggestion that he was two minutes from falling asleep, and his outfit consisted of a loose grey t-shirt, joggers, and shoes selected for comfort rather than any coherent aesthetic principle.
Invisible threads drifted between his fingers in geometric patterns that his hands produced on autopilot while the rest of him committed fully to existing as little as possible.
"Nah man, that’s cool, that’s cool." Finn’s voice arrived at the pace of continental drift. "Good morning. Or whatever."
"It’s eight twenty."
"Aggressive."
Marco Vidal stood between Eden and Caden with a bag of chips already open and a yellow energy disk flickering lazily between his fingers, the glow catching the morning light and illuminating the small scar on his left cheek.
He was, as always, the shortest person in any formation and the least bothered by this fact. His dark glossy hair sat in a state of managed chaos, and his warm brown eyes tracked the group with the amused assessment of someone who had already decided today would be entertaining and was simply waiting to collect evidence.
"Yo, Belmont." Marco tossed him a chip that Lukas caught on instinct. "You look like somebody who needs to eat something that isn’t optimized for protein synthesis."
"I eat things that aren’t protein."
"Ramen doesn’t count. Ramen is a personality trait at this point, dude."
Caden produced his phone with theatrical grandeur and held it up so the screen faced the assembled group. An Uber confirmation glowed against the morning light. "Gentlemen. Our chariot arrives in six minutes. Destination is loaded. Nobody ask where we’re going."
"Where are we going," Finn said without inflection.
"I literally just said don’t ask."
"Nah I heard you. I just don’t follow instructions I find unreasonable."
"The destination is a surprise because surprises build camaraderie." Percy stood at the edge of the group with his notebook open, already documenting arrival times. "Holt and I scouted the location Wednesday evening between seventeen hundred and eighteen forty-five. I confirmed the venue’s safety rating, fire code compliance, and Yelp reviews averaging four point three stars across two hundred and seventeen assessments."
"Percy reviewed Yelp." I let that sentence sit in the air where it belonged. "Percy Mendoza, the man who analyzes insurance regulatory frameworks for fun, spent time reading Yelp reviews."
"Yelp reviews contain statistically significant data about establishment quality when controlled for reviewer bias." Percy’s pen moved across the notebook page. "I developed a weighting algorithm that accounts for review length, recency, specificity of complaints, and correlation between one-star reviews and documented health code violations."
Marco put a chip in his mouth and chewed with purpose. "Dude, that’s the most Percy thing I’ve ever heard, and yesterday you timed how long it took the elevator to open within the margin of error."
"Three point seven seconds. Plus or minus point two." Percy did not look up from his notebook. "Consistency matters."
"It does." I grabbed another chip from Marco’s bag uninvited. "Fine. Surprise destination. Six guys, one Uber. Nobody gets arrested. Nobody uses their Aspect in public. Nobody tells Steele."
"Steele already knows," Caden repeated, his grin stretching to its functional maximum.
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true. Steele knows everything. It’s her whole deal. She probably has a file on this."
"Steele has a file on everything." Eden flicked his lighter open and shut, the metallic click punctuating his words. "My sister said when Steele was active, her agency filed intelligence briefs on every restaurant she ate at because her presence constituted a security event."
"Your sister makes things up."
"My sister is a crisis response track student who hacked the cafeteria’s dietary management system to get extra pudding cups. She’s resourceful, not unreliable."
The Uber pulled up at eight twenty-six, a black SUV with enough room for six humans of varying dimensions, including Finn’s length and Eden’s tendency to gesture with both arms during stories about his lighter collection.
Caden called shotgun with the speed of someone who had been rehearsing the word since childhood. Marco climbed in after him with his chips. Eden took the far back with characteristic enthusiasm, leaving Finn, Percy, and me in the middle row where Finn immediately slumped against the window and produced a thread pattern between his fingers without appearing to notice.
Percy sat between Finn and me with his notebook balanced on his knee and his pen held in a ready position, the posture of someone prepared to document the journey with the rigor of a field researcher entering uncharted territory.
His blue hair caught a stray beam of sunlight through the window, and for a moment he looked less like someone who timed elevator doors and more like someone who had gotten invited somewhere and couldn’t quite believe the invitation was real.
"So." I leaned back against the seat as the SUV pulled onto the access road. "Nobody’s going to tell me where we’re going."
"Correct." Caden half-turned from the passenger seat with the satisfaction of someone who had waited fourteen hours to deploy a surprise and intended to extract maximum enjoyment from the anticipation phase. "You are going to sit in that seat, eat Marco’s chips, listen to Eden talk about fire, and arrive at our destination in a state of relaxed ignorance. This is the Boyz Day experience. Trademarked."
"Not trademarked," Percy noted without looking up. "I checked. The phrase is available for registration in seventeen states."
"See? Percy checked."
Eden leaned forward from the back row with an energy that the seat belt struggled to contain. "I heard from Maribelle that the bathhouse was wild last night. Like, Camille apparently—"
"Maybe we shouldn’t talk about our female classmates like that."
Percy said it to his notebook rather than to anyone, pen still moving, voice pitched low enough that he could have pretended he hadn’t spoken if the SUV had been louder.
The car erupted. Marco booed with chips in his mouth, which produced more spray than volume. Eden booed with his whole chest, the sound bouncing off the back window. Finn booed at approximately half speed, three seconds behind everyone else, and stopped as soon as he realized he’d participated.
"Sure, sure." Caden turned fully around in the passenger seat, seat belt digging into his shoulder, hazel eyes bright with the specific joy of a man who had already prepared his follow-up. "Respect the ethics. Genuinely. Love that for you."
"Thank you."
"So. Fuck, marry, kill."