My Scumbag System Chapter 723: Scoop Stick

For whatever the fragment you got you’re going to become. Nel’s voice carried something rare and unwelcome, which was hesitation. I would advise against overexertion for seventy-two hours. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the Audience is losing its mind. Apollo has flagged your metrics as priority viewing. Somebody up there just moved a very large amount of divine currency.

Fantastic. My cell division was now a pay-per-view event.

Emi’s hand had not moved off my chest. Her thumb had, though, tracing a small, unconscious arc over the fabric of my shirt, drawing a gentle curve that followed the contour of muscle beneath. The motion was slow, exploratory, and I was ninety percent certain she didn’t even realize she was doing it. The remaining ten percent suspected she knew exactly what she was doing and was pretending otherwise, which was somehow infinitely more dangerous.

That small, repetitive movement was raising more temperature in my chest than the ring on my finger ever had.

"Emi."

"Hm." The sound was soft, distracted. Her eyes were still fixed on my chest, watching her own thumb move.

"Your hand."

She blinked. Looked down at her hand like it was a foreign object that had attached itself to her body without permission. Then the realization hit.

Her whole face went red in one continuous wave that started at her hairline and crashed down past her collarbone, probably continuing under her shirt to parts I wasn’t going to think about right now. She snatched her hand back like the shirt had bitten her, clutching it against her own chest like she needed to physically restrain it from wandering back.

"Sorry. Sorry. That’s—I was checking, that’s a diagnostic contact, it’s standard practice, we cover it in the second-year module on tactile mana assessment which I read ahead on because I wanted to be useful and it says fifteen seconds minimum for accurate reads and that was maybe forty seconds which means I was definitely not doing medical assessment anymore and I have absolutely no defense for that."

She was spiraling. I could practically see the gears grinding themselves into dust.

"You’re allowed to touch me."

"That’s worse." Her voice cracked slightly, going higher. "That’s so much worse. When you say it like it’s allowed, like it’s something you’re giving me permission to do, my brain goes completely blank and I forget words. Actual words. Real vocabulary just vanishes. Like yesterday I completely forgot the word for spoon."

Despite everything—the exhaustion still clinging to my bones, the uncomfortable awareness of my own altered body, the flour coating most of the visible kitchen—I felt my mouth twitch.

"What did you call it?"

"Scoop stick," Emi said miserably.

Behind her, Maki made a noise that was unmistakably laughter.

I picked Emi up.

Not far. Two inches, hands under her arms, and I set her down on the counter beside the dough, which put us at eye level and put the last of my personal restraint on a very short lease. She squeaked. Flour puffed off her shirt into the air between us and floated in the light in patterns my new senses insisted on tracking, thermal drift and air current and the slow curl of convection off her skin.

"Satori."

"You’ve been awake since five thirty because your body told you I was dying," I said. "You’ve made, what, forty cinnamon rolls."

"Thirty-six. And the dough."

"Thirty-six. You are running on no sleep and a stress response, and you were going to keep going until either the sun came up or you ran out of flour, and then you were going to smile at me in the common room and pretend everything was fine."

Emi’s antenna strands drooped. Her hands twisted in her lap.

"I don’t want to be the one who makes it heavier," she said. "Natalia’s already planning six days of infiltration prep, and Skylar’s already sharpening things, and Soomin cried twice yesterday, and Jacob committed a felony for you and he keeps looking at his own hands like they belong to somebody else. You have so many people leaning on you. I didn’t want to be another one."

I put my thumb under her chin and tipped her face up.

"You healed three cracked ribs, a hip contusion, and whatever the tail did to my kidney, and you did it in a loading bay behind a pharmacy in an evacuated neighborhood while a monster the size of a delivery truck was still steaming forty feet away," I said. "You don’t lean. You carry."

Her eyes went glassy and wet in about a second and a half.

"That’s not fair."

"None of this is fair. Welcome to Onyx House."

She grabbed the front of my shirt with both hands and pulled, and because she weighed one hundred and twenty-three pounds and I could currently hear a man’s heartbeat through two floors of hardwood, she did not move me an inch. Which meant she had to lean up instead.

Her mouth found mine and the Nectar went off like a struck match.

That was the part I had stopped being able to lie about. The evolved version did not manufacture anything. It only turned up the volume on what was already playing, and what was already playing in Emi Aoyama had been at a dangerous level since she brought me burnt eggs and cried about being useless. She made a small helpless sound against my lips and her knees came apart and her hands went from my shirt to my neck to my hair, and the dough got an elbow in it, and the pendant against my sternum flashed cold, cold, cold.

Natalia. Three rooms away. Awake. Watching through the bond with the composure of a woman keeping a ledger.

I broke the kiss. Emi chased it for half an inch before she caught herself.

"Pendant?" she breathed.

"Pendant."

"Is she mad?"

I checked. The cold had a texture to it now that I could read better than I used to, and under the frost there was something warmer and more complicated, which was the closest Natalia Kuzmina ever came to giving anybody permission.

"She’s keeping score," I said. "That’s different from mad. Mad is when things freeze."

Emi’s fingers were still in my hair. She was breathing through her mouth, lips swollen, flour on her cheek, and one shoulder of the pink shirt had slid down her arm at some point during the last forty seconds and revealed a strip of skin and a bra strap that was, for reasons I chose not to examine, patterned with tiny cartoon strawberries.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I’m going to get down off this counter and go back to my dough and think about literally anything else, and you are going to go drink coffee, and we are going to be professional teammates."