Chapter 514 | Consequence and Its Playlist

Chapter 514: 514 | Consequence and Its Playlist

"I’ve noticed." She stepped back, and I watched the shift happen. Soft pink around her edges went knife-sharp in the time it took to blink. "Belle wants to run extraction logistics for Monterey over lunch. Jordan says he’s not coming unless there’s real food and not protein bars. Addison texted that she’s crashing our lunch because Aurora is stuck in guild orientation until three and Addison gets destructive when bored."

"So it’s a party."

"It’s logistics." Naomi picked up her staff case and headed down the stairs. "Also Hikaru left something on your desk. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but she looked embarrassed, which for Hikaru means her left eyebrow moved approximately one millimeter."

Hikaru leaving things on my desk was new. Hikaru showing emotion was newer.

We hit the ground floor and pushed through the double doors into California sunshine that had no business being this beautiful when half the people I cared about bore scars from a dimension that tried to eat them. The campus spread out in clean lines and manicured greenery, students crossing between buildings with the obliviousness of people who had not recently killed anything with their bare hands.

Naomi’s phone buzzed. She checked it and groaned.

"Addison found the cafeteria’s lollipop supply. She’s buying the entire stock."

"With what money?"

"Aurora’s card. Aurora doesn’t know yet."

I made a mental note to stay at least ten meters from the blast radius when Aurora discovered the unauthorized purchase. Addison had once told me that she consumed fifteen lollipops a day. The East Tower vending machine charged twelve points per pop. Even a conservative estimate put the total somewhere in the neighborhood of a war crime against Aurora’s credit balance.

We crossed the quad toward the dining hall, and my phone pinged with a message from a number I recognized but hadn’t expected.

Yumi.

The copper-haired weapon engineer who kept dead birds in jars and wanted to strap me to a table for science. Her message was characteristically dense and unhinged:

YOUR FREQUENCY SPIKED SIX TIMES LAST NIGHT. SIX. THE QUAD-SOURCE EVENT REGISTERED ON MY SEISMOGRAPH AND I DON’T OWN A SEISMOGRAPH. BRING THE PINK ONE SATURDAY OR I WILL COME TO YOU AND I WILL BRING INSTRUMENTS. ALSO VALE SAYS YOUR CARDIO NEEDS WORK. I DISAGREE. BASED ON LAST NIGHT’S DATA YOUR CARDIO IS EXTRAORDINARY. TELL THE PURPLE ONE HER RESONANCE SIGNATURE IS GORGEOUS. END TRANSMISSION.

I read it twice and then put the phone away.

Naomi watched me with the focus of someone who had learned to read my facial expressions as a survival skill. "Bad news?"

"A scientist thinks my cardio is extraordinary."

"That’s not bad news."

"She also wants me to bring you to Santa Barbara on Saturday so she can study our resonance coupling with instruments she hasn’t specified."

Naomi’s ears went pink. "That sounds invasive."

"Yumi makes everything sound invasive. She’s building me a weapon powered by the connections I’ve made with people who care about me. She needs to observe those connections under active conditions. You’re the strongest signal she can measure." I paused. "Also she told me to tell Addison that her resonance signature is gorgeous."

The pink in Naomi’s ears spread to her cheeks. "She can see that? From Santa Barbara?"

"She can see a lot of things."

Naomi chewed her lower lip, a habit she fell into when her brain chased something complicated enough to require teeth. "How gorgeous are we talking? Like, objectively gorgeous or scientist-who-hasn’t-slept-in-three-days gorgeous?"

"There’s a difference?"

"There is if the scientist is attractive and interested in studying your body."

The jealousy was so quiet I would have missed it from anyone else. But I’d spent six weeks learning the exact frequency of Naomi Love’s insecurities, and this particular note played low and uncertain beneath her composure. She wasn’t jealous of Yumi. She was jealous of anyone who understood the graft better than she did, because understanding the graft meant understanding me, and Naomi had decided that was her territory.

I stopped walking. Took her hand. Her fingers laced through mine on reflex, the calluses from her staff catching against my knuckles.

"Yumi is Vale’s ex-girlfriend," I said. "She wants to put me on a table and scan my organs. She keeps a dead bird in a mason jar and once killed it by accident with a prototype weapon that arrests biological function. The only thing she finds attractive about me is my dimensional frequency, which she described as ’the most interesting data set in a decade.’ I am not a romantic prospect. I am a lab rat with a parasite and a death timer."

Naomi searched my face, running her own analysis that had nothing to do with spreadsheets and everything to do with the B-rank Perception she never got credit for. Then she squeezed my hand.

"Saturday," she said. "But I’m picking the music for the drive."

"We don’t have a car."

"Vale has a car."

"Vale’s car is named Consequence and has eight hundred horsepower and I’m pretty sure it’s sentient."

"Then it can enjoy my playlist." Naomi pulled me forward toward the dining hall, and the shell necklace swung against her collarbone, and the silver-pink ring in the back of my skull burned so steady I could have navigated by it in the dark.

We pushed through the cafeteria doors into the usual chaos of lunch hour. The smell of grilled chicken and garlic bread hit me first, followed by the visual confirmation that Addison Baxter had indeed colonized an entire section of the East Tower vending machine’s lollipop inventory. She sat at our usual table by the windows with a pile of individually wrapped lollipops stacked in a pyramid between her elbows, her purple-highlighted hair pulled into a messy bun and her combat boots propped on the chair beside her. A cherry lollipop occupied its permanent position in the corner of her mouth.

Belle occupied the opposite end of the table, her blue hair in its combat braid, her laptop open to a spreadsheet with color-coded columns that I could read from thirty feet away. Jordan sprawled beside her with his face buried in his arms and a half-eaten burger balanced on his spine. Javier sat at the table’s edge with three notebooks open and a protractor, measuring something on a hand-drawn map of the Monterey coastline.