Chapter 539 | The Inconvenience of Your Death [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 539: 539 | The Inconvenience of Your Death [CASTLE BONUS]

The soup machine down the hall was apparently a Halloran Medical institution, because forty minutes after Juno left, half of Class 1-B knew I was awake and the other half was actively lying about not being on their way.

I know how the news traveled. Percy Mendoza runs a communication network with the efficiency of a small government intelligence agency, and I would bet real money that the moment Juno logged a status change in my chart, Percy’s notebook registered a data point and a text went out with a timestamp and an ETA. The kid loves me. He would never admit it in words. He shows it in spreadsheets.

The first knock wasn’t a knock. It was Camille Ortega deciding the door was a suggestion and shouldering through it with the specific momentum of someone who has spent the last twenty-nine hours managing an emotion she doesn’t have a filing category for.

"You absolute—" She stopped four feet from the bed. Her eyes did the thing her Precision Read does, cataloging every crack in the situation, and I watched her clock the gauze, the brace, the monitor, the color of my skin, and arrive at whatever conclusion her aspect handed her before she’d consciously formed it. Her two-tone hair was down for once, blonde-to-brown falling loose around a face that had not slept. She wore compression leggings and a fitted grey top that she had clearly not changed out of since the plaza, and the fabric pulled tight across her chest with each breath she was taking too fast. "You threw yourself in front of a directional annihilation beam."

"Technically it was black fire, not a beam. Different mechanic entirely."

"I don’t care about the mechanic." She crossed the last four feet. Her hand came up like she was going to check my pulse the way Sloane had, then stopped, then hovered, then landed flat on my sternum with the specific pressure of someone confirming a heartbeat she’d spent a day and a half unsure about. "Your stamina was at four percent. I watched the feed. I watched you stand up anyway."

"I’ve been told I have a low tolerance for spectating."

"That’s not a personality. That’s a death wish with good marketing."

Behind Camille, the door opened again, and this one did knock, three precise raps that I recognized before the wood finished vibrating, because there is exactly one person in my life who knocks like she’s filing a scheduling request.

Petra Lang entered the way she enters everything, which is to say she made the room feel like it had been waiting for her. She’d traded the silk pajamas for a cream sweater with the sleeves pushed up and a dark skirt, and her geometric black waves were arranged with a precision that told me she’d stopped to fix her hair before coming, which told me more than anything she was about to say. Her emerald eyes swept the room, found me, and did something complicated that she immediately suppressed.

"You," Petra said, "signed a federal document with my name on it four days ago."

"I remember. Good times."

"That document assumes you are a Rare-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot range and a twenty-pound lift capacity." Her voice stayed level. Her hands did not. She had them clasped in front of her the way she does when she’s holding something down. "There is now video footage, on the public internet, viewed several million times, of you moving faster than a licensed A-rank while wreathed in electricity that your registration does not account for, carrying a Legendary weapon that appears on no equipment manifest I have ever seen." A pause. The flush climbed from her collar. "My mother has called eleven times. My name is attached to your fiction. When that fiction collapses, and it is collapsing, my family’s name collapses with it."

"So this is a professional visit."

"This is—" Her jaw worked. "You could have died. And my name would have been on the paperwork of a dead liar." Her composure cracked exactly one degree wider than she wanted it to, and underneath the ice there was the girl from the conference room, the one who’d said when instead of if. "That would have been extremely inconvenient for me."

"You came to the medical wing at two in the morning to tell me my death would be inconvenient for your paperwork."

"Yes."

"Petra."

Her ears went red. She looked at the wall.

The third arrival didn’t knock or shoulder or file anything. Felicity Hardy came through the door like weather, blonde hair in a loose braid falling apart at the edges, a white cropped hoodie and pink shorts that she’d clearly slept in if she’d slept at all, and her blue eyes found me and did the read she does, the one that strips past the surface and lands on something underneath. She didn’t say anything for a second. She just looked at me, at the gauze and the brace and the version of me that had been unconscious for a day and change, and her lower lip did a thing that she caught and controlled.

Then she smiled, and the smile was a lie, and everyone in the room could tell it was a lie, and she deployed it anyway because that is Felicity Hardy’s entire load-bearing structure.

"So," Felicity said, crossing to the foot of the bed, "the internet thinks you’re a top-ten Hero in a student costume, and I have to say, bestie, the whole gold-lightning-savior aesthetic is very much giving main character, which, congratulations, but also—" and here the smile broke, right down the middle, and the real thing underneath came through raw and young and not performed at all, "—you ran toward a monster that put two A-rank instructors on the ground and you didn’t tell any of us the plan, and I found out you’d stopped breathing from Percy’s headcount, and Lukas, I sat in a hallway and listened to Percy count and your name came out flat, and I didn’t—" She stopped. Swallowed. Rebuilt the smile from nothing, badly. "I didn’t like that."

"I got better."

"You are not allowed to make jokes right now."

"It’s the only thing I’m cleared for. Juno was very specific."