My Scumbag System Chapter 746: The Forgiving Bruise

Maki’s purr shook the terrarium hard enough that Bartholomew stopped, reassessed his position on the glass, and continued upward. Immortality had given him a magnificent indifference to noise. I envied him. I envied a snail. That was where we were.

Emi’s head dropped onto my shoulder somewhere around seven twenty.

She fought it first. Her whole body did that hitch thing where she jerked upright and blinked too fast and said something about needing to log the eight hour sweep in the notebook. Her hand was still on my thigh. Her aura was gone, burned down to nothing, and without it she was a girl with flour on her face and dried blood under her nails who had spent six hours holding a broken thing together with her bare will.

"Emi."

"I’m awake."

"You blinked for four seconds."

"That’s a normal blink."

"That’s a nap with extra steps."

She made a sound that might have been an argument if her jaw had cooperated. Then she tipped sideways and her forehead found the space under my collarbone and she was out. Just like that. Her breath went slow against my shirt and one of her braids came apart across my arm.

Natalia watched her fall asleep on me and did not say a single word about it.

That, more than anything else in the last twelve hours, told me how bad the morning had been.

I lifted Emi. She weighed nothing. Six months ago I would have needed to brace and grunt and pretend it was casual, and now my arms registered her the way they’d register a jacket. Thirty four primary channels. Forty nine secondary. My body was becoming a very efficient machine for a purpose nobody would explain to me, and the only immediate benefit was that I could carry a healer upstairs without making it weird.

"Third door," Natalia said. "She left it unlocked. She always leaves it unlocked because she thinks locks are rude."

"She thinks locks are rude."

"She told me that in September. I have not recovered."

Emi’s room smelled like sugar and antiseptic and the lavender stuff she rubbed on her wrists when her channels ached. Sketches of combat gear covered one wall, pinned in rows, every design annotated in three colors of pen. Healer boots with spring mechanisms. A med-kit that opened one handed. A gauntlet with a channel dampener built into the wrist, and on the margin, in her round handwriting, the words FOR HIM. NO ARGUING.

I put her down. Pulled the blanket up. She grabbed my sleeve in her sleep and mumbled something about hydration statistics.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

I unhooked her fingers one at a time and left.

Natalia was in the hallway with her back against the wall, arms crossed, one boot flat on the baseboard. The Ring had gone quiet. Not dark, quiet, the way a pot goes quiet when someone finally turns off the burner. Her braid was ruined. The bruise along her jaw had gone from purple to that ugly green yellow that means the body has started forgiving.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

Neither of us said the thing.

The thing being: I almost walked through that door. Not because something forced me. Because I wanted to. Because for the first time since I woke up in a body that wasn’t mine with a dead man’s memories rattling around inside it, something had reached out and said you fit here, and I had wanted to fit somewhere so badly that six people had to physically stand between me and it.

"Go to bed," I said.

"No."

"Natalia."

"You’ll do something stupid."

"I can’t do anything. I’m on a leash. Braxton, Emi, and you all independently threatened me about the same seventy two hours, which means either I am extremely loved or extremely inconvenient."

"Both." She pushed off the wall. Stopped close enough that the cold coming off her raised the hair on my forearms. "You’re both. That’s the whole problem with you."

Her hand came up. Flat on my chest, over the fifth node, the way she’d done it in the basement when she’d needed to feel me still ticking. Her palm was freezing. My skin ran two degrees hot. Somewhere between the two, the pendant sat and hummed and did nothing useful.

"Sunday," she said.

"Sunday."

"Your mother. Your father’s signature. The president of Valoria eating pot roast in your kitchen." Her thumb moved once. "If he shows up."

"He won’t."

"You don’t know that."

"He signed a form in the Apex Tower at five in the morning while I was asleep in a house with sixteen people and a bakeneko who can smell a lie through a wall. He’s not going to knock on the front door and ask for a napkin."

"Then why did she invite herself." Natalia’s eyes came up. Not angry. Working. "Seraphina. Why does the woman who has spent twenty three years preparing to kill whoever grows a lattice in their chest want to sit at a table with your mother."

I didn’t have an answer.

I had a guess, and the guess had a taste to it like a coin under the tongue, and I wasn’t going to say it out loud in a hallway at seven thirty in the morning with a sleeping healer eight feet away.

Natalia read my face anyway. She’d gotten too good at that.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. Keep it. Tell me at the table with your hand in mine like you promised."

"I did promise."

"You promise a lot of things."

"And I’m still alive, which statistically means I’m keeping most of them."

She hit my shoulder. Not hard. The frost on her knuckles bit through my sleeve.

Then she leaned in, put her forehead against mine, and stood there breathing for ten full seconds without saying anything at all. The Ring pulsed once against my chest. Cold enough to ache. She stepped back before I could decide what to do with my hands, turned, and walked to her door.

"Six thirty," she said without looking. "Kitchen. I’m not letting you eat cereal standing over the sink like an animal."