Chương 63: 26.Off-Base Supply Run 26-3

Harvey stood in the shadow of the covered walkway, scanning us first, as if checking whether this group would start doing something stupid the moment we left the surplus store.

"1200 hours," he said.

"Meet at the corner diner on the main street. Blue sign, white letters, faded plastic fish hanging by the door." Jess raised an eyebrow.

"Why a fish?" Harvey's expression didn't move.

"Owner says he used to actually sell fish."

"And now?"

"Now he sells things that won't kill you. On a good day." I appreciated the city's straightforward culinary standards. D hitched his oversized bag higher on his shoulder, looking down at us like a wall that had decided to pick its own route.

"I'm going to buy food." Jess shot back immediately.

"You'd better not be planning to haul back three days' worth by yourself."

"Not three days." D thought about it with genuine seriousness.

"A week first." I looked at him.

"You know we're due back by evening, right? We're not emigrating." D paused for half a second.

"Then I'll buy what fits in the locker." Harvey had already written him off and moved to his conclusion.

"Food street for you. Don't get ripped off. Don't buy bulk sugar drink mixes — the Academy's hot water supply is shit, you won't get through them." When he said "you," his glance flicked to me and Jess. The implication was obvious: certain people were clearly going to drag unnecessary liquid happiness back to the dorm, and he knew it.

"What about you?" I asked.

"Parts alley," Harvey said.

"I need two sets of cold-cutting discs and an old interface adapter. Maybe scout for whatever decent scrap the idiots haven't bought yet." Jess clicked her tongue.

"You make it sound like you're rescuing abandoned strays."

"Strays don't kill people because of wrong connector specs." Very true. Very Harvey. So we split. D headed for the food street, Harvey peeled off toward the parts alley. Jess said she needed to stock up on pharmacy items, hygiene supplies, and a few practical things that could be smuggled into the dorm, then asked if I wanted to tag along. I was about to nod when her eyes dropped to my bag and she smiled with tremendous lack of charity.

"Although you're probably more urgently after those two dozen cherry colas. And that light novel with the title that reads like a psychiatric evaluation report."

"You make it sound like I have some shameful fetish."

"You do," she said.

"Cheap, high-sugar, and cherry-flavored." I couldn't be bothered responding. I waved her off. She laughed, turned, and disappeared into the foot traffic, leaving nothing but a grey uniform and a swinging ponytail. Then it was just me, and suddenly the noise settled. Not real quiet. Just that once the familiar voices dropped away, the street's own sounds had room to surface.

The chime of automatic shop doors, the clatter of a service robot rolling over pavement gaps, someone on a second-floor balcony beating out a dust cloth, the low hum of old air conditioning units, and somewhere farther off, a shop playing music so old it had gone soft at the edges — melody sweet enough to hurt your teeth, lyrics probably about love or bankruptcy, which these days amounted to the same thing. I went to a wholesale grocery first. The air conditioning was working hard.

Cases of drinks were stacked at the entrance, colors bright enough to qualify as traps for cadets who hadn't seen the outside world. It didn't take long to find the target — cherry cola, canned, the box art printed with a sincerity of tackiness that bordered on performance art, red as a chemical incident. Next to it, a handwritten promotional sign: Buy two dozen, get portable ice pack free. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

I stood there for three seconds and thought: fate really does want you dead most of the time, but occasionally it throws you something small and cheap just to keep things interesting.

"Two dozen," I told the clerk. She looked up at my grey uniform, then at the two cases, with the exhausted acceptance of someone no longer surprised by anything.

"Academy?"

"That obvious?"

"Yeah." She dragged the cases out without changing expression.

"Normal people don't haul two dozen cherry colas at 0930 like they're restocking a forward base." I considered that and decided it was accurate.

"They are strategic supplies." At checkout I grabbed a few packs of hard candy and salted crackers — not good, exactly, but the kind of thing that can pull you back from the edge when your blood sugar crashes or you're about to start killing people. Piled together with the cherry cola, it all looked like a survival kit assembled by someone in a very complicated emotional state. After the grocery, I followed the main street toward the bookstore.

