Chapter 571 | The Agreed Word Shall Be "Monterey"

Chapter 571: 571 | The Agreed Word Shall Be "Monterey"

The graft gave a hard, sour throb behind my ribs.

He was not accusing me of anything. He had no idea what he was holding, and that made it worse. Javier wrote everything down, and he would keep writing it down. In a week, a man with a shield on his lapel would ask to see his notebooks, and Javier would hand them over with both hands and a proud red face, and somewhere in the back would sit a page with Naomi’s name and Misato’s name and a column of numbers that pointed at me.

"Hey," I said. "Do me a favor and stop writing that down."

He looked up. His pen stopped moving on the page.

"Why?" he asked.

"It’s their stuff, man." I kept my voice easy, the voice I used on bouncers and professors and Vale. "Naomi doesn’t love people tracking her numbers, and the Captain would murder you with a clipboard. Just let it go."

Javier looked at me for a long moment across the lamp glow.

He had brown eyes, wide and earnest behind his glasses. I had seen those eyes scared and crying and lit up over a dagger technique, and I had seen them go soft every time Blair Davenport insulted him. I had never once seen them like this, steady and careful, as though he were reading me the same way he read a tide chart.

"Okay," he said. "I hear you."

He closed the notebook. He did not cross the page out, and he did not tear it loose, and he did not say he would stop. He put the green notebook on top of his stack and laid his hand on the cover, right over the Vanguard card tucked inside the front.

For nine weeks, every time I asked Javier for something, he had said yes before I finished the sentence. This time he simply looked at me, and he did not promise.

"Your conclusion needs one more sentence," he said, and turned back to his own screen.

I typed the sentence. I did not taste any of the words.

I hit three thousand and fourteen words at one ten in the morning.

Javier had already packed his fortress into a backpack big enough to hold a small child, and he was zipping it shut with the green notebook on top. He gave me a little salute from the end of the table, still red around the eyes, still smiling, and then he walked off into the stacks with the card in his pocket.

I sat alone under my little yellow lamp and stared at the gray line in my vision.

Resonance load: 8.4 / 9.

My phone lit up on the table beside my laptop. Naomi had sent a picture of her shell necklace on her nightstand, her yellow dress folded beside it, with a line underneath.

come to bed, you’re thinking too loud from across campus

Addison sent a skull emoji and then another line. coffee jellies, three, tuesday, you will not escape.

I grinned at the screen, and some of the cold eased up under my sternum.

Then my phone buzzed again at one fourteen. It was Belle.

She had not sent words, and Belle always sent words. Belle sent paragraphs and spreadsheets and timestamped incident reports with footnotes. This time she forwarded a file with no comment at all, and that scared me more than any of her paragraphs had.

The forwarding header showed the original sender, Harrington, Vale and Associates, Personal Counsel to Ms. Blair Davenport. Under that sat a single PDF attachment, with a little red icon and a filename that made the graft in my chest lurch.

DAVENPORT_TERMS_v4_FINAL_FINAL.pdf

I opened the file. At one fifteen in the morning I have never left a red icon alone, and that stubborn streak beat whatever survival instinct told me to close my laptop and go to bed.

The first page loaded under a gold letterhead that probably cost more than most students’ tuition. Every pixel of that crest screamed money and better lawyers than you.

PRIVATE WAGER SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT. Between Blair Catherine Davenport, hereinafter Party A, and Jace Monroe, hereinafter Party B. Drafted at the request of Party A, 11:47 PM.

The timestamp told me everything. Someone in San Francisco had gotten a call from an eighteen-year-old girl at a quarter to midnight. That lawyer had sat up in bed, turned on his desk lamp, and typed this thing out while his wife rolled over and muttered about billable hours. I respected his dedication. I also wanted to buy him a drink and apologize for whatever sleepless nights Blair had given him in the last six hours.

Under the title someone had added a note in red text.

Version four supersedes versions one through three, which Party A has requested be shredded.

"Four drafts," I muttered to the empty study room. "She wrote four drafts of a sex contract."

The Ruby kid with his face on a chemistry textbook snored into his arm, which I took as validation from a neutral third party.

Clause One laid out the bet in language so sterile it could have been a parking lease. Top five at Winter Evaluation meant Party A joined the Midnight Foxes for second semester and submitted to Party B’s authority. Anything below top five meant Party B withdrew from San Nicolas Academy and submitted to Party A’s authority.

Clause Two spent three full paragraphs explaining what "submitted to authority" meant without ever using a single word that would make Johnathan Davenport call his own lawyers. It danced around ownership and obedience and total control with the kind of linguistic gymnastics that probably cost two hundred dollars per sentence.

I scrolled down. The PDF went on for nine pages.

Nine pages.

For a bet we made in a training room while she was coming down from an orgasm and I was trying not to pass out from mana drain.

Clause Three made me sit back in my chair.

Party A retains the unconditional right to suspend or terminate any term of this Agreement at any time, by verbal statement or by use of the agreed word, and Party B shall comply at once. The agreed word shall be "Monterey."