My Scumbag System Chapter 724: The Bourbon Sweats

"Sure."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I’m never going to say it like I mean it."

"I know," Emi said, and kissed me one more time, fast, and then shoved my chest until I stepped back, which worked only because I let it. She slid off the counter and turned around and picked up the rolling pin and immediately dropped it.

Maki hopped up onto the stool by the breakfast bar and sat with her tails wrapped around her paws like a magistrate settling in for a hearing.

You should have kept going. She wanted you to. Her scent went sharp when you picked her up.

Not in the kitchen where seventeen people eat.

You have no ambition. Also I want tuna.

You had tuna Tuesday.

That was Tuesday. This is a new week and a new tuna and my needs are ongoing.

The coffee maker had been broken since the tournament, which meant we were down to the ancient stovetop kettle and a bag of grounds that Juan had bought in bulk and that tasted like burnt tires. I filled the kettle anyway. The pipes shuddered behind the wall and I heard the water travel from the main line through the joists, through two elbows, past the pressure valve Braxton had jury-rigged with a hose clamp and a prayer.

I hated knowing that. There is no version of your life that improves when you can hear plumbing.

Emi rolled dough. I stood at the stove and watched the flame and let the new sense do its thing without fighting it, which was harder than it sounds, because it wanted to show me everything at once and I only had one brain to work with.

Then the temperature in the room dropped four degrees and the back door opened.

Braxton Miller stood in the doorway with an unlit synth-cigarette in his mouth, gym shorts, a t-shirt with the collar destroyed, and the expression of a man who had been awake for a while and had not enjoyed a single minute of it.

He looked at me for six full seconds without saying anything.

"Kitchen," he said. "Aoyama, out."

"Professor, I have thirty-six rolls in the second oven and if I leave them they’ll"

"Take them with you."

Emi looked at me. I nodded. She grabbed a tray with two towels and went, and paused in the doorway, and said, "Eat something," and then she was gone up the stairs with the smell of cinnamon trailing behind her like an argument she had won.

Braxton crossed to the counter. He took the kettle off the flame before it whistled, which I noted, because it meant he did not want the noise carrying.

"You know what woke me up," he said.

"No."

"Guess."

"The plumbing."

"The bourbon on my desk started sweating." Braxton set the kettle down. "I keep a glass out overnight. Habit. Bad one. Four fifteen this morning the condensation on that glass ran, which means the ambient temperature in my office went up while every window was shut and the building’s climate control has been dead since August. So I get up. I check the hall. And the hall is warm on the north side and cold on the south side and the line between them runs directly under your door."

Well.

"That’s not a training injury," Braxton said. "That’s not accelerated development. That’s not a late bloomer catching up. You want to tell me what it is, or do you want me to keep guessing out loud until I say something that makes you flinch?"

I could lie. I had Devil’s Advocate and the Liar’s Brooch and eighteen years of Kaelen’s mouth, and I could have built him a story with load-bearing walls and a nice view.

Except this was the man who threw me into a padded wall until I learned to stop telegraphing, and who covered for a three-day absence with people who make students disappear, and who handed me a B-Rank contract and full command because he wanted to see what I would do with it.

He would know. And knowing that I lied would cost more than the lie was worth.

"My Aspect isn’t what’s on the file," I said.

"I’ve known that since the Necropolis."

"It was never what’s on the file. Not from the first day."

Braxton took the synth-cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it and put it back.

"Keep going."

"Something changed in me. It finished changing last night while I was asleep, or it started finishing, I don’t know which yet. I can hear Raphael hitting the bag in the basement. I can tell you the water in that kettle came up two degrees since you took it off the burner. I can feel every person in this house and I could not do that yesterday."

"Aspect expansion."

"Not the kind you have a category for."

"Try me. I’ve seen a lot of categories."

"Have you seen one that adds thirty mana channels to a human body in six hours?"

That got him. His jaw shifted. He looked at the floor for a moment and then he pulled out the stool next to Maki and sat down on it heavily, and Maki, who did not like anybody, permitted this.

"Twenty-two years ago," Braxton said, "I ran with a woman named Talia Okonkwo. A-Rank. Best barrier user I ever saw, and I’ve seen Petrova work. Talia came out of a B-Rank Gate in the northern district with a scratch on her arm and by the end of that week she could hold a barrier over a city block. By the end of the month she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t stop hearing things nobody else heard."

I already knew the shape of the rest.

"VHC took her in for evaluation on a Tuesday," he said. "Insight Division. Standard workup. I got a letter six weeks later saying she’d been reassigned to a research post in Kyoshu. No forwarding address. No response to any message I sent for four years." He rolled the synth-cigarette between two fingers. "I stopped sending them in year five."