Divine Milking System

Chapter 467: 467 | A Sorry Collection of Broken Toys

Blair Davenport did not do anything mechanically. She was the top-ranked first-year in Obsidian. She had scored ninety-eight percent on Tsukishima’s practical and Tsukishima did not give ninety-eight percent to anyone, and this boy who could not run a mile in September had put his hand on her jaw in the dark and told her she was technically perfect and boring.

She had said teach me, then.

She sat down on the retaining wall. Her skirt rode up and she didn’t fix it, and her tights had a hole in the left thigh from the river rock, and she noticed that she was still wearing a uniform blazer that had been tailored six weeks and eleven pounds ago and now pulled across her chest in a way the dress code had opinions about. She did not fix that either.

The phone went again.

MONROE, J.

4:17 PM

relax

bet resolves at winter evals like we agreed

I’m just saying the transfer already happened

so if we hit top five you only owe me the fun half

BLAIR DAVENPORT

4:18 PM

There is no fun half.

MONROE, J.

4:18 PM

you described the fun half to me for like ninety seconds straight

in detail

I have notes

BLAIR DAVENPORT

4:18 PM

You do not have notes.

MONROE, J.

4:19 PM

mental notes

they’re extremely thorough

Blair pressed the phone face-down against her thigh and looked out at the water.

Three sailboats passed her line of sight. The ferry cut in from the mainland, its wake white against the grey-green chop. Two second-years stood on the lower lawn chucking a frisbee into the hedge with the kind of consistent incompetence that only close friends forgave, laughing every time the disc vanished into the brush again.

She let herself think about the cave. The amount of thinking was fixed at exactly as long as the ferry took to pass behind the rocky point. She had decided this in the shower on Saturday: a budget of remembering per day, and when the budget was spent she would stop.

His mouth on her jaw. The scrape of stone against her burns and the way she hadn’t moved away from it. His hand flat on her waist where the suit had melted through the fabric, fingers spread, not sliding up and not sliding down. Waiting. Like the next thing that happened depended entirely on what she chose, like there was a version of reality where Blair Davenport made a decision about her own body and the other person in the room just stood there and listened for the answer.

Nobody had ever waited for her.

Her father didn’t wait. He issued instructions and you followed them or there were consequences. Cassandra didn’t wait either—Cassandra showed up with PowerPoint slides and chartered helicopters and a professionally bound assessment of your failures, three copies, one for you and two for her records. Misato had tried waiting once, when they were nine, and Blair had spent the nine years since teaching her that patience was a mistake she would not be allowed to repeat.

Something moved in her chest that didn’t belong there and she stood up too fast. Her left leg gave its usual complaint about the angle and she caught herself on the wall.

Fine.

Five weeks. Eight people. She was going to take a squad built from lottery admissions, a boy who slept through his own ability activations, a gold digger whose primary contribution was identifying which pile of loot was worth stealing, a girl from a fishing boat who apologized when she breathed too loud, a Japanese transfer who had spoken maybe six full sentences since arriving on campus, an earnest idiot with a training journal, Misato, and Jace Monroe, and she was going to drag the whole sorry collection of them straight into first place.

Above Sapphire.

Above Katerina Volkov.

Above every single guild legacy who thought their last name bought them a ranking.

And she would do it because her father would take everything from her if she didn’t. And because Charles Leone was dead in a forest she set on fire. And because Vale had stood at the front of a lecture hall and told the entire room that individual strength meant nothing, and she had agreed with him out loud in Tsukishima’s class this morning like a fool, and now she had to actually mean it.

And if they finished top five, which they would, because Blair Davenport did not participate in things that finished sixth, then the wager resolved in the direction that made her the property of an eighteen-year-old lottery winner for the remainder of the semester.

There was a thing happening low in her stomach about that. It was not dread. Blair had spent four days aggressively not identifying what it was, and she was going to spend five more weeks not identifying it, and then maybe after that she would spend the rest of her life not identifying it either because there were a lot of very productive things a person could do if they simply refused to acknowledge certain physical phenomena that had perfectly reasonable explanations tied to combat adrenaline and tactical proximity and absolutely nothing else.

She picked the phone back up.

BLAIR DAVENPORT

4:23 PM

Six in the morning. East field. If you are late I will burn your boots off your feet.

MONROE, J.

4:23 PM

you got it captain

BLAIR DAVENPORT

4:24 PM

I am not your captain. There is co-command.

MONROE, J.

4:24 PM

sure

whatever you say

BLAIR DAVENPORT

4:24 PM

And Monroe. What happened in the cave did not happen.

The reply took eleven seconds, which meant he typed something else first and deleted it, which meant Blair spent eleven seconds staring at a phone like a moron.

MONROE, J.

4:25 PM

already forgot it

Blair looked at that for a while. Then she put the phone in her blazer pocket and walked up the hill toward Summit House with her scarf crooked and her leg screaming and her hands cool for the first time in an hour, and if her mouth did something on the way up, there was nobody on the path to see it.

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