Chapter 554 | Operational Distractions

Chapter 554: 554 | Operational Distractions

By lap twelve I had stopped being a person and become a pair of legs with a grudge. The five clones ran in a loose ring around me, swapping places every hundred meters so I never found a clean line. Each time one of them slid past my shoulder, a stopwatch clicked and another lap landed on my tab.

"That puts you at nineteen total, field lead," the clone on my left said.

"You’re making those numbers up, Captain."

"I’m a clone, so I can’t make anything up." She drifted past me on the curve and clicked her watch. "That makes twenty now."

I want to state for the record that B-rank Endurance is a gift from the heavens. Six weeks ago I’d have died on lap two and been buried under the bleachers. Now my lungs simply filed a strongly worded memo every four hundred meters, and my calves sent a second memo cosigning the first. Misato’s buttermilk was still warm in my blood, and that warmth was carrying me further than any human being deserved to be carried.

The problem was the clones themselves.

They wore the Captain’s face and the Captain’s ponytail, and they ran in the Captain’s tight black training shorts that rode up a little more with every stride. Five copies of that ass bounced ahead of me in staggered formation, and my brain had to choose between counting laps and staring. My brain made the wrong choice every single time. That was how lap twenty became twenty-three.

"Eyes up front, Monroe," a clone said without turning around.

"My eyes are on the track, Captain."

"Your eyes are on my glutes, field lead." She glanced back over her shoulder, and her green eyes caught the gray morning light. "I can feel you staring through all five of us."

That stopped me cold for half a stride. Shared senses meant the original Misato was standing on the center line right now, feeling five separate pairs of eyes on her body. When I looked over, she had her tablet pressed flat against her chest like a shield. Her ears had gone the color of a stop sign.

I grinned, and she hated it. I could tell from forty meters away.

"Make it twenty-five," she yelled.

By the time she let me stop, the sun had cleared the cliffs and the grass had gone from gray to gold. I dropped flat on my back on the infield beside Jordan, who hadn’t moved an inch in forty minutes. The sky above us was a soft blue that had no idea I was suffering, which I found deeply rude.

"How many did you finish, man?" Jordan asked the clouds.

"She gave me twenty-eight in total."

"I ran four laps and I’m thinking about writing a will." He turned his head on the grass to look at me. "You smell like her soap, by the way."

"Everyone keeps telling me that today."

"Because it’s true, Jace." He closed his eyes again. "I’m too tired to judge you, but I’m judging you anyway."

Belle’s shadow fell across my face. She stood over me holding her laptop on one hip and a bottle of water in her free hand. The morning breeze kept catching the hem of her training tank, lifting it enough to show a strip of pale stomach and the edge of a navy sports bra. She knew exactly where my eyes went, and she let them go there for a full count of three before dropping the water on my chest.

"Hydrate before you embarrass the brand," she said.

"Thanks for your concern, Fox."

"It’s an investment in your health, not concern." She crouched beside me, and her blue braid swung over her shoulder. "Twenty-eight laps, a clone collision, and four confirmed glute violations before seven in the morning. I’ve never had this much material."

"You’re counting glute violations now?"

"I count everything you do, Jace." She tapped the screen, and I caught a column header that read OPERATIONAL DISTRACTIONS. "This is my favorite tab, and you’re carrying it alone."

Naomi knelt on my other side and pressed a cold towel against my neck without asking. Her pink eyes moved over my face, my chest, and back again, checking for damage the way a mechanic checks tires. Wait, I can’t say that. She checked me over twice, and her fingers lingered on the bite mark at my shoulder for one extra second.

"You’re fine," she said, and she smiled at me. "She went easy on you today."

"Twenty-eight laps counts as easy now?"

"Yesterday she wanted to put you in the ocean herself." Naomi tucked the towel around my collar. "Today she only made you run, so that’s growth."

Misato’s whistle split the morning in half.

"Assault variation three, everybody up now," she called. "Diamond formation, and Davenport is calling target priority."

We got up. Even Jordan got up, which tells you everything about the Captain’s voice.

The drill was the same one we’d run all week, except Misato had decided to stack the deck. Her Gold buff meant six clones instead of five, and each one hit harder than before. They came at us from the tree line in a staggered wedge, swinging wooden poles and moving fast enough that my eyes kept losing them in the shadows.

Naomi took the high point on a training platform and lit her staff. The blue-white glow ran up her forearms and into her braid, and she knocked the first clone flat before it crossed the halfway mark. Jordan’s shadows slid across the grass and caught two more by the ankles, and they went down hard in the dirt. Belle called positions from the left flank, and Hikaru moved through the gaps so fast I only tracked her by the clones dropping in her wake.

Blair stood at her support point on the right, and she was not having a good morning.

"Monroe, cover the left gap now," she snapped.

"I’m already there, Davenport."

"Then cover it better, and stop looking at my flank."

"Your flank happens to be on fire," I pointed out.

She looked down. Her training jacket had a scorch line running from her hip to her ribs where her own heat had leaked through the fabric. The grass around her boots had died in a perfect ring, and the air above her shoulders shimmered. She had been angry since she saw the hoodie, and her ability kept tattling on her.

A clone came over the berm at Blair’s back, and she didn’t see it.

I pulled on the Copper Legion Split before I had time to second-guess myself. My clone peeled off my shoulder in a burst of lime light and sprinted across the grass. He caught the Misato clone around the waist from behind and hauled her backward into the dirt, and both of them rolled away in a tangle of limbs.

The doubled senses slammed into me again. I felt grass against two spines and two sets of hands grabbing at fabric. One of those sets of hands landed squarely on a very firm Misato chest, which my clone had not planned. My clone was a moron in exactly the same ways I was a moron.

On the center line, the real Misato dropped her tablet in the grass.

"Monroe!" Her voice came out a full octave higher than usual. "Get your clone’s hand off my clone!"

"He’s covering the left gap, Captain."

"He’s covering my left breast, field lead!"

My clone looked down at his hand. He looked up at me across forty meters of training field. Then he squeezed once, purely out of scientific curiosity, and the real Misato made a sound I last heard at two in the morning in her bedroom.

The Misato clone underneath him went bright red and punched him in the face. He exploded into green sparks, and her stopwatch clicked.

"Three more laps for you," she said, and then she dissolved too, because the original had lost focus completely.