Chapter 518 | The Shojo Manga Gambit

Chapter 518: 518 | The Shojo Manga Gambit

"Yet," Addison said, and put the lollipop back in her mouth like she’d made a threat instead of a promise.

The graft did something warm and stupid in my chest, and I decided not to examine it.

Lunch broke apart the way our meals always did now, in stages, with a lot of arguing. Jordan required physical assistance to leave his chair, which Belle refused to provide, which meant Javier ended up hauling him upright while explaining recovery breathing that Jordan absolutely did not want to hear. Hikaru vanished between one blink and the next, the way she did, there and then gone, her tray already returned to the rack like she’d never been sitting three feet from me at all. Blair collected her cracked water bottle and her leather jacket and left without saying goodbye, which for Blair counted as an emotionally generous farewell.

Naomi walked me to the doors, our shoulders doing the brush-and-touch thing they’d been doing since week one, and then she peeled off toward the library because she had a Nishimura reading due and, unlike me, actually did her homework.

Which left me alone in the hallway with thirty-eight minutes to kill and a note from Hikaru sitting on my desk that Naomi said made her emotional.

Hikaru. Emotional. Two words that did not belong in the same sentence unless someone had died.

I took the stairs up to Building C because my endurance bar was one segment off B-rank and I’d learned that Misato could smell an elevator on me from across a training field. The climb didn’t cost me anything anymore. Six weeks ago these stairs nearly killed me. Now I hit the fifth floor without my lungs filing a formal complaint, which was either impressive or a sign of how catastrophically low the bar had been.

The apartment sat quiet. Hikaru’s door closed, no light underneath, her tea mug drying on the rack in the kitchen the way it always was, clean and upside down and exactly where it belonged. She’d been here and gone again, probably to train, probably alone, probably pushing her mostly-healed body harder than the nurse cleared her for because the concept of resting was foreign to everyone I knew.

I went to my room.

The note sat on my desk. Cream paper, folded once, my name written on the front in handwriting so clean it looked printed. Hikaru’s handwriting. Of course it was. The woman probably practiced calligraphy to relax.

I picked it up. Unfolded it.

You almost died. I would have found the person who sent us into that gate and made them understand what my ability does to living tissue. You do not get to leave. Not before I do. This is not permission. This is an order. -H

Underneath, smaller, like she’d added it as an afterthought and then hated herself for it:

The manga was a gift. You said you cried at Chapter thirty-seven. I marked the good parts.

I looked over at my bed.

There, sitting on the pillow like it had every right to be there, was a paperback with a shirtless man and a sword and an offensive amount of sparkles on the cover. Volume one of something with a title I couldn’t read because it was in Japanese, but the little sticky tabs poking out the top told me everything. Yellow tabs. A whole row of them. Someone had gone through the entire book and flagged the Chapters worth reading.

Hikaru Tanaka, the Ice Prince of Obsidian, an A-rank blade with an invisible death aspect and a body count in simulations that made third-years nervous, had bought me a shojo manga and marked her favorite parts.

I sat down on the edge of my bed and stared at it for longer than I’d admit to anyone.

The old me, the one from six weeks ago with a spreadsheet and a death timer and a con for every woman in the building, would have filed this under asset development. Roommate warming up. Gold-tier essence and an A-rank ability, one closed door away, softening at the edges. Devotion climbing. A ring flickering pale blue in the back of my skull, thin but structurally significant, Yumi’s words, occupying a frequency range none of the others covered.

That version of me would have been running numbers.

This version put the manga on the nightstand and made a mental note to actually read it, because a woman who’d spent three years so terrified of being seen that she bound her chest flat every morning behind a locked door had walked into a store, picked out a book, and marked the good parts for me.

The graft hummed, satisfied, and I told it to shut up.

My phone buzzed.

Aurora. guild orientation is HELL. these people run drills like accountants. one of the scouts asked what my ability does and i said ’i can make you taste your own bad decisions’ and now they respect me. how’s your harem

Building something, I sent back. Not sure what.

a cult probably. you have the eyes for it. bring the tie saturday i’m not done with the classroom thing

I set the phone down before I could respond to that, because responding to that was how I ended up not making it to strategy sessions, and Belle would strangle me with my own spine if I no-showed the Monterey prep tomorrow.

Thirty-one minutes.

I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling, which up here didn’t have a water stain shaped like an angry rabbit, which was a downgrade from the hospital, honestly. The hospital rabbit had been a whole personality.

Somewhere in Santa Barbara, a copper-haired woman who kept a dead bird in a jar was watching my frequency spike on a machine she claimed she didn’t own and texting Vale about it at four in the morning. Somewhere on the mainland, a man named Johnathan Davenport was making phone calls about a lottery kid who’d embarrassed his daughter and then survived a Void Gate that should have erased the problem entirely. Somewhere under the surface of the world, an old man in a library that didn’t exist was arranging chess pieces I couldn’t focus on, waiting to see whether the thing he’d built would save the species or just die interestingly like the twelve before it.

And somewhere in this building, eight people who couldn’t agree on lunch were getting ready to walk into a gate full of amphibious monsters and kelp and a tide that lied about its timer.

I closed my eyes.

The graft pulsed, warm and full, eight rings burning steady, one flickering at the edge where a girl with frost-blue eyes hadn’t decided what she felt yet. Eighteen days on the clock. A weapon forging out of folded dimension and every bond I’d ever made.

It wasn’t a bad way to be dying, all things considered.