Chapter 736 | The Scallion on My Boot

Chapter 736: 736 | The Scallion on My Boot

I didn’t take the seven-thirty bus, because the seven-thirty bus was already halfway across the river while I stood on the sidewalk outside Lin’s watching my breath fog in the November drizzle. I caught the seven-forty-eight instead. It was packed to the doors with wet commuters who smelled like damp wool and cheap umbrella nylon, and I spent thirty-five minutes wedged between a guy hugging a bucket of drywall mud and an old lady who guarded a plastic bag of groceries like it held state secrets and jabbed her elbow into my knees every time the bus braked.

By the time I’d transferred to Route 14 at Central Station and ridden it up the ridge into the sunshine, it was eight-fifty-two. The grey-haired morning driver had finished her loop and swapped off with a guy who watched me tap my card the way you’d watch a raccoon climb out of your trash can, so I didn’t even get a hard-boiled egg out of the deal.

I cleared the main gate at eight-fifty-six and gave the WARDEN pillar a two-finger salute when it informed me my heart rate was consistent with mild tardiness. Then I ran the Academic Spine at the exact top speed a Rare-tier Channeler with a mid-tier file could hit on camera without triggering a WARDEN advisory.

It wasn’t fast enough. The bell rang while I was still on the second-floor stairs of Building C.

I skidded to a stop outside Room 214 at nine-oh-four. I gave my lungs three seconds to fake some heavy breathing and stuffed my wet utility jacket in my bag. Then I pushed the door open.

Nineteen heads swiveled in the tiered amphitheater seats. At the podium, Imara Steele stopped mid-sentence with a whiteboard marker in her left hand and a coffee mug in her right, her fitted black jacket zipped to the collar. She tipped her chin up, and her eyes found my face with the look a shark gets when somebody dumps a leaky bucket of chum off the back of a boat.

"Belmont." Her voice reached the top row without needing help from the walls. "We were discussing perimeter timing for the Invitational. Thank you for the live demonstration of what happens when a combatant fails to account for transit variables."

"Route 31 had a disagreement with a garbage truck on Fourth, ma’am," I said, heading down the steps toward the third row with my bag over my shoulder. "The garbage truck won."

"Fascinating." Steele’s mouth didn’t move. "Ten miles after afternoon dismissal. No Aspects. Finish in under sixty-five minutes and I might let you eat dinner before your knees lock up. Sit down."

"Yes, ma’am," I said, and slid into my seat between Percy and Felicity.

Steele’s attention stayed on me one second longer, and the room picked up a sharper edge without her doing anything else. On my left, Percy’s pen never stopped moving across his notebook, but he nudged a folded square of graph paper two inches over until its corner touched my wrist.

"Six minutes and fourteen seconds past the bell," Percy murmured, eyes on his margin notes. "Your hair is dry at the roots and damp at the ends, so you ran from the gate in the sun after standing under an awning on the Eastside for at least twelve minutes. Also, there’s a scallion skin on your left boot."

I looked under the desk. Sure enough, a tiny green ring of wet onion clung to the steel toe cap, right below Ophelia’s double-bow bunny ears. I scraped it off on the chair leg before Caden could hang over the seat back and write a third act about it.

On my right, Felicity kept her mouth shut, which for Felicity was its own kind of announcement. She sat with her ankles crossed and her chin propped on her palm, blonde hair spilling over one shoulder in loose waves that smelled like vanilla and expensive mousse. When Steele turned to sketch the southeast gallery sightlines on the whiteboard, Felicity slid her left foot across the gap between our desks and hooked her ankle behind my calf. She gave it a slow squeeze through her charcoal stocking, then let her knee settle against my thigh and left it there.

I glanced sideways. She didn’t look back. Her blue eyes stayed on the board while the corner of her mouth ticked up maybe two millimeters, and a translucent gold butterfly the size of a postage stamp bloomed into being under our shared desk. It brushed my knuckles with one flap of its wings, where nobody else could see, and crumbled into warm sparks.

Across the aisle in the second row, Camille Ortega sat with her arms folded and her two-tone braid hanging down her back like a fuse waiting for a match. She checked over her shoulder once and clocked the exact angle of Felicity’s leg under the table. Then she whipped back around so hard her blazer collar slapped her jaw. Down in the front row, alone as usual, Petra Lang never lifted her eyes from her leather planner. Her emerald pen kept gliding across the page in unhurried lines, as if she hadn’t spent half a night on her father’s Munich servers tracing the boxes I’d just chased across a river.

The System blinked into the bottom corner of my vision, a polite blue box nobody had invited.

?SYSTEM NOTIFICATION?

?Active Heroines within 15m Radius: 6 (Soleil, R. / Hardy, F. / Ortega, C. / Lang, P. / Cross, V. / Kennedy, M.)?

?Passive Trait [Musk]: Operating at full output in Enclosed Classroom Environment.?

?System Note: Instructor Steele’s mood is currently elevating the heart rates of everyone in the first four rows by 8%, which is compounding nicely with your pheromones. Do try to pay attention to the lecture, Host. You have ten miles to run at four o’clock.?

I blinked the box away, propped my elbow on the desk, and pulled up the syllabus on my tablet while Felicity’s knee stayed warm against my leg for the next forty-six minutes.