Chapter 372: My Girlfriends Reviewed the Crime Footage

Cherry had sent the advertisement with a helpful question about whether the man chasing us knew he owed me an appearance fee, which was how I learned that concern could arrive wearing lipstick and holding a calculator.

I watched Rex describe our escape as an exciting new partnership while Lukas bought water beside the relay tower. My wing hurt, our rental was famous, and a smiling lizard had apparently acquired the rights to my suffering without even sending a fruit basket.

[System: That’s show business, mate. First they steal your image, then they charge people to watch you struggle, and somehow you’re the rude cunt for biting the producer.]

I should have charged him before I bit anybody, because now it would look like I was negotiating.

The advertisement carried a contact number for anyone who spotted our crawler. I sent the recording to the rental company with a short explanation, then bought an actual road map because a route chosen by somebody hunting me probably had poor customer reviews.

Two hours later, we reached a salt camp with white drying beds and shade roofs patched from old freight covers. The manager asked for payment before she asked why I looked like a fancy kite that had lost a fight with a fence.

We paid two hundred forty credits for two nights, drinking water and a covered parking bay. She pointed at a separate tap and warned us that the water there washed equipment, not customers.

Lukas inspected the brown stream and asked how often people confused them.

"Often enough that the toilet doors don’t lock anymore," she said, handing him our room key.

I liked the place immediately. Its attempt to kill us had come with a warning label.

The rooms stood behind a wall of packed salt blocks. Beyond them, workers scraped the drying beds into carts while a small tractor carried empty containers back toward the pumps. Their children played beneath the shade mesh, arguing over a broken toy truck instead of rehearsing a tragic prophecy for passing tourists.

For once, the world had other things to do than throw something at my head.

Lukas cleaned grit from the crawler’s intake while I changed my wing dressing according to the medic’s instructions. The torn edge remained tender, and trying to extend it earned me a sharp reminder that being made of unusual material didn’t excuse being an idiot.

Old Mate watched from his private chair with a drink balanced on his stomach.

[System: Look at you, following medical advice. Another two responsible decisions and I’ll have to put a bloody cardigan on you.]

You could help by finding me a skill that made the bandage adhesive less personally invested in my body.

[System: You’ve got portals and a brain upgrade, you industrial power cable. Start by admitting you stuck the wrong side down.]

I corrected the dressing before Lukas returned and informed him that the whole process had gone beautifully.

The camp relay opened after sunset, when the wind dropped enough to stop grit collecting around its cooling fans. We joined a line of workers waiting to call home, which made my own excuse about being too busy sound especially pathetic.

Lyra answered from our apartment, with Cherry perched beside her and Bridget sitting close enough to share the screen. They had left a space between them that made the distance feel much longer than the map suggested.

Lyra asked what I had eaten, where I was sleeping and whether the wing injury in the recording looked worse than it felt.

"It felt exactly as stupid as it looked, but the medic treated it and I was resting."

"Show me the dressing, Matt, because you sound proud of doing the minimum."

Lukas joined the call on his phone and held its camera toward my wing. I couldn’t turn my internal phone into a photographer just because I wanted to control the angle, which felt like an unfair restriction on a naturally handsome patient.

Cherry inspected the result and announced that I looked like an expensive parcel returned for damage. Then she played a cropped clip of Lukas riding through pink celebration powder beneath the words AVAILABLE FOR WEDDINGS.

He reached for the phone before she finished explaining the pricing tiers.

Bridget stopped laughing long enough to ask about Rex’s glowing marks. I described the moving platform and divider, including what I hadn’t seen. She asked whether his hands had touched both objects first, and I remembered the easy brush of his fingers against the frame.

"Keep watching that," she said. "You don’t need to win an argument with him to learn something useful."

"Unfortunately, winning arguments was one of the cheaper hobbies available to me."

Lyra asked whether I wanted them to come out. I wanted it badly enough to picture her beside me before I answered, but this trip belonged to Lukas and me, and dragging them into Rex’s road show wouldn’t make me miss them less.

"I wanted you close, sweetheart, but I wanted this trip too. Those things could both be true without you having to fix them."

She smiled at that, then told me what she planned to cook when I returned, which was a low and effective attack on my resolve.

I gave them the updated totals, twenty-five thousand EXP and five hundred thirty-five IP, and promised another call after the next crossing. Cherry demanded a better angle if Lukas accepted another riding challenge. Bridget asked him to stop accepting them entirely.

The second night passed quietly. My wing remained sore, but the swelling hadn’t spread, and Lukas managed to service the intake without selling any important parts to a stranger.

At breakfast, the manager laid a fresh notice beside our plates. A driver had photographed the next road checkpoint and sent it through the camp relay.

Our crawler filled the center of the image, with Rex’s smiling face beside an offer of payment for information.

Lukas turned the map toward me and tapped a railway that curved away from the checkpoint, straight through a place labeled Jawbone Cut.

The manager studied his finger, then pushed the notice closer so we could read the smaller line beneath the photograph.

The reward doubled if we arrived alive, and tripled if nobody warned us first.