Chương 133: Chapter 126

Siobhan I stepped out of the shower, wiped the fog off the glass with the flat of my hand, and had a look at what my father's blood and a lifetime of Aura work had built. I approved. The stomach was a ladder. The shoulders were lean and yet feminine. The chest, well, let us just say that my mother is Omazan (feisty even by the standards of the Omazan) and I am very much built like her. I am busty if you aren't getting it.

The one mark on otherwise perfection was a bruise coming up green along one hip from the Crucible. I considered the bruise more closely and decided it improved the composition. A girl who trains for a living does not get to be shy about the results, and I have never once been shy about anything. I took the mass that was my copper-red curls and wrapped it in the towel where it fell. I grinned, and opted not to wrap myself, walking out into the noise in all my naked glory. That is right, naked GLORY.

You're welcome, world. Thank me later. Lyala hung upside down off the end of my bed, and Megan had my interface, which she takes hostage when she has decided to read me my own life back to me.

"You will want to be dressed for this," Megan said, not looking up.

"I am always dressed. It is a state of mind." I found the green shorts, because a body kept in this condition should be let out for air, and Lyala threw a pillow at the principle of it.

"Your state of mind doesn't cover your junk. Put some clothes on."

"You know I think better when I am air drying." Megan and Lyala rolled their eyes but were smiling.

"So." Lyala righted herself, hair everywhere.

"The date. Dinner and dancing and the full production, or are you going to be a normal person for once in your life."

"I am already a spectacle, might as well embrace it," I said.

"Pretty soon I am going to be diving into Rifts whose sole intention is to kill me. So before I do that, I am going to enjoy every second, and so is the entire Underbranch, because I intend to document the evening in loving detail." Lyala clapped. Megan did not.

"You are going to love-bomb a boy you have spoken to three times," Megan said, "in front of thousands of strangers, on purpose. That is intense even for you."

"I am going to give him the full Siobhan. Flowers he did not ask for. Compliments that make grown men leave the room. A running account of exactly how devastating he is, posted in good light." I stretched, and something in my shoulder popped pleasantly.

"He will get a kick out of it. Boys like him always do, once they work out I am not serious."

"And if he does not get a kick out of it."

"Then I will kiss him until he feels better." Megan set the interface on her knee.

"This is about Deryn."

"This is about my entertainment. That Deryn Cassar will watch the whole thing from behind Ysolde Marran's shoulder and choke on it is a coincidence I have gone to some trouble to arrange." Deryn spent the last social with his hand at the small of Ysolde's back where the whole island could admire his taste, after a season of letting me believe that hand was mine to lose. I made no sound. I am the Dire Bear's daughter. We do not chase. We arrive, and the room rearranges itself around the fact.

And I did not reach for the nearest pretty boy to arrange it with. I was there for the Crucible the day Cale Arcanus fought his whole class. The Crucible is where the serious training goes on at Arclight Academy. I am usually in the training rooms in the Dungeon Simulator, but for some reason I thought I needed to take out some aggression on some of the boys in my class. I didn't notice anything at first. I am not one to notice things not related to training when I am in that mode.

Cale Arcanus is hard not to notice, though I didn't find out his name until later. It started with his classmates and clear Sanatio Expression work, which is strange in and of itself. Few people at Arclight have a Sanatio core. They usually opt for Aura first, as it's the easiest, being the only Expression you can use without a core, and Arcanum, which is the largest repertoire of Expressions and sub-expressions for the single core.

People who have a Sanatio core are either dedicated healers who wouldn't be caught dead on the Crucible, or Aura swordsmen who don't have a specific creed for single-core perfection. Always thought that was stupid. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. So there I was, whipping on the sycophants in my class, and bam, there is a scruffy but handsome guy straight up healing his classmates.

I mean real healing, testing, diagnosing, and regeneration all while sitting on a fighting mat. It was delicate work too, I could see it from over here. Being an AMAZING Aura expert myself, I can tell these things. Ok, handsome boy, you have my attention. Then I watched as the scruffy handsome boy took on his entire class. Sometimes one on one, sometimes two or more. He did it. Only using Ventus Elementa Arcanum. Ok, now that was impressive. I have spent my life around people who fight.

My father is the Dire Bear, an SSS-rank Adventurer who literally changed the game for Adventurers. I know the difference between a boy who has learned to fight for fun, for purpose, or even for imitation. Cale Arcanus was none of those things. He had learned to fight somewhere that if he did not fight he was going to die. Yessssss, that is absolutely my type. He is also, and I say this with a professional eye, unfairly good to look at even with the mountain man thing going on.

It took me a while to drag up the memory, but he also did the thing to Lucien Veylan that nobody on this island will say out loud. I am liking what I see more and more. Pretty, dangerous, and a mystery a great family spent real coin to bury. If I sat down to build the ideal boy to walk in on my arm and post about, I could not improve on the one who strolled into the Crucible and did not look at a soul. Megan interrupted my musing, which is something I do.

