Chapter 569 | The Desperate and the Insane

Chapter 569: 569 | The Desperate and the Insane

The gray line was still there on Monday, sitting at the bottom edge of my vision like a sticky note somebody had slapped on the inside of my eyeball and forgotten to peel off.

Resonance load: 8.4 / 9. Graft upkeep recalculation pending.

I had stared at it on the ferry until Naomi fell asleep on my shoulder, and I had stared at it again at breakfast while Belle stole my bacon. It never changed, and it never explained itself, and by Monday afternoon I had decided that ignoring it was a valid strategy. I had a deadline that could actually hurt me, and the graft could wait in line.

Dr. Cross wanted two thousand words on adaptive engagement in transition biomes. She also wanted an extra thousand from me personally, a firsthand account of standing on a sea monster’s forehead, because she was a sadist in a pencil skirt. That added up to three thousand words on a forehead, due Tuesday morning at eight, and at eleven fifty-two on Monday night I had four hundred and six of them.

The library at midnight belonged to the desperate and the insane. The overhead lights ran at half power after eleven, so the stacks turned into long gray canyons, and every table sat in its own pool of yellow lamp glow. A Ruby kid slept on a chemistry textbook three tables over with his mouth open. Two Emerald girls whispered over a laptop near the windows, and every few minutes one of them giggled and the other one shushed her. The whole place smelled like old carpet and somebody’s illegal ramen.

Javier Mendoza sat across from me surrounded by a fortress of notebooks.

He had five of them open in a half circle, plus his laptop, plus a printed tide chart from the Monterey buoy with highlighter in four colors. His hair stuck up on one side where he kept shoving his hand through it, and his Obsidian hoodie had a coffee stain on the cuff shaped like Florida. He typed in short angry bursts, stopped, flipped a notebook page, and then typed again.

I had been watching him do this for forty minutes, and I had learned more from it than from my own document.

"Your tide math is wrong," he said without looking up.

"My tide math is fine, Mendoza."

"You wrote that the surge hit thirty-four minutes early." He turned his laptop toward me, and my own shared document glowed on his screen with a red comment bubble floating in the margin. "It hit thirty-eight minutes early. I have the buoy log right here, and I also have your face on helmet cam yelling about it at minute thirty-eight."

"I rounded it for narrative flow."

"You can’t round a tide, Jace." He looked at me over the laptop with an expression of real pain, and his voice cracked on my name. "Four minutes is the whole difference between standing on rock and drowning. Dr. Cross will notice the number, and then she’ll circle it in red, and then she’ll read it out loud in class."

He had a point, and I hated it. I fixed the number.

He went back to typing, and then he made a small wounded noise and turned the laptop toward me again. Another red bubble sat in the margin, and this one pointed at a sentence I had been proud of.

"This is a comma splice," Javier informed me.

"That’s a stylistic choice."

"It’s a crime against a semicolon." He scrolled down, and four more bubbles appeared in a neat red column. "You do it here and here, plus twice in the paragraph about Naomi. You write like you talk, which is fine for a group chat, but this goes in your academic file forever."

"I write with energy, man."

"You write with commas that have no business being where they are." He pushed his glasses up his nose with one knuckle, and his ears went pink. "Sorry, I’m being annoying. I just think your forehead section is really good, and I don’t want the punctuation to drag it down."

I stared at him across the lamp glow. He meant it, and that was the problem with Javier. Every insult came wrapped in a compliment, and every compliment came wrapped in an apology, so I could never get properly mad at him.

I fixed the comma splices.

By twelve thirty I had fourteen hundred words, and Javier had stopped flinching at my sentences quite as often.

He had gone back to his own essay, which sat at twenty-six hundred words with forty footnotes, because Javier Mendoza could not turn in a document unless it could survive a peer review panel and a house fire. I was trying to describe the moment my spear fell into the kelp without making myself sound like an idiot. That was hard, mostly because I had been an idiot.

Footsteps came down the aisle between the stacks, steady on the carpet, and they stopped at the end of our table.

The woman standing there did not belong in a library at midnight. She wore a charcoal blazer cut sharp at the waist over a black turtleneck, and slim gray trousers that ended at a pair of polished ankle boots. A silver pin sat on her lapel, a shield crossed with a spear, the crest of Sentinel Vanguard. She was maybe thirty, tall and long-limbed, with dark skin and close-cropped black hair that showed off a long neck and a pair of small gold hoops. The turtleneck clung to her chest in a way that probably did a lot of work in recruiting meetings, and I made myself look at the pin instead, which mostly worked.

Snake Eyes flickered on reflex and died against her like a match in the rain. My vision threw up the error text before I could stop it.

ERROR. Too high to analyze.

Great. Another woman on this island who could fold me in half.

"Sorry for the hour," she said. "Night owls are easier to catch than day ones. I’m Imani Okafor, talent liaison for Sentinel Vanguard."