Chapter 194: 195 | Room 4-B
Mera lifted her head from my collarbone.
"Now."
"She’s expecting me. I promised her answers."
"About what."
"About everything. What I am. The drain. All of it."
Mera’s yellow eyes held mine in the half-dark of the back seat. The streetlights outside painted amber bars across her face every few seconds, illuminating then hiding, illuminating then hiding. Her tail tightened on my wrist.
"You’re telling the Short Stack."
"I’m telling the Short Stack."
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
From the front seat, Cheon’s typing stopped. The tablet screen reflected off the windshield in a pale blue rectangle. She turned her head just enough that I could see the edge of her profile, the clean line of her jaw, the way her loose hair fell against her neck.
"What specifically are you planning to tell her."
"The drain. The copy mechanism. The intimacy requirement. The fact that her Essentia tastes like vanilla and frost and she’s been in my bloodstream since Friday."
"Are you planning to tell her about the system."
The question landed like a brick dropped from orbit.
The system. The Harem Lord quest. The 700-day countdown. The fact that I was a dead man walking in a body that wasn’t originally mine, running an objective designed by something I couldn’t see or understand, collecting women like progression checkpoints in a game I never agreed to play.
"No."
"Why not."
"Because the system is the one thing I can’t verify. Everything else, I can prove. The drain, I can demonstrate. The blood work, Vivian gave us documentation. The surveillance, we can spot the Lexus ourselves. But the system is invisible. It lives in my head. Nobody else can see the notifications. Nobody else can read the quest log. If I tell Noel that a supernatural game interface told me to build a harem or die, she will assume I’ve lost my mind and report me to the academy’s psychological services."
Cheon considered this. Her fingers tapped a rhythm on the edge of her tablet that I recognized as her processing pattern. Three quick taps, pause, two slow.
"You’re right. The system stays between us."
"Between us and nobody else."
Mera pulled back to study my face. Whatever she saw there satisfied something in her, because she nodded once and released my wrist. Her tail unwound from my arm with a slow, deliberate drag of warmth.
"Bring her food. Something expensive. That girl runs on spite and calories and you owe her both."
"I was planning on it."
"And Rome."
"Yeah."
"If she takes it well. If she doesn’t run." Mera paused. Her voice dropped into that lower register, the one that came out when she stopped performing and started being real. "Bring her here tomorrow. Cheon and I should meet her properly. Not as the classmate she barely tolerates. As the other women in this. She deserves to know who she’s standing next to."
Cheon’s tapping stopped.
"Agreed," Cheon said. Nothing else. Just the word. But it carried the weight of something she’d been thinking about for longer than tonight.
Marco took the exit toward the Shore District. The city opened up as we left downtown, the buildings getting shorter and the sky getting bigger. I could smell the ocean through the vents.
"Marco."
"Sir."
"Drop me at Luca’s on Fifth. Then take Cheon and Mera home."
"Of course, sir."
Luca’s would be closed at this hour, but the Vietnamese place three doors down did late-night pho that could bring dead people back to life. Noel had said to bring food. She hadn’t specified what kind. But I’d learned in the past two weeks that the way to Noel Stark’s grudging cooperation ran directly through her stomach, and pho at ten PM carried the specific energy of someone who gave enough of a damn to think about what she needed instead of what would impress her.
The Mercedes pulled to the curb outside a strip of Shore District restaurants. Most had their lights off. The Vietnamese place glowed warm and golden through steamed windows.
I opened the door.
"Rome." Cheon’s voice caught me with one foot on the sidewalk. I looked back. She held her tablet against her chest with both arms, the way she held things when she needed a barrier between herself and whatever emotion was trying to escape.
"Be careful with her."
Not be careful out there. Not watch your back. Be careful with her.
"I will."
I shut the door. The Mercedes pulled away. I watched the taillights disappear around the corner on Harbor Street, the red glow fading into the general luminescence of Century City at night.
The pho took twelve minutes. I ordered two large bowls with extra noodles, spring rolls, and a Vietnamese iced coffee because I had a feeling neither of us was sleeping tonight. The woman behind the counter packed everything into a brown bag and handed it over with both hands and a small nod, the way people here gave you things they’d put care into.
I walked back to campus.
The main gate recognized my student ID at the scanner. The courtyard was empty at this hour. Most of the dorm buildings had gone dark except for the occasional lit window where someone was studying or having a crisis or both. Building F sat at the far end of the quad, a concrete rectangle with exterior stairwells and the particular architectural charm of a Soviet apartment block.
Fourth floor. Room 4-B.
I knocked three times.
The door opened before the third knock finished landing.
Noel stood in the doorway wearing an oversized Stark Industries t-shirt that hung to mid-thigh and a pair of sleep shorts that were technically visible if you knew where to look. Her violet hair was down. No product. No styling. Just straight and clean and falling past her jaw, the fringe slightly crooked from where she’d been lying on it. No makeup. Her face looked different without the armor. Younger. The aristocratic angles softened by exhaustion and whatever she’d been thinking about alone in this room for the past several hours.
She wore glasses.
Small black frames. Round lenses. The kind that people who spent too much time reading in bad light eventually needed.
I had never seen Noel Stark in glasses.
"You’re staring."
"You wear glasses."
"I have an astigmatism. Are you coming in or are you going to stand in the hallway making observations about my optometric history."
