Divine Milking System

Chapter 465: 465 | The Girl Inside Did Not

Blair got twelve steps down the corridor before her leg reminded her it had been on fire four days ago.

She didn’t slow down. Slowing down was what people did when they wanted to be caught, and there was a full lecture hall behind her that had just watched Dominic Vale hand her over to a squad of lottery admissions like a rescue dog with paperwork.

Eight people. Co-command. Field lead.

The words kept arranging themselves into different shapes inside her skull and every shape was worse than the last.

"Blair." Javier’s sneakers squeaked. "Blair, hey, wait up, I just want to ask about Dante, because his family filed the withdrawal at like nine this morning and that’s before Vale even had the merger approved, which means the timeline doesn’t work unless somebody knew on Sunday, and if somebody knew on Sunday then Vale had this whole thing drafted before we even got the medical clearances, and I keep thinking about it because the paperwork order is weird, right, the paperwork order is really weird."

"Mendoza."

"Yeah?"

"You are speaking."

"I do that." He kept pace beside her. Two pens clipped to his collar, a notebook with a scorched cover that he wrote in while moving. He somehow managed coordination that should have been impossible. "I’m just saying, Dante was Elite Ten. You don’t just lose an Elite Ten and get a form filed the same morning. Somebody made phone calls."

Somebody had made phone calls. Blair knew which family made phone calls at nine in the morning on a Monday. She knew what they sounded like. She had been in the room for hundreds of them since she was old enough to sit still. Her father would already have the report. The squad roster with her name on the top line and seven other names underneath. Four of which had gotten into San Nicolas by winning a raffle.

He would call tonight. Or worse, he wouldn’t.

"Go away," Blair said.

"Okay. Yeah. Sorry." Javier stopped. Then from behind her, in a voice that had gone quiet in a way she hadn’t heard from him before, "He was in my squad too."

Her boot came down wrong on the polished floor. Heat lanced up from her calf through her hip and settled behind her ribs like a coal.

She kept going.

The main corridor of Theory East at four in the afternoon was a river of first and second years. The river opened for her. It always opened for her. That was the entire point of being Blair Davenport, except today it opened wider. A cluster of Emerald girls stopped talking mid-sentence and pressed against the lockers. A tall Sapphire boy who had been leaning into a doorway removed himself with real urgency. Somebody near the stairwell said gate and somebody else said Leone and both of them said it too loud, then didn’t say anything else at all.

Blair walked through the middle of it with her chin level and her shoulders square. The posture her father had beaten into her at eleven years old with a piano bench and a stopwatch. The shape held even when the girl inside it did not.

Her scarf had come loose again. She felt the collar shift and felt air touch the burn along the left side of her throat. Three separate people looked at it, then pretended not to.

She yanked the scarf back into place. The silk dragged over blistered skin and her vision went white at the corners for a moment. She made a small sound through her teeth that nobody heard because nobody was standing close enough to hear anything.

Fine. Good. That was fine.

The Midnight Foxes.

That was the name. That was the actual registered squad designation she had been folded into by a man with a coffee cup that said WORLD’S OKAYEST HUNTER, and it wasn’t even a serious name, it was a pun on the gold digger’s surname, and Blair had watched them submit it in homeroom eight weeks ago and thought at the time that it was the most embarrassing thing she had ever witnessed at an institution of higher learning.

She was a Fox now.

S-rank Hellflame, eleven years of private instruction, four regional junior championships and a Davenport Industries combat suit that cost more than most people’s houses, and the roster she would be listed on for winter evaluations said Midnight Foxes and had Jordan Wayne’s name on it.

Jordan Wayne slept during weapons drills. Jordan Wayne had fallen asleep in a Void Gate.

Blair shoved through the east doors. Salt and eucalyptus and something dead from the cliffs below rolled over her face and she kept moving. Twenty meters onto the quad path and her hands started, and she had to stop at the retaining wall by the sculpture garden. Both palms went flat on the stone. It was warm from the sun. She focused on that.

Her vision was blurry. Her pulse was too fast. Her breath kept catching at the top of each inhale like her lungs had forgotten how breathing was supposed to work, which was stupid, which was pathetic, which was exactly what her father would have said if he were here to watch her fall apart over something as small as squad assignments.

She counted. In for four. Hold. Out for six. The rhythm came back slowly. Her chest stopped trying to tear itself open. The tremor in her fingers went from violent to manageable and then stopped entirely.

Four seconds in. Hold. Six seconds out.

Her mother had taught her that, back before leaving became more important than staying. The lesson’s value was up for debate. Her lungs didn’t care about debate. They just obeyed.

There was heat coming off her fingertips. The stone under her right hand had gone a shade darker where the moisture cooked out of it, and Blair pulled her hands back and pressed them against her skirt and forced the temperature down until her palms were only unpleasantly warm.

Losing control in public was for people who had nothing to lose.

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