Chapter 540 | Combat Pay

Chapter 540: 540 | Combat Pay

Belle went through the portal first, and the torn neoprene flapped open over her hip as she stepped into the light. I got a clear view of black lace against pale skin, and I decided that counted as combat pay. Hikaru followed her in total silence, red eyes forward, shoulders square under a suit that clung to her like wet paint.

Jordan stood up on top of the spire and groaned loud enough to scare every fish in the fracture. Then he slid down the rock on his butt because his legs had apparently filed for divorce.

"I’m going through now, and nobody is allowed to talk to me for a week."

Javier caught him at the bottom and steered him toward the tear, notebook still held high over his head. The two of them vanished into the green, and the water rose another three centimeters around my ankles while I watched.

Blair stopped at the edge of the portal and turned back. Steam still rolled off her shoulders in slow white curls. Her suit hung open from throat to navel, showing a long stripe of pale skin that ended at the shadow between her hips, broken only by the pink gloss of her burn scar. Seawater beaded on her collarbones and hissed away into vapor before it could run anywhere interesting.

"I’ve saved your life twice now, Monroe."

"You’re counting the tentacle? That tentacle was barely holding me."

"It had you around the waist and was dragging you toward a mouth the size of a garage."

"I had a plan for that part."

"You never have a plan for any part, and you know it." 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

Her ice-blue eyes dropped to my chest, where the suit had torn along the leopard scars, and stayed there for a full second before she caught herself. The water around her boots started to bubble. She spun and stepped through the tear before I could say anything clever, and the tips of her ears had gone the color of a stop sign.

The ninth ring in the back of my skull flickered bright, then settled into a steadier glow than I had ever seen from it.

Naomi’s fingers slid between mine. She didn’t look at me. She stared straight at the portal with her jaw locked and her wet hair hanging down her back in heavy stripes of pink and black, and she squeezed my hand hard enough to grind my knuckles together.

"Together, and don’t you dare let go this time."

"I let go once, and I was drowning."

"That’s not an excuse I’m going to accept."

We stepped through as one, and the transit grabbed my nerves and dunked them in freezing seawater that only existed inside my skull. My lungs panicked. My ears popped hard enough to white out my vision, and then my boots hit dry grass on a California bluff under a sky so blue it hurt.

Real air hit my face, cold and salty, and I sucked it down so hard I started coughing again.

The staging area had turned into a small circus while we were gone. Two FGRA medics in yellow drysuits were already pulling Jordan onto a folding cot. Javier stood beside him reading kill counts off his notebook to anyone within earshot, which at the moment meant a very tired handler and one confused seagull. Deluca waited at his folding table under a canopy, clipboard in hand, looking at us like we had crawled out of a sewer.

In fairness to Deluca, we smelled like we had crawled out of a sewer.

Belle stalked toward the table first. Her suit had peeled so far down her left side that the tear now reached her ribs, and she walked like she was wearing a ball gown instead of wet rubber and ruined lingerie. Two medics turned their heads to watch her pass, and one of them walked into a tent pole.

"Clear time?"

Deluca checked his tablet, then checked it again, then looked at Javier with new respect.

"Fifty-eight minutes and forty seconds, and the tide surged thirty-eight minutes early. Your analyst’s buoy data was right."

Javier flushed down to his collar and tried to hide behind the notebook. Belle patted his shoulder twice, the way you’d pat a good dog, and turned back to Deluca.

"Kill count, including the alpha, and then the core valuation."

"Sixty-one confirmed hostiles plus one Silver-class alpha, and zero casualties on your roster."

"Good. Now the core."

Deluca’s pen stopped moving. He looked up at me, and I suddenly felt very aware of the black ichor drying in my hair.

"The core was destroyed during termination. We recovered fragments from the surf line, but the primary mass shattered."

Belle turned around slowly. Her amber-brown eyes found me across the grass, and her expression drained of color, then filled back up in blotchy red. She started walking toward me, and I briefly considered jumping off the bluff to avoid the conversation.

"You stabbed it."

"The core had to die, Belle, and I needed a pointy option."

"You stabbed a Silver alpha core the size of a beach ball in the middle of its face! Do you know what that thing was worth intact?"

"Your life, roughly, if I hadn’t stabbed it."

"Don’t give me math when I’m grieving, Monroe."

She jabbed a finger into my chest, directly over the graft, and the ring in the back of my skull flared amber so hard that I felt it in my teeth. Her finger stayed there. The anger in her face cracked for one breath, and underneath it I saw the girl who had screamed at me not to jump, who had shoved me forward anyway.

"You drank my bottle too."

"It was an emergency."

"Everything’s an emergency with you. You’ve had nine emergencies this month, and I’m keeping receipts on all of them."

Deluca cleared his throat from behind her, and Belle whipped around like he’d insulted her mother.

"Fragment valuation comes to roughly eleven thousand at current market, plus clear bonus. Your squad will net about thirty-four thousand before academy cut."