Divine Milking System

Chapter 428: 428 | The Milk Man Cometh

The clothes were gone. Obviously the clothes were gone. The clothes had been shredded across the chest, soaked in enough blood to fail every biohazard regulation in California, and then presumably incinerated by someone who’d taken one look and made a decision.

What waited for me instead, folded precisely on the chair where Naomi’s jacket used to be, was a stack of clothing that had never been within a hundred yards of a Vault outlet store. These were the kinds of clothes people wore when they had actual money and someone else to carry their bags.

Black jeans, first. The kind with real stitching, not the factory stamping that came apart after three washes. I could tell just by looking at them that these had been made by someone who gave a damn about how fabric sat against skin. The charcoal henley on top felt like it had been grown in some luxury greenhouse, not churned out of a textile mill in Bangladesh. Soft in a way that made you understand why rich people complained about thread counts.

Then the boots. Leather, obviously. Good leather, the kind that would last through an apocalypse and still look better than anything I’d owned in my previous life.

And the jacket. Not my jacket, because my jacket was currently decomposing in a medical waste incinerator after spending its final hours soaked in my blood. This jacket was what my jacket had dreamed of becoming before it died. Supple black leather, clean lines, a fit that would make photographers reconsider their angles. This was the kind of jacket you wore when you wanted to be remembered.

There was a note on top, written in handwriting I recognized from a shopping receipt I’d studied far too closely while standing in a boutique I couldn’t afford.

You looked like a war crime on national television. Fixed it. Do not thank me, thank me properly on Saturday. Wear the boots. -A

Aurora Fitzgerald had been trapped in a B-rank gate fighting lizards for a guild that wouldn’t let her leave, and she’d still found time to buy me an outfit remotely.

I got dressed. Everything fit like it had been cut for a body I’d only had for about four days, which meant Aurora had eyeballed my measurements from news footage of me half-dead in Naomi’s arms, and honestly that’s the most terrifying thing anyone has done to me this week.

My phone lit up while I was lacing the boots.

BELLE: shuttle left at 8. don’t panic

BELLE: ride’s arranged

BELLE: stop panicking

JACE: I wasn’t panicking

BELLE: you were absolutely panicking

NAOMI: we wanted to stay!! misato made us take the shuttle 😭

MISATO: Squad has a 1400 debrief with faculty. Monroe is excused. Everyone else is not.

JORDAN: i have brain damage and she’s still making me go

MISATO: You have a mild concussion and an attitude problem.

ADDISON: who’s driving him

BELLE: faculty transport

ADDISON: which faculty

BELLE: ...

ADDISON: oh no

ADDISON: 💀

I stared at the skull emoji for approximately four seconds before the group chat erupted and I stopped reading, because none of it was going to change the fact that I was already on the elevator down.

The hospital’s front loop had a covered drive, a bench, and a valet kid who looked about nineteen and profoundly bored. I stepped out into California morning heat and started scanning for one of the academy’s grey transport vans, the kind with the IHC seal on the door and suspension made out of hopes and prayers.

What I found instead was a car that made the valet kid put down his phone.

It sat at the curb in matte black, long-hooded, wide across the shoulders like it had been designed by somebody with a grudge. A 1969 Charger, or something close enough that I stopped caring about the exact year, because the exhaust note idling out of it was too clean and too deep to be original hardware. Somebody had gutted this thing and rebuilt its heart with money.

Leaning against the driver’s door with his elbows on the roof was Dominic Vale, silver-white hair pushed back, designer sunglasses on despite the covered drive, jacket that probably cost more than my entire scholarship, and the general posture of a man who had never once in his life been in a hurry.

"There he is," Vale said. "The Milk Man cometh."

My soul left my body.

"What."

"Milk Man." He pushed off the door. "That’s what the third-years are calling you. There’s a poll going around. The other options were Void Walker, Golden Boy, and Burger Guy, and Burger Guy is winning by a considerable margin, so consider Milk Man a mercy."

"Why would they call me that."

"No idea." He tilted his head. "You tell me, Heir Apparent."

Every muscle in my body decided at once to stop functioning. Vale’s mouth did something under the sunglasses, a small flat curve that told me absolutely nothing about how much he knew and everything about how much he was enjoying watching me sweat, and then he tapped the roof of the car twice.

"Get in."

I did not get in.

"Where’s the transport van?"

"Broke down outside Camarillo. Tragic. Nobody hurt." He walked around the front of the car, which took him a while, because the front of the car went on for a long time. "You’re getting a ride from your instructor. Feel honored. Katt begged me for a ride once and I told her the bus builds character."

"Is the van actually broken down?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to the van."

Vale laughed. Not the courtesy laugh, an actual one, short and surprised, and something in my chest did an unwelcome little flip because getting a genuine laugh out of the strongest hunter on faculty is a stat I didn’t know I wanted.

I still didn’t get in.

Look, I want to be clear about my hesitation. Four days ago this man sent ten first-year students into a Void Gate that killed Charles Leone. He’d known the entity density was thirty percent above baseline. He’d known about the secondary core probability and told us anyway, which meant either he genuinely didn’t know it was a Void Gate or he’d known and done it on purpose, and both answers were problems.

Also, he’d stood in a vault holding a fake Platinum crystal and told me he’d let my squad walk into a federal crime because stopping us wouldn’t have been fun.

So when Dominic Vale opens a car door for me, I don’t get in. I stand on the curb like a raccoon evaluating a dumpster with a suspicious latch.

"We’re not going to campus," Vale said.

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