Chapter 570 | Anomalies, Monterey

Chapter 570: 570 | Anomalies, Monterey

I opened my mouth. I had a whole line ready about Burger Guy being available for a very reasonable fee.

She turned toward Javier.

"You’re Javier Mendoza," she said.

Javier’s pen fell out of his hand. It rolled across his tide chart, off the table, and onto the carpet, and he did not pick it up. His face went gray, then red, and then a blotchy mix of both.

"I, um," he said. "Yes. Hi, I’m Javier. That’s me, ma’am."

"I read your buoy work on the Monterey clear," Imani told him. She pulled a slim tablet out of her blazer and tapped it awake, and the screen showed one of his hand-drawn tide graphs, photographed and blown up big. "The FGRA tables had that window at ninety-two minutes, and you corrected it to eighty off four years of raw data and a moon phase adjustment. Our field analysts passed it around the office for two days. One of them cried a little, and he’s a very large man."

Javier made a sound that I could not spell.

"We’d like to sit you down for an interview," she went on. "It’s nothing formal yet, just a conversation about how you build your models and where you see yourself after the academy. Our Captain Cross would want to be on the call."

She said the name Cross, and something cold slid down the back of my neck.

Captain Elijah Cross was Javier’s hero. He was in the notebooks and the posters and every single story Javier had ever told about why he came to San Nicolas. In the novel I had once trashed in a comment section, there was a Chapter where a Vanguard scout found Javier after his first big gate, and it was the start of everything. It came with the mentorship and the climb, plus the endgame Javier was supposed to have.

That Chapter was not supposed to happen for another year. It was also supposed to happen without me sitting at the table.

The cold feeling settled in under my sternum, right next to the graft. It felt as though the story had noticed a typo and come back with a red pen of its own. I had eaten Javier’s arc piece by piece for nine weeks, taking the girls and the gates and the alpha kills, and now the plot had walked into the library at midnight in a nice blazer to take one thing back. My graft gave one slow, unhappy throb.

"I would, yes," Javier was saying. "I would love that, I mean. Sorry, my mouth isn’t working at the moment."

"Your mouth is doing fine for half past midnight." Imani slid a card across the table to him, white and thick, with the shield and spear stamped in silver. "Call that number by Friday. Bring the notebooks, all of them."

She looked at me then, for the first time, and her eyes moved over the bite mark above my collar and the scar ridges under my shirt.

"You’re Monroe," she said.

"I get that a lot."

"You climbed a Silver alpha by the face." Her mouth tilted at one corner. "My boss watched that footage four times and said a lot of words I won’t repeat in a library. Good luck with your essay, Mr. Monroe."

She left the way she came, and her boots made soft steady sounds down the aisle until the stacks swallowed her.

Javier sat frozen and stared at the card in front of him. He had both hands flat on the table on either side of it, and he did not touch it, as though it might evaporate if he made a sudden move. His eyes were very wet behind his glasses.

"Jace," he whispered. "Sentinel Vanguard knows my name."

"Yeah, man, they do."

"Captain Cross might be on the call." His voice broke all the way. "I have a poster of him in my room. My roommate makes fun of it every single morning."

I made myself grin, because it was the right thing to do, and because he deserved it more than anybody on this island. I reached across the table and shoved his shoulder hard enough to rock his chair.

"You earned that card," I said. "You saved eight people with a highlighter and some moon math, so go ahead and frame it."

He laughed, wet and shaky, and finally picked the card up. He tucked it into the front pocket of his favorite notebook, the battered green one, and then he pressed the cover down flat with his palm and held it there.

The cold under my sternum did not go anywhere.

At twelve fifty-eight I hit twenty-eight hundred words, and Javier offered to proofread the forehead section while I fixed my conclusion.

He read in silence for a while, mouthing the words, with his pen tapping against his lower lip. He fixed two commas without comment, which I took as a sign of deep respect. Then he paused on a paragraph and frowned, and he pulled his laptop closer and opened the helmet footage from Monterey in a second window.

I watched him scrub the timeline back to the moment Naomi rose out of the ocean under the alpha’s jaw. The frame froze on her hovering above the water, staff braced and glowing, her skin lit gold from the inside at the throat and wrists. Javier zoomed in on the gold light along her forearms and left it there.

"This is weird," he said absently, the way people mention the weather. "Naomi reads Gold in this whole sequence. I checked the mana output against her last assessment, and she’s tested Silver every time. Silver people don’t spike a full tier for twenty minutes at a stretch."

My stomach dropped through the chair.

"Adrenaline," I said. "People do crazy stuff in gates."

"Adrenaline gives you a burst." He scrubbed the timeline forward, to Misato’s clones swarming the alpha’s cheek with their steel poles. "This is a plateau. And look at the Captain’s clones here. They hold solid for eleven minutes with zero flicker, and Legion Split clones always flicker under strain. It’s in every paper on her ability, and her own assessment last month shows it too."

He reached for his green notebook. He flipped to a page near the back, and I saw his small neat handwriting under a heading I could read upside down. Anomalies, Monterey.

"That shouldn’t happen at their ranks," he said. "I wrote it down."