"What was that about Gong and Blair’s bodies?"
"Huh?"
"You heard , Jace."
I absolutely had heard her. I was choosing not to have heard her in the sa way a person standing on railroad tracks might choose not to hear the train. The problem was that trains don’t care about your preferences and neither did Belle Fox when she slled blood in the water.
Naomi had gone very still beside . Not the angry kind of still. The watching kind. The "I want to see how you handle this" kind of still that was sohow worse because it ant she was going to let dig my own grave and then judge the craftsmanship.
"I said she has the sa background as Blair," I tried. "Sa tier of money and training."
"You said body," Belle corrected. Her smile hadn’t changed. The chip in her hand remained pointed at like evidence in a courtroom. "You specifically referenced both of their sexy bodies. While discussing why Gong Sun-Hee is, and I’m quoting you here, Blair without the bitchiness."
"That’s not what I..."
"Do you have a ranking system for this?" Belle leaned forward on her elbows, her blue ponytail falling over one shoulder. The yellow academy shirt pulled across her chest in a way that was absolutely not helping my ability to form coherent sentences.
"Like, is there a spreadsheet sowhere? Gong Sun-Hee, 36E, nice. Blair Davenport, 39F, also nice but an. Aurora Fitzgerald, 34D, available for dates. Belle Fox, 38DD, currently deciding whether to stab you with this chip."
"There is no spreadsheet."
There was a spreadsheet. It was called Snake Eyes and it ran automatically every ti I made eye contact with a woman. The entire system was built around cataloging physical asurents and attraction percentages. My divine power was literally a breast-scanning targeting computer crossed with a charm effect.
Jordan had picked up his breadstick and was eating it while watching burn with the relaxed enjoynt of soone attending a matinee performance of a play called "Jace Monroe Destroys His Own Life Through Casual Comntary."
"For the record," Naomi said, her voice carrying the careful neutrality of a diplomat addressing a border dispute, "I’m curious about the answer too."
"There is no answer because there was no ranking."
"You ranked them."
"I compared their backgrounds."
"You compared their bodies."
"In the context of socioeconomic privilege and its relationship to physical developnt through access to personal trainers, nutritional programs, and healthcare that most people can’t afford."
Belle and Naomi looked at each other.
Then they looked at .
"That," Belle said, "was the most elaborate dodge I’ve ever witnessed. And I grew up in a town where people dodged bill collectors for sport."
Naomi picked up her water glass and drank from it, and over the rim her pink eyes communicated a full paragraph of comntary that I was not going to be allowed to forget during our next private conversation. The shell necklace caught the light as she tilted her head, and the tiny reddish mark on her forearm from sparring that morning served as a reminder that this was a woman who could blast across a field with spiral energy if properly motivated.
"Moving on," I said.
"We are absolutely not moving on," Belle said.
"We are moving on to the extrely important topic of how we close a forty-point gap against the strongest house in the academy."
"The strongest house that contains two won whose bodies you apparently have detailed opinions about."
"I have detailed opinions about everything. That’s my personality. You’ve t ."
Jordan crunched his breadstick. "He’s not wrong. The opinions are constant and they cover all subjects."
"Thank you, Jordan."
"They’re also usually terrible."
"Less thank you, Jordan."
Belle’s dangerous smile softened by exactly one degree, which in Belle mathematics represented the difference between active hostility and grudging amusent. She ate her chip. She did not break eye contact while doing so.
"Forty points," she said, letting off the hook because she’d already filed the conversation away for future leverage. Belle didn’t forget things. Belle stored them like ammunition in a vault with excellent organization and alphabetical indexing. "That’s what, two strong gate runs? Three if we play it safe?"
"Two if we hit Tier II with clean clears and solid core counts." I pulled up the point breakdown on the app. "The system weights clear ti, core quality, coordination scores, and bonus objectives. If we max coordination and hit bonus objectives that other squads are leaving on the table, we can make up ground faster than raw combat trics alone."
Naomi nodded, already taking notes in her lecture notebook despite this being lunch and not class. "Nishimura’s environntal reading techniques could help with that. If Belle’s detection maps the whole fracture space before we engage, we can plan routes that hit bonus objectives while clearing. Two birds."
"Sapphire has coordination baked into their culture," Jordan said, surprising everyone by contributing sothing useful to a strategic conversation instead of complaining about consciousness. "Tsukishima’s been drilling teamwork into that house since before Katt took over. Their worst squad probably has better communication than most Obsidian squads at full strength. We’re not going to out-coordinate them across the board. We need an edge they can’t replicate."
He was right. Jordan was almost always right about strategic analysis, which was infuriating because he delivered his genius observations with the enthusiasm of soone reading a terms of service agreent aloud.
"The edge is versatility," I said. "Sapphire runs the sa formations every ti. Their playbook is deep but predictable because it’s institutional. If we build loadouts that adapt per gate instead of per doctrine, we can hit scoring categories they’re not optimizing for."
Belle finished her sandwich. She folded the wrapper into a neat square and placed it on her tray at a perfect ninety-degree angle to the chip bag.
"So we need more gate runs, better core quality, and an X-factor that Sapphire can’t counter by throwing Katerina at the problem."
"Basically."
"And we need all of this before winter evaluations in six weeks."
"Also basically."
She looked at Naomi. Naomi looked at her. Sothing passed between them in the silent language that won developed through shared group chats and coordinated schedules for managing the romantic and supernatural feeding habits of their mutual boyfriend.
"Fine," Belle said. "But you’re buying chips every day this week as reparations for the body-ranking comnt."
"I didn’t rank anyone’s body."
"Thirty points a bag, seven days. That’s two hundred and ten points. Consider it the Belle Fox Emotional Damages Tax."
"That’s extortion."
"That’s the cost of doing business with won whose bodies you have detailed comparative opinions about." She stood, collecting her tray with the serene satisfaction of soone who had won a negotiation before the other party realized negotiation was occurring. "I’ll send you my chip preferences by flavor. Don’t cheap out."
She walked toward the tray return station, her hips swaying in the academy skirt with a rhythm that was one hundred percent deliberate and designed to punish for the comnt I’d made about physical developnt and socioeconomic privilege.
Naomi gathered her notebook and stood beside , close enough that her arm pressed against mine.
"For what it’s worth," she said quietly, her pink eyes warm and her mouth barely containing a smile, "I thought the socioeconomic dodge was actually pretty clever."
"Thank you."
"You’re still in trouble."
"I know."
She kissed my lips. Quick and soft, gone before anyone could register it happened, and then she followed Belle toward the exit with her staff case over her shoulder and her braid swinging behind her.
Jordan remained across from , the breadstick consud, his expression carrying the specific exhaustion of a man who has witnessed too much of soone else’s love life.
"The spreadsheet is real, isn’t it," he said.
I ate my mashed potatoes and did not answer the question.
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