Chapter 526 | Faith in You

Chapter 526: 526 | Faith in You

"That’s the guy you are," Addison agreed. She crunched down on her lollipop, which meant she was thinking too hard about something. "Aurora likes you. Like, actually likes you. Which is annoying because Aurora doesn’t like people. She tolerates them and finds them useful and occasionally sleeps with them, but she doesn’t like anyone."

"She likes you."

"I’m different. I’ve earned it." She tossed the stripped lollipop stick over the cliff and pulled another from the bag. "She’s terrified of losing you. She won’t say it because saying it makes it real, but she watched you nearly die on a news broadcast and she couldn’t leave her guild tryout to be there, and that’s going to haunt her for a while."

I knew that. I’d known it since the hospital, since the message thick with crying that Aurora sent from inside a gate she wasn’t allowed to leave.

"So don’t die," Addison said. "Simple instruction. You’d think it’d be easy."

"You’d think."

She smacked my arm hard enough to bruise. "I’m serious, milk boy. This whole thing you’ve got going. Whatever it is. It’s real for all of us. You don’t get to be casual about it."

I drank the coffee she’d brought, which was terrible and exactly what I needed, and watched a boat cut a white line across the water somewhere far below. Addison sat beside me with her boots over the edge and her lollipop clicking against her teeth, and for a while neither of us said anything.

Then she stood, brushed grass off her jeans, and looked down at me with something soft moving behind the violet contacts she’d put back in at some point.

"Coffee jellies," she said. "Tuesday. You owe me three and a hair appointment. Don’t forget."

"I never forget you, Addison."

Her ears went pink. She stomped off across the field before I could see the rest of her face, combat boots thudding against the turf, and the graft in my chest hummed with a dark purple ring that burned a little brighter than it had that morning.

The rest of the day passed the way days pass when you’re waiting for something bigger to arrive. Classes. Food. Belle’s spreadsheet updates arriving every ninety minutes with the persistence of a debt collector. Naomi texting me pictures of her Nishimura notes with the good parts highlighted in three different colors because she took studying more seriously than I took my own survival.

By evening the squad had gathered in the conference room one last time before Friday. Misato ran us through the Monterey formation until the movements lived in our bodies instead of our heads. Blair called target priority without correcting anyone more than four times, which for her counted as growth. Jordan complained. Belle documented. Hikaru watched everything and said nothing, and I caught her red eyes on me twice, both times when she thought I wasn’t looking.

When Misato finally dismissed us, the sky outside had gone dark and the campus lights had come on, and I felt the particular exhaustion that came from a full day of being pulled in eight directions by eight people who all wanted a piece of my attention.

Naomi walked me to the stairwell. Our arms brushed the whole way, that frequency we’d fallen into since the first week, and when we reached the landing she stopped and turned to face me.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow."

"First gate with the new group." She tugged at her shell necklace, the tell she didn’t know I’d catalogued. "First one since the Void Gate."

"Yeah."

"You’re not nervous."

"I’m terrified."

Her eyebrows went up. She hadn’t expected honesty, which stung a little because it meant I’d trained her not to expect it. "You’re allowed to say that now?"

"You told me to say when things are bad. Things are bad. I’m about to lead seven people into a kelp forest full of monsters that outnumber us three to one, and the last gate I went into killed Charles Leone and nearly killed everyone else, and I’m the one they’re all going to look at when the ceiling comes down."

Naomi was quiet for a moment. Then she stepped into me, pressed her forehead against my sternum, and wrapped her arms around my waist the way she had in the alcove. The graft pulsed. Her silver-pink ring burned steady and bright, and I could feel her heartbeat where our chests met, faster than it should have been for someone standing still.

"We’ve got this," she said into my shirt. "You said it yourself. Belle’s detection. Jordan’s shadows. Blair’s fire, even at reduced power. Me in the air. Hikaru covering gaps. Misato holding it together. Javier with his notebook and his knives." She pulled back and looked up at me, pink eyes catching the stairwell light. "And you in the middle, making the calls nobody wants to make."

"That’s a lot of faith in one plan."

"It’s not faith in the plan." She reached up and touched my jaw, thumb tracing the line of it. "It’s faith in you."

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I kissed her instead, slow and thorough, the kind that made her forget to breathe. When we broke apart she was flushed and unsteady, and I felt marginally less like the world was about to crush me.

"Get some sleep," she said. "You’ve got Vale at five."

"Vale can wait."

"Vale will break your other arm if you’re late."

"Vale will break my arm regardless. It’s his love language."

She laughed and kissed me one more time, softer, then jogged up the stairs toward her floor with her hair bouncing behind her. I stood in the stairwell and listened to her footsteps fade, and the graft hummed warm and full and content.

Then I climbed the last flight to my floor and let myself into the apartment.

The lamp was on. Hikaru sat on the couch with a mug of tea and the shojo manga she’d given me open on her knee, except this was a different volume, which meant she was collecting them now. She’d changed out of her uniform into a loose sleep shirt and shorts, and her chin-length black hair fell soft around her face instead of pulled back into the sharp Ice Prince style she wore in public. The wire-frame reading glasses I’d only seen once perched on her nose.

She looked up when I came in. Her red eyes tracked me across the room with that hunter awareness that never fully switched off, and for a second I saw her cataloguing me, checking for injuries, the way she’d probably learned to do growing up in a house where the wrong bruise in the wrong place meant questions she couldn’t answer.

"You’re home late," she said.

"Some extra credit with Vale."

"Monterey tomorrow."

"Monterey tomorrow."

She set the mug down and closed the manga, keeping her thumb between the pages to mark her place. Something moved behind her eyes, careful and deliberate, the look she got when she was deciding how much of herself to show.

"Sit," she said.