"Bookstore" was generous. It was more like a refuge for printed matter. Small frontage, a display window with a few back-issue magazines, two volumes of war memoirs, and a row of mass-market novels with covers bright enough to be embarrassing. The bell over the door rang once. The old man behind the counter reading his paper looked up just long enough to confirm I wasn't there to rob him, then went back to reading. More civilized than most Academy instructors.

I worked my way along the shelves and found it quickly in the light novel corner.

"That Time the Editorial Department Lost Their Minds and Made This Light Novel Title So Long" The whole series was lined up neat as an aid drop, like comfort supplies pre-positioned for people of precisely my psychological profile. I pulled out volume one and flipped through it. The cover was trying extremely hard, the synopsis padded with enough filler to test any reader's patience — but that was exactly why it had a certain stable, reliable quality of being garbage, which was reassuring. Good.

Books that take themselves seriously make you feel like even resting requires effort. Garbage novels don't. The only moral demand a garbage novel makes is that you don't bring your full brain to it. I took three. Volume one, volume two, and a side story. The old man behind the counter glanced at the covers while bagging them and, for the first time, spoke unprompted.

"Academy students read this stuff?"

"Academy students need this more than anyone." He grunted — agreement or contempt, hard to say.

"At least the title's long enough. Makes for a more stable table leg than most." I nodded. For a light novel, that was a fairly high-end endorsement. By the time I left, I had enough bags that this looked less like a supply run and more like a low-budget evacuation. One bag of new gear, two cases of cola, another bag of snacks and books. Even I wanted to ask myself if I was planning to build a nest in the dorm. A little further on, Jess was waiting outside a pharmacy, two bags at her feet.

She checked out my cases of cola, then the bag of books, with the calm of someone whose suspicions had been entirely confirmed.

"You actually bought them."

"I don't joke about strategic supplies." She grabbed the book bag, peeked at the title of That Time the Editorial Department Lost Their Minds and Made This Light Novel Title So Long, and burst out laughing.

"Oh God, that's not just long, that's a declaration of war on the reader."

"Which makes it honest."

"You know what the really terrifying part is?" She pushed the bag back into my arms.

"I completely understand why you bought it." I looked at her haul. Meds, quick-dry detergent, feminine hygiene products, bandages, wet wipes, a few small storage containers, and two black hair ties she'd materialized from somewhere. It looked like a dorm civilization reconstruction kit.

"And you bought enough to run a covert field hospital in our room."

"At least it's more normal than your two dozen colas," she said, then paused and added, "Relatively speaking." We walked toward the rendezvous at an easy pace. When we passed an open-air market, D was already there. Two huge bags of dry goods, jerky, canned food, and instant drinks were stacked at his feet, plus a bundle of high-calorie bars that looked like they could double as fortifications.

Standing next to him, Harvey was expressionlessly checking the expiration date on a vacuum-packed meal like he was pre-sentencing a future food poisoning case.

"You really bought a week's worth," I said. D glanced at me.

"Can share." That actually raised him a notch in my estimation. Not pure hoarding — collective hoarding. At least he remembered this wasn't a solo colonization mission. Harvey dropped the pack back in the bag, his eyes landing on my books and cola. His expression didn't change, but I was certain he'd already issued some kind of cold internal verdict on my survival logic.

"Done with the serious shopping?"

"More or less," I said.

"Good enough." He paused, then delivered the kill shot.

"At least if your kidneys give out from all that cherry cola, your gear will hold up long enough to drag you back." Jess bent double laughing. We stopped outside the diner with the faded plastic fish. The sun was higher now, heat starting to roll up off the pavement and metal walls in layers. The air was a mix of cooking oil, old machinery, cleaning fluid and human sweat — ugly, but alive.

Compared to the Academy's over-sanitized order, this at least felt like a city, not a compactor designed to process young people. I looked down at everything I'd bought today. Things to keep me alive a little longer. Things to make the suffering slightly less. Things to stop me from wanting to detonate the entire Academy from the foundations up. Very comprehensive. For a first off-campus supply run, I thought I'd conducted myself with considerable maturity. At least structurally speaking.