My Scumbag System Chapter 688: The Healer and The Analyst

"I know. That’s why it’s terrible." Her fingers curled into my shirt. "Okay. Okay. You need to eat, then, because whatever you did burned through everything and I can feel your reserves and they’re at maybe forty percent, which is criminal, and I made a lot of food specifically for this exact situation."

She turned to grab a plate and I caught her wrist.

She stopped.

I felt her pulse jump under my thumb, a fast flutter against the skin, and I watched the color climb up her throat and spill across her cheeks. Four months of this and she still went scarlet every single time. It was, and I say this with the full weight of my objectivity, the most satisfying thing in my life.

"Thank you," I said. "For counting the days."

"S-someone had to."

"Nobody had to."

"Well, I wanted to." She tugged her wrist free and hid it behind her back like evidence. "Don’t make it a thing. It’s not a thing."

"Eleven trays, Emi."

"It’s not a thing!"

I laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, the sound coming up out of me without permission, and her whole face lit up at it, that ridiculous sunbeam grin breaking through the tears, and she smacked my arm and shoved a plate into my hands and told me to sit down and eat before she healed me into unconsciousness.

I ate. Three cinnamon rolls and half a loaf of something with almonds in it. The integration had left me hollow in a way that food only partly touched, but her Aspect kept washing over me while I chewed, pale green and gentle, filling in the parts that bread couldn’t reach.

"There’s a Gate," I said around a mouthful.

Her hands stilled. "When?"

"Three days. B-Rank. Braxton wants me running it."

"You’re leading?"

"I’m leading."

She sat down across the table from me and folded her hands and got very serious, which on Emi looked like a golden retriever attempting a business meeting. "Then I’m going."

"Obviously you’re going. You’re the only healer we have who doesn’t pass out from a papercut."

"I’m going to be better than last time." Her jaw set. "In the Necropolis I froze. Twice. Marco had to cover me and you took a hit that should have killed you because I wasn’t fast enough to get in front of it, and I have thought about that every single night since, and this time I’m going to be where I need to be before you need me there."

Something moved behind my ribs that had nothing to do with mana channels.

"Emi."

"Don’t argue with me."

"I wasn’t going to." I set the fork down. "I was going to say that’s the right answer."

She blinked. Then her whole face did the sunrise thing again and she had to look at the table to hide it.

Nel murmured, "Bond resonance climbing. The Audience is weeping. Aphrodite has opened a new tab."

Tell Aphrodite to mind her business.

"She says she’s an interested party and business is exactly what she’s minding."

I found Skylar on the back porch with her boots up on the railing and a clove cigarette burning down between two fingers.

She didn’t look at me. She never looked at me first. That was part of the routine.

"You smell like a lightning storm," she said. "And cinnamon. Which is a combination I’m going to need therapy about."

"Emi’s been baking."

"Emi’s been having a nervous collapse in pastry form. Marco ate eight cinnamon rolls yesterday and cried about how much he loves the team." She took a drag and blew smoke at the pine trees. "You went to Mount Katara."

I sat down on the step below her chair. "How do you know that?"

"Because I’m not stupid and neither are the seismic monitors the Academy keeps on the northern range." She tipped her head back. Indigo hair with those pink streaks, cut in that chin-level bob that always looked like she’d just lost a fight with a wind tunnel and won on points. "There was an energy spike at 0347 two nights ago. Big one. Trans-dimensional signature, not Aspect. Lasted forty-seven hours and change. And then you came home looking like somebody rebuilt you from a kit."

"Bubblegum, you are terrifying."

"Don’t call me that." She finally looked down at me, violet eyes half-lidded, red mouth flat. "What did you do?"

"You want the honest answer or the one that lets you sleep?"

"Guess."

So I told her.

Not all of it. Not the entity, not my mother wired to a table twenty-three years ago, not the Remnant standing on a fog-drowned pier wearing my mother’s face like a mask that fit too well. But the shape of it. That my father had built me. That there had been two of me and now there was one. That I’d been offered everything and taken a single drop of it and walked out with my name still attached.

Skylar listened. She didn’t interrupt, didn’t gasp, didn’t do the thing where people reach for your hand. She smoked her cigarette down to the filter and crushed it against the porch rail and then she said:

"So you’re a science experiment."

"Yeah."

"Your dad made you into a doorway for a cosmic horror and then vanished for eighteen years."

"Yeah."

"And two nights ago you climbed into a chair in a bunker and let something older than the species take your brain apart to see if it fit back together."

"That’s the one."

Skylar was silent for a long moment. Then she said, very calmly, "I’m going to stab you."

"That’s fair."

"Not right now. Later. When you’re not running on forty percent and Emi’s carbohydrate crusade." She swung her boots off the railing and stood, and she came down the steps until she was one above me, which put her at exactly the height where she could look me in the eye without craning her neck, which she’d absolutely engineered.

"You went alone."