Divine Milking System

Chapter 431: 431 | ERROR - Too High to Analyze

"Yeah," I said. "Guilty as charged, I guess."

She stared at me for a solid four seconds, and then she put down the ball of dough she’d been working and wiped her hands on the front of her apron and pulled her phone out of her back pocket with the urgency of somebody reporting a house fire.

"Dad’s gonna lose it. Dad. Dad, he’s here. The burger kid from the news is standing at our counter." She had the phone pinned between her shoulder and her ear and she was already reaching under the counter for something. "No, I’m not messing with you. No, I didn’t call him that to his face." A pause. "I absolutely called him that to his face, he’s fine with it, look at him, he’s got the face of a guy who’s fine with things."

I did not, in fact, have the face of a guy who was fine with things. I had the face of a guy who had spent four days in a dimension that ate a classmate and eighteen hours unconscious in a hospital bed and about forty-five minutes in a fake classroom with a woman in a trench coat, and the last thing my face was equipped to process was becoming a regional celebrity because I asked for ground beef on television.

I ran Snake Eyes on reflex. Six weeks of habit, same as breathing.

◆ SNAKE EYES FAILED ◆

Target rank exceeds limitation.

├─ Name: Unknown

├─ Bust: 34DD (physical observation only)

└─ Rank: ERROR - Too high to analyze

Cool. Excellent. My magic pervert eyes, which have never once failed to hand me a woman’s exact attraction percentage like a receipt, had just thrown a four-oh-four at a girl selling hamburgers on a pier.

Two ranks above me at minimum. She was Gold, or worse.

Now that I was actually looking instead of doing my usual scan-and-file routine, the evidence was all over her. Her forearms had the kind of thickness you don’t get from kneading dough, corded from the elbow down, with a scar running along the outside of the left one that stopped being a kitchen accident about three inches into its length. She’d been leaning her weight on the steel counter and the steel counter was flexing. Her shoulders sat too square. Her stance was too wide for someone standing still, feet apart, weight forward, the whole geometry of a person who could throw a punch from that position without adjusting anything first.

Also she was, and I want to be professional about this, absolutely stacked.

The bandana was faded red and tied back over dark hair that had escaped it in about six places. Sun had gotten to her, browning her arms two shades darker than her collarbones, and there was a streak of flour across her cheekbone and another one on the front of a white tank top that was already fighting a losing war against physics. The apron cinched at her waist and that cinch made everything above and below it a genuine safety hazard for men with weak constitutions. Denim shorts. Thighs that had clearly spent years doing something more strenuous than standing at a griddle. A chain around her neck with a dull bronze monster core hanging off it, cracked down one side, the kind of thing you don’t wear as jewelry unless it came out of something that almost killed you.

Twenty-six, maybe. Old enough that she looked at me and saw a kid, which was going to be a problem for the version of me that had already started drafting approaches.

"Okay, love you, I’m hanging up, he’s staring at my necklace." She dropped the phone on the counter and pointed at me. "You’ve got about nine minutes before my father limps down here from the tackle shop to shake your hand and tell you a story about 2033. I recommend you order fast and eat faster."

"What happens in nine minutes?"

"He starts at 2033 and he does not stop until the sun goes down."

Then her attention slid past me and landed on Vale, and her whole body language reorganized itself around him like a weather front coming in.

"And you," she said. "You brought a discharged hospital patient to my counter."

"He’s fully healed." Vale had taken the stool at the far end and hooked one boot on the rail, sunglasses still on, indoors, at a burger shack, because the man has never once experienced shame. "Peterson did him last night. Gold-rank. Very thorough. Cost a fortune, though I didn’t pay for it, so I have no strong feelings."

"Peterson." She said it like a curse. "Peterson does field triage on gate teams. You had a Gold combat medic do closure work on a first-year?"

"His family sent the healer, actually. Different family. Long story with a lot of money in it."

"I hate every part of that sentence."

"You’ve always hated most of my sentences, Frankie."

"Because most of your sentences are load-bearing lies with a joke stapled to the front."

Frankie. Noted, filed, permanently.

She grabbed a spatula off the hook without looking at it, which was a hell of a party trick, and pointed it at him across the length of the counter. "Six weeks. Six weeks since you last came by and you show up in the Charger with a kid whose ribs were in three pieces on Thursday, and you didn’t call, and you didn’t text, and I had to find out from Channel Four that Obsidian lost a student."

The gulls kept screaming outside. Somebody’s kite hit the boardwalk for the fourth time in five minutes.

"Charles Leone," Vale said. "Third generation guild. Broke formation twelve times this semester and I have all twelve on tape."

"That’s not what I asked you and you know it isn’t."

"It’s the answer I have."

Frankie put the spatula down very slowly, which was somehow worse than if she’d thrown it, and I watched her jaw work while she decided which of about nine responses to use. She picked none of them. She turned to the flat-top instead, dropped two patties on it with a sound like the ocean hitting rock, and started slicing a tomato with a knife that moved faster than my eye wanted to follow.

I looked at Vale. Vale looked at the ocean. Nobody explained anything to me, because that’s the standard operating procedure of my entire life.

So I did what I do, which is push.

"How long were you two together?"

Frankie’s knife stopped. Vale’s mouth curved up under the sunglasses.

"Three years," he said.

"Two years and four months," she said.

"She rounds down."

"He rounds up because he counts the four months where I wasn’t speaking to him as part of the relationship."

"We were in the same house. Sharing a lease. You made me dinner."

"I made myself dinner. You ate it out of my refrigerator like a raccoon with a graduate degree."

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