"And how did he say yes." Megan, again. Lyala plans the wedding. Megan checks the floor for the trapdoor.

"Like it was a dentist slot." I have not stopped turning it over since. Every boy I have asked for anything has said yes with his whole face. This one said it like he was granting me a small, patient favor and had somewhere more worthwhile to be.

"So he laid it on thick. The not-caring."

"Or he does not care," I said.

"I have not settled which is the greater insult, and I am enjoying both."

"Before you build the shrine," Megan said, "watch this. It moves the numbers." She turned the interface to the room. The tailor footage. Everyone on three planes had seen the thirty-second cut, the grey jacket, the turn, the crowd. But Megan had the long one, the version his sister had been posting all week, and his sister does not edit for mercy. It opened in a salon.

A woman with silver rings up one ear circled Cale with a pair of scissors like a verdict, and along the bottom of the frame the sister's commentary ran live and shameless. LOOK AT THE BONE STRUCTURE UNDER THAT MOP. I FOUND THIS IN A COFFEE SHOP LOOKING LIKE A FERAL SAINT. Lyala wheezed. The stylist turned the chair, the hair came off his face, blue-black and careless, and the salon made a sound. The sister's caption swallowed the whole frame in capitals. I AM NOT OKAY. NOBODY IS OKAY.

THE JAW WAS UNDER THERE THE ENTIRE TIME. Someone off-camera told him to smile.

"I am smiling," he said, not smiling, and the salon lost it. A woman asked what his secret was.

"A knife, mostly," he said, and the comments crawling up the side of the frame turned into a stampede. Lyala was crying. Even Megan's mouth had gone traitor.

"He is funny," Lyala managed.

"Why is he funny. You cannot be that handsome and funny. That is against the rules."

"I am not sure he is trying to be funny," I remarked. Lyala wiped at her eye.

"Oh, I like him even more." Then the door of the salon chimed, and a woman walked in. She came through it like she had bought the building on her way over. Dark leather. Fire worked up the side of her neck in ink that caught the light and looked like it had not yet made up its mind whether to spread. I have sat at my father's table across from most of the dangerous people on three planes. I did not need a name to know I was looking at a killer at rest. The footage did not linger on her.

It cut, because his sister has the instincts of a showman, to the second shop, which was not a shop so much as a stage, two floors of black glass and warm brass, and a man there lost his entire mind in the finest possible way. A tall creature in a coat the color of a fresh bruise swept the floor, took Cale by the chin, tipped his face to the light, and pressed a fist to his mouth like a man witnessing weather.

Behind the glass a crowd had gathered, all women, every one, and when the tailor threw his hands up they erupted like he had scored. Then they started feeding him.

"THE BLUE," someone screamed.

"PUT HIM IN THE BLUE."

"No, the grey, darling, the GREY."

"Take the shoulder in, I am begging you, take it in." The tailor gathered the shouting like a conductor, spun Cale into charcoal, then blue, then something grey that made the whole shop go up, and the boy in the middle of it stood there and let a room full of strangers dress him by committee. Someone yelled at him to say something. He looked at the lens, or through it.

"I have somewhere to be," he said. He plainly did not have somewhere to be. The shop howled. And through all of it, at the edge of the floor, the woman with the fire on her neck sat with her boots up on a second chair and watched him, and did not once look at the clothes. When his back came around, her eyes went the length of him, slow, came back up, and she smiled at nothing, small and sure, and did not trouble to hide it from a lens she plainly knew was running. The room went quiet. Even Lyala.

"That," Lyala said, "is not a student."

"No," I said.

"She is not." Megan was watching me and not the footage, and her face was not smug, which I could have swatted. It was kind, which I could not.

"The boy you are going to love-bomb for laughs," she said, "has a woman like that in his afternoon looking at him like she holds the deed, and he stared at the wall the whole time." That was the point where a sensible girl reconsiders. You do not build a public production around a boy with a killer looking at him like that in the corner of his own footage. I have never been the sensible one, and my father did not raise me to back away from the interesting thing because it turned out to have teeth.

The teeth are the appeal. I am going to walk into a Rift for a living. A boy with a dangerous woman in his history is barely a warm-up. I closed the interface and looked at the green coat on the back of the door. The one that ruins people. I was going to love-bomb Cale Arcanus off the edge of the feed. I was going to post every glorious second of it. Deryn Cassar was going to feel it behind his ribs.

And underneath all the production, quietly, I was going to learn what kind of boy keeps a woman like that in his afternoon and looks at the wall. I was not taking a single part of it seriously. I was, however, taking all of it.

"You are dripping on the rug," Megan said.

"Let it drip," I said, and reached for the coat.

"It is having the best day of its watery existence."