My Scumbag System Chapter 726: Data Point: One Bite

Natalia did not repeat herself. She never has to. She said sit down and my body was already moving toward the basement stairs before my brain filed the objection, which tells you everything about the last four months of my life.

"I’m fine."

"You are radiating," she said behind me. "Your resting temperature is two degrees over baseline and you smell like the air before lightning. Emi’s aura misfired at five thirty-one. Braxton’s whiskey sweated through a wall. Skylar woke up. Raphael has been punching a bag for ninety minutes because his skin itches and he doesn’t know why." Her hand landed flat between my shoulder blades and it was cold enough that my shirt fogged. "You are not fine. You are a broadcast. Move."

The basement gym smelled like rubber mats and old sweat and the faint chemical ghost of whatever Emi cleaned the medical bench with. Natalia flipped every light on. All of them. The bad fluorescent one over the squat rack that flickered at a frequency I could now feel in my molars.

"Shirt off. On the bench."

"You know, most people buy me dinner first."

"I have bought you dinner. Four times. You ate mine both times we went to the ramen place." She dragged the medical cart out from under the stairs with one hand and her Ring flared blue and the wheels lifted an inch off the floor so they wouldn’t squeal. "Shirt. Off."

I pulled it over my head and sat.

And then I got to watch a girl who had spent the last thirty-six hours running two combat formations, sealing a dimensional breach, and threatening a gas authority into existence turn into something clinical. She snapped on the little penlight she stole from Emi’s kit in August. She pulled up the datapad with my Academy medical baseline from the July intake, the one where I’d been graded as a very ordinary C-Rank with an interesting file note. She set a thermometer strip against my sternum and watched the numbers climb.

"Ninety-nine point six," she said. "You were ninety-seven point four in July."

"Maybe I’m sick."

"You have never been sick. Not once. Not even after the Necropolis when you were breathing through a punctured lung in a swamp." She did not look up. "Do you know how insane that is? Emi and I talked about it in September. Sixteen people in this house and every single one of us caught that cold that went through the Academy. You slept nine hours and got up and did burpees."

The Ring hummed. Frost crept up the leg of the bench and stopped at the exact point where my calf touched the metal, which meant her own Aspect was reading me as a heat source and adjusting without her telling it to.

"Natalia."

"Don’t." Her jaw moved. "Don’t use my name like that right now. Not while I’m counting."

So I shut up and let her count.

She mapped me with her hands. Not the way she does at two in the morning with the door locked. This was different, and somehow worse, because she went slow and she pressed and she stopped every time her fingers found something that shouldn’t be there. Base of the throat. Under the collarbone. The soft dip beside the sternum. Down the ribs where three of them had been broken and glued back by Emi in a pharmacy loading bay six hours ago.

Her fingertips stopped over my right side.

"These healed."

"Emi’s good."

"Emi is very good and she is not this good," Natalia said. "She sealed cracks. She did not knit bone. This is knitted bone. Six hours." She pressed harder, hard enough that I should have gasped, and I felt pressure and nothing else. "Does that hurt."

"No."

"It should hurt for eleven days."

Something moved in the shadow under the free weights and unfolded into a girl.

Maki came out of my shadow wearing nothing at all, which was standard, and she stretched with her arms over her head so both tails swept the mats in a slow arc and every single line of her body caught the awful fluorescent light in a way that suggested three centuries of practice at exactly this.

"He also does not bruise anymore," Maki said, and her golden eyes found Natalia’s with the specific glee of a cat presenting a dead bird. "I bit him Tuesday. Hard. Broke skin. It was gone in an hour and I was very sad about it."

"Maki."

"What. She asked for data."

"She did not ask you."

"She did not ask me not to." Maki dropped onto the mats and folded her legs under herself and rested her chin in her palms with her tails swaying behind her like a metronome set to smug.

Natalia’s Ring pulsed and the temperature in the basement fell four degrees and she did not look away from my ribs.

"Put on clothes," she said. "There is a hoodie in the laundry basket by the stairs."

"I do not like clothes."

"I do not care."

"You care very much," Maki said. "You are counting his heartbeats and pretending it is medicine because if you stop counting you will have to feel something, and you are not good at that unless he is inside you."

I have watched Natalia Kuzmina freeze a battlefield. I have watched her build a dragon out of atmospheric moisture and throw it at a girl who could summon lightning. I have never once seen her miss a beat the way she missed one right then.

"Hoodie," Natalia said. "Now. Or I will freeze your tails to the floor and leave you there until dinner."

Maki considered this with genuine interest, then got up and got the hoodie, and put it on, and it came down to the middle of her thighs and did absolutely nothing to fix anything.

Natalia went back to work.

"Left arm out. Palm up."

I gave her my arm. She traced two fingers from the inside of my wrist up to the elbow crease, and her Ring flared, and a thin skin of frost formed along my forearm and then broke apart in a pattern.

She stared at it.

"Say something," I said.