Chapter 616 | Growth is Uncomfortable

Chapter 616: 616 | Growth is Uncomfortable

Route 31 pulled up six minutes late, and the driver never glanced up from his thermos when I tapped my card. I ate Dralun’s pork bun before we cleared Halverson. The dough was still warm through the wax paper, and the filling tasted of black pepper and sweet soy. It was the best thing I had eaten in either of my lives, and I planned to take that secret to my grave, because his aunt would never let me forget it.

The bus crossed the river bridge at 8:03. Morning light came off the water and hit the towers on the far bank, so everything on the Strand side went gold while the Eastside stayed the color of old concrete behind me. I watched the scaffolded shell by the river shrink in the back window until a delivery truck blocked it.

After that I fell asleep against the glass, which my Demigod trait probably filed as a personal insult. I woke up at Central Station with the window seal printed down my cheek and a girl in a hoodie watching me from across the aisle. She held her phone at chest height, and the little red dot on her screen told me she had been filming for a while.

"Are you the gold guy from the dome thing?"

"I’m the tired guy from the bus thing, and I’d love a moment of privacy."

She took another photo anyway.

Route 14 was waiting at bay nine, and the driver was the same woman from yesterday, down to the reading glasses on their beaded chain. She took one look at the soot on my collar and waved me past the fare reader without a word. When I sat behind her, she dug through a lunch bag and handed a hard-boiled egg back over her shoulder.

"Front seat, gold kid. You look like you fought a building and got your ass handed to you."

"The building started it, and I’m calling the result a tie."

She snorted and pulled into traffic. I peeled the egg with fingers that stank of burnt drywall, and the interface opened in the corner of my vision while I chewed.

〘Status Update: Host has been awake for 25 hours and 12 minutes.〙

Last night I had knocked on doors until my knuckles ached, and a man had screamed at me about his dead brother on his own front step. Sleep sat very low on my list of wants. I felt awake in the spot under my sternum where the second heartbeat lived, and it had kept knocking since Yesenia closed her door.

The rock-skinned Hero was still working the checkpoint at the base of the ridge. He lowered his scanner when I stepped off the bus at 8:41, and his craggy eyebrows climbed his forehead.

"Rough first day at placement, kid?"

"I filed a raccoon report and returned a baby’s bracelet before sunrise. It’s been a big week for me."

He waved me through, and his face did a thing I lacked the brain cells to translate. The WARDEN pillar at the main gate glowed when I pressed my palm flat against it.

"Good morning, Lukas Belmont. Your cortisol is elevated and your blood sugar is low. You also smell of smoke and five-spice. I am glad you survived."

"You tell that to every kid who was in the dome."

"I do tell that to every kid from the dome. With you, I mean it slightly more."

I decided the facilities team had been playing with its settings and started running.

Homeroom began at 8:58. Prometheus House sat eleven minutes from the gate at a normal human walk, and I made it in four without Blitz, because a Rare-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot leash has no business breaking the sound barrier on a Tuesday. Caden was sprawled on the common room couch with a bowl of cereal on his knee, and he nearly lost it when I came through the door.

"Holy shit, look at you. Did the Eastside chew you up and spit you back?"

"It chewed me and decided I needed more seasoning. I have fourteen minutes to shower."

Percy leaned over the stairwell railing above us with his notebook already open. His blue hair was combed flat, and his collar pins were aligned to the millimeter.

"Four minutes for the shower and two for dressing leaves you a seven-minute walk on Route C. That gives you a margin of one minute and thirty seconds. I have been unable to account for your hair."

"Nobody can account for my hair, Percy. That’s the whole brand."

"You missed conditioning at 6:00, and I was concerned for exactly eleven minutes. I stopped at 6:11, when Steele said your supervisor had emailed her."

He disappeared back up the stairs before I could ask what that meant, which was either kindness or strategy, and with Percy the line between those was very thin.

I showered in four minutes flat. The water ran grey off my shoulders for the first ninety seconds, carrying soot and a surprising amount of pink glitter from a bat that had failed to ruin my week. I found a long pastel strand stuck to my collarbone, a shade lighter than Sloane’s, and I sent it down the drain before I let myself think about whose drill curls had been tickling my neck at five in the morning.

I slid into my third-row seat in Room 214 at 8:57 with wet hair and my collar half flipped. Felicity was already in her seat to my right, and she looked at me for a full two seconds before her nose wrinkled.

"Bestie, why do you smell like a dim sum restaurant that caught fire?"

"Because I spent the night in a dim sum restaurant that has a fire department problem."

"That’s the least helpful answer anyone has ever given me."

Caden dropped into the row behind me and put his feet on the back of my chair, and Steele walked in at 8:58 exactly with her coffee in her left hand. She had rolled her sleeves up again, and the black burn scarring on her right forearm caught the overhead lights all the way up to her elbow. She had stopped hiding it after the first week, and something in my chest squeezed whenever I saw it, because I had seen her go to her knees on that tile. Her pink eyes swept the room and landed on me.

"Belmont. You missed my conditioning this morning, and I noticed."

"I was working a case with my supervisor, Ms. Steele. It ran overnight."

She set down the coffee and picked up her tablet, and the smile she gave me was a shark smile wearing a gold jacket.

"Your supervisor sent me a report at 7:52. Would you like me to read it to the class?"

"I would really prefer that you didn’t, ma’am."

"KID DIDN’T BREAK ANYTHING. RETURNED FORTY-SEVEN. NEEDS TO EAT."