Chapter 468: 468 | Compound Interest
The sound escaped her before she could stop it, a compressed noise from somewhere between her teeth and the back of her throat, and her eyes went wide and her flush erupted into a full crimson bloom that swallowed her throat and her ears and the line of her jaw, and she slapped her planner shut with a crack that sounded like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence she would never finish.
"Did Petra Lang just make a sound?" Felicity whispered.
"She made a sound," Camille confirmed, and her grin had sharpened into something approaching delight.
"I did not make a sound."
"Babe, that was a sound."
"That was a dental consonant."
"That was a moan."
"It was NOT a moan, Hardy, it was an involuntary glottal response to insufficient oxygen intake caused by elevated ambient temperature in this room which is clearly not maintained to acceptable HVAC standards and I will be filing a facilities report on Monday."
Vivienne drew a small heart in the margin of her tablet and moved the needle to eighty-seven percent toward dangerous. The target was at eighty-five. The margin was two percent. Nobody drank. Petra looked like she wanted to evaporate through the floor on a molecular level.
The game continued for another forty minutes. My turn produced the spectrum OVERRATED to UNDERRATED and the clue "Halloran cafeteria ramen," which generated a twelve-minute debate that somehow became a referendum on sodium-to-broth ratios that Petra won through sheer argumentative stamina. Felicity’s next clue on the spectrum from COLD to HOT was "this room right now," and Camille suggested approximately ninety-eight percent toward hot while Petra insisted on seventy-four percent while her ears remained the color of a fire truck.
Vivienne contributed clues with surgical precision designed to extract maximum emotional response from the room. She chose the BORING to FASCINATING spectrum and delivered "watching Belmont try not to stare at four women simultaneously," which I protested on the grounds of personal attack and which landed at approximately ninety-two percent toward fascinating by unanimous vote.
Camille’s competitiveness intensified with each round. She argued positions with the same ferocity she brought to combat training, leaning forward to make her points and occasionally grabbing my forearm when she wanted emphasis, her grip firm and warm and accompanied by the faintest glow of orange at her palm that she probably didn’t notice but that I noticed because my body cataloged every place Camille Ortega’s skin touched mine with the precision of Percy’s notebook and approximately seventeen percent of the academic detachment.
Felicity maintained her position against my side through the entire game, her body heat constant and her commentary running at a frequency calibrated to make me laugh at moments when laughing was the exact wrong thing to do because my laugh, apparently, was its own category of dangerous, and she knew this and deployed the knowledge like a precision tool.
Petra migrated from the reading chair to the edge of the bed at the thirty-minute mark, a relocation she justified by claiming the chair lacked adequate lumbar support. Her knee ended up four inches from my knee. The silk of her pajama leg caught light in a way that my hundred Intelligence processed and my hundred Agility reflexes responded to, a micro-lean of my own body that I caught and corrected before anyone noticed, except Vivienne, who noticed everything and added a tally mark.
The sake diminished. The laughter grew louder. The Oracle Feed tracked emotional signatures rising across the room and Temptation Gauges climbing in my peripheral vision that I refused to read because the numbers were not the point. The point was Camille’s real laugh. The point was Petra’s guard coming down inch by inch until she was arguing about ramen seasoning with the same passion she brought to federal documentation. The point was Felicity pressed against my side, warm and present and genuinely happy in the way she described wanting to be, the way she said she only got when she stopped performing.
The point was Vivienne watching all of it with quiet satisfaction, keeping score of something she hadn’t defined, and the trust it required to sit in a room full of people she’d cataloged as complicated and decide the complication was worth participating in.
At twelve-forty-seven, the Defiance counter in my peripheral vision ticked once and settled at forty. A cold sensation ran along the base of my skull, the System’s passive reminder that avoidance carried compound interest. The debuff settled deeper into my reflexes, shaving fractions off response time that I’d need back in thirteen days when the Crucible arrived and Odette Reyes stood on the floor watching trauma sensor numbers that couldn’t perform.
I’d deal with it. The stat loss was real and the Penalty Quest was coming and I’d handle that too, the same way I’d handled everything else since opening my eyes in a dead boy’s bedroom with a System where a childhood should have been. But tonight I sat on my bed at Halloran Academy playing a party game with four women who had each independently chosen to be here, and the Oracle Feed ran quiet in the background, and the Bond Resonance carried Sloane’s signature across campus warm and steady and settling into sleep, and I was going to let this moment be what it was for as long as it lasted.
Felicity drew the final card. She looked at it, looked at me, and her blue eyes softened into the version of herself she showed only when cameras turned off and the performance stopped and the girl underneath remembered she was allowed to want things without justifying them.
"Last round," she said. "Spectrum is: FORGETTABLE to UNFORGETTABLE."
She studied the hidden target. Set the card face-down.
"My clue," she said, "is tonight."
Nobody argued about the position. Camille reached for the needle and moved it to the far edge. Petra did not object. Vivienne closed her tablet and set her pen down.
The target sat at ninety-eight percent toward unforgettable.
The needle landed at one hundred.
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