Divine Milking System

Chapter 440: 440 | Mostly for Science

Yumi laughed, sudden and bright, and for a second she and Vale looked at each other across the workshop, and I saw the whole history of them in it, the two years and four months, or three years if you counted the silent stretch Vale insisted on counting, the chaos of two people who could each end the world in their own specialized way choosing to point that chaos at each other for a while and then choosing to stop.

There was no heat left in it. Just the familiarity of two disasters who had survived each other.

"I’m not going to be your girlfriend," Yumi said, and her delivery had the weight of someone who’d already calculated every angle I might be coming from and preemptively sealed all of them.

"Let me make that exceptionally clear right now. I dated Dominic. Two years and four months of trying to love a man who used powers the way other people used breathing and who made terrible decisions at the exact rate required to keep his lifespan interesting. I survived it. Barely. So if you’re thinking about adding romantic complications to this experiment, you can stop. I want your body for scientific purposes exclusively. Not for the fun purposes, not for the emotionally disastrous purposes Vale specialized in, just science."

She stopped. That grin came back slow, the kind of expression a predator made when it realized the prey was actually intriguing instead of just edible.

"Well," she said, and now she was enjoying herself, "mostly for science. If the research happens to produce some recreational benefits, I won’t object, and I’m going to assume you won’t either, but those would be incidental findings, not the primary experimental goal. Are we clear on the methodology here?"

"That’s a very specific disclaimer."

"I’m a very specific person."

She stood and spun the stool once just to watch it rotate. Then she crossed to me in three strides and stopped. Close enough that I could smell everything—metal, ozone, the sweat she’d worked up at the forge, the copper tang coming off her hair, something warmer and human underneath all of it. She looked up and those neon eyes had that same dissection-ready focus they’d had before, the look of an engineer who’d found the exact machine she wanted to crack open. But there was heat under it now. Actual human interest. The look of someone who’d just discovered the first thing in two years worth being excited about.

"So," she said, and her voice had a purr to it I didn’t trust at all. "My little test subject. Do we have a deal?"

I thought about my timer. Seven days left before the graft finished digesting me from the inside. I thought about the Void Gate buried somewhere in my future and the thing in my chest that would eat me alive if I let the well run dry.

I thought about Naomi carrying my corpse through a collapsing dimension with tears running down her face. Belle standing over my hospital bed taking notes on my recovery like she was documenting a failed experiment. Aurora threatening to burn down whatever guild let me die and actually meaning every word. Addison walking into a hospital wearing a trench coat and lingerie because Aurora had asked and because she cared enough to want me alive.

I thought about a weapon that grew with me. A stabilizer that might mean I stopped dying every time I used the one ability that actually worked. I thought about Yumi feeling the countdown when we shook hands, feeling the graft feed, understanding the thing killing me better than anyone alive, and wanting to spend her time keeping me alive.

And I thought about the black sphere on the shelf, the one pulsing at my exact frequency, the one even Vale had been warned not to touch.

"What’s in the sphere," I said.

Yumi’s grin didn’t fade. If anything it got wider, sharper, the grin of someone who had been waiting for exactly that question.

"Deal first," she said. "Then the sphere."

I held out my hand.

She shook it. Her grip was strong, hot from forge work, callused in patterns I recognized from my own training sessions. When our palms connected the graft in my chest pulsed once, sharp and immediate, like it had found something it wanted.

Her eyes went wide with delight.

"Oh I felt that. I felt that in the handshake." She released my hand but kept staring like I’d just proved something. "This is going to be the best year of my life."

Vale finished my burger.

"See? I told you this was worth the drive."

Somewhere in California a nurse named Sakura was filing paperwork on my discharge. Somewhere off the coast of Ensenada a retired blacksmith was fishing. Somewhere back at the academy Belle was composing a formal complaint about my extended absence. And I was here in an unmarked workshop in Santa Barbara, sitting on a crate of coins, having just agreed to become the personal research project of Dominic Vale’s copper-haired ex-girlfriend who wanted to figure out what made me tick.

Vale’s roster could genuinely compete with mine.

I needed to reckon with that.

Later.

Yumi let go of my hand and spun toward the shelf with the sphere.

"Rule one," she called over her shoulder. "When I show you this, do not touch it. Do not breathe on it. And do not, under any circumstances, let your graft resonate with it." She paused at the shelf, fingers hovering over the black metal. "Because I mean it when I say I don’t know what happens. And I’ve spent ten years being the only person who could theorize."

She looked back at me.

"Now I finally have a variable that can talk."

"You keep calling me a variable."

"You keep being one." She picked up the sphere, cradled it in both hands, and turned back to face me, her neon eyes lit up by the blue-white light bleeding through the black metal veins. "Now. Do you want to know why Dominic told you not to look at this?"

The graft in my chest pulsed again, slow and hungry, reaching for the thing in her hands like it recognized it.

"Yeah," I said. "I really do."

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