Divine Milking System

Chapter 433: 433 | I’ve Known Since Orientation

"Frankie, then. The gate sealed behind us. There was a guardian at the exit and it had already killed one of us and it was going to walk out into California with nine dead kids behind it, and my options were a very short list." I shrugged, and my shoulder informed me that shrugging remained a bad idea for another two days. "I picked the one where everybody else got to go home. I’d pick it again, and I’d be annoyed about it again, but I’d pick it."

She set my plate down in front of me.

"That," she said, "is the exact tone of voice he uses."

"Yeah, I’m hearing that a lot lately."

The burger was obscene. Two thin patties with lace edges crisped into the cheese, a bun that had been on the flat-top in butter, raw onion, one slice of tomato, some kind of sauce that I would have committed light crime to identify. I took a bite and my body did something it had not done since I woke up in this frame six weeks ago, which was shut up completely.

◆ NUTRITIONAL RECOVERY ◆

Caloric intake registered. Cellular repair accelerating.

Endurance \[D\] +0.4 segments

Note: Host morale improved. Cause: beef.

"I’m going to marry your father," I said, with my mouth full.

"Get in line, half the pier’s already tried." She leaned a hip against the counter and folded her arms, which did nothing good for my heart rate. "You want a second one?"

"I want four."

"You’ll get two and a water, because you’ve got a corruption burn healing in eight places and grease is not a treatment plan."

"You know a lot about corruption burns."

"I know a lot about everything that happens to a hunter’s body, kid. I had ninety-one confirmed clears before I hung it up." She said it flat, no pride in it, the way people report the year they got their license. "Gold. Kinetic amplification. I could put a fist through an engine block, and for about four years that felt like the most important fact about me."

"Why’d you stop?"

Vale ate a french fry and said nothing, and that nothing was extremely loud.

"My father’s knees went," Frankie said. "Fracture arthritis, both sides, from a B-rank in 2033 that he shouldn’t have run solo. There’s no healer who fixes that, they just manage it. So somebody had to run the shack, and my brothers are useless, and the arithmetic came out the same no matter how many times I did it."

"That’s a hell of a trade."

"It’s a trade. Everything’s a trade." She flicked a glance at Vale. "He offered to buy the place. Three times. Just buy it outright and hire staff and let me go back out."

"You said no."

"I said no, because I’d rather resent him from behind this counter than owe him from inside a guild." She smiled at me for the first time, and it wasn’t the celebrity smile. It was small and crooked and it made her look younger and it did something regrettable to my composure. "Also the burgers are mine. He’d have ruined them. He doesn’t eat dairy."

"I heard about the dairy."

"Everyone hears about the dairy."

Vale finished his dry, cheeseless burger with an expression of a man completing paperwork. "Are you two done?"

"No," Frankie said.

"We’re really not," I said.

"Fantastic." He put a bill on the counter that was significantly larger than the price of two burgers, and Frankie made it disappear into the apron without breaking eye contact with him, which suggested this exact transaction had happened several hundred times. "Second one for the road, then. We’ve got a stop in Santa Barbara."

Frankie went still, and the whole easy thing she’d been doing with her shoulders left her. "Who’s in Santa Barbara?"

"A man who owes me a favor."

"Which man."

"You know which man."

"Vale." Her voice dropped and lost every joke in it. "He’s a kid."

"He’s the one who tore a dimensional guardian’s core out with his hand while standing in a collapsing Void space, and he’s eighteen, and both of those things are true at the same time, and I didn’t design the world." Vale stood up and put a hand on the spatula still buried in the post beside him, worked it loose with two fingers, and set it on the counter with more care than the throw deserved. "He needs to meet him before somebody less friendly finds him first. Davenport’s already circling. So is the Commission."

Frankie looked at me for a long moment.

Then she reached under the counter, wrote something on the back of an order ticket in pen, and pushed it across to me under two fingers.

"That’s the shack line," she said. "It rings out here, and it rings in the apartment above it, and I pick up until eleven. If he ever puts you somewhere you can’t get out of, you call it, and I will drive up that hill and I will amplify through the front door. Gold rank never expires, it just stops getting invited."

I took the ticket. Somewhere behind my eyes, the numbers I couldn’t read on her went right on being unreadable, and for once I didn’t care about the percentage, because the words were sitting there in ink and they were better than a number anyway.

"Why," I said. "You met me nine minutes ago."

"Because I know what he’s like when he’s convinced he’s out of time, and I know what happens to people standing next to him." She tipped her chin at the flour handprint on my jacket. "And because you said you’d pick it again. Somebody should be on the other end of the phone when the picking gets stupid."

Vale was already at the door with his hands in his jacket pockets.

Frankie wrapped the second burger in wax paper and pressed it into my hands, and her fingers stayed on mine a half second past necessary, which I noticed, because noticing that specific half second is the only skill I brought with me from a previous life.

"Eat that before you get to Santa Barbara," she said. "Whatever he offers you up there, ask for double, and don’t sign anything with your left hand."

"Why my left hand?"

"Because that’s the one they photograph."

Out on the boardwalk, the sun had dropped enough to turn the water into hammered metal, and an old man in a fishing hat was making his way down the pier with a cane and a determined limp, waving at me from forty yards out with his whole arm.

"Nine minutes," Vale said. "She was generous."

"I like her a lot."

"Everyone does. That was always the problem." He put his sunglasses back on and tossed me the keys again, and they went end over end and slapped into my palm. "Hector’s going to talk to you about 2033 for eleven minutes and you’re going to let him, because he earned it. Then we’re going north, and I’m going to tell you what happened in Osaka in 2039, and you’re going to understand why somebody engineered a Void Gate around a first-year with a hunger problem."

I stopped walking.

"You know about the hunger problem."

Vale kept going toward the car, one hand raised over his shoulder in greeting to the old man limping toward us.

"Milk Man," he said. "I’ve known since orientation."

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