Chương 138: Chapter 131

Cale Ellara had run the operation for three days. She chose the jacket. She supervised my hair styling, getting strict. I mean strict. I have negotiated with warlords with less forgiving instructions on how it's supposed to fall (whatever the hells that means), and because of those instructions, she literally spent almost an hour on my hair. An hour. On a dude's hair.... who the actual hell spends an hour on the hair of the Ghost of the Wastes? Come on. Ellara was super lucky that I liked her.

Oh, but we weren't done. After what seems like years of planning, we finally had the entire agenda laid out in crisp detail. Two hours before, after the hair torture, she laid the evening out on the kitchen table like she was commanding an invasion of the Eastern Bloc and, in doing so, planned to reunite the two churches. Let the Solaran and Orthodox churches rejoice. After a thousand years, Ellara Arcanus was bringing them back together.

"Cale, why are you laughing?"

"Nothing, I was thinking of something funny."

"Well, pay attention." I sat up a little straighter. Her briefing was precise and structured. Detailed enough that I had a couple of contingencies for each situation, but not so detailed that I didn't have any flexibility in my planning, because no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Geez. I was really going to have to look into some sort of military strategy academy for her. It would be expensive, but I've got plenty of currency. I might be looking at the next Arthur Pendragon.

Again, she made me take notes, literally made me write notes. Not on a Crystal interface, on paper. Apparently, it was more real that way. I'm not going to go into all the instructions, but here's the baseline: I needed to open doors. I needed to pull out chairs. I needed to kiss her hand. I needed to compliment her looks, specifically her eyes and her dress, because that is what she is most known for. She will most likely be wearing green, and it'll complement her hair. Make sure you compliment her hair.

Yeah, that was just the first 10 items and went on for another 30. Here's the gist of it. I needed to make and take special care of who Siobhan Morrigan was because in doing so, I would be able to manage the expectations of the people that would literally be tuning in to watch this, and that would, in turn, help manage expectations, because what the island thought of her, and by extension me, was very important. I also needed to make sure it needed to be documented and projected upon the World Tree Lattice.

By the time the briefing was done, I had a headache. It was like I was getting a bear hug from an Omazan huntress. I was about to protest about the projection. My younger sister seemed to forget that I don't have any social applications on my Crystal interface, except for the ones that I kept hidden, related to being the Ghost of the Wastes, and I certainly wasn't going to upload a date to the Ghost of the Wastes mercenary connection. Though in some sick way, the thought of it was kind of funny.

Reminded me I needed to message Bea. My well-intentioned, adorable little sister continued her direction. I pretended to listen for the most part, as she got into the advice of the interaction to the night. I kept perhaps a third of it. And to be honest with you, the only reason I kept that third was because it was entirely adorable to see how excited Ellara was getting. I was actually looking forward to it as well.

I haven't spent a ton of time with the opposite sex when someone wasn't trying to murder or marry me, which is definitely not a sentence that I ever thought myself thinking. At 10: 00 til, I knew it was about that time. Our house sat on a narrow lane, twenty-five minutes on foot from Arclight, in one of the old neighborhoods that pressed up against wealth without ever being let inside it.

It had a stubborn doorframe that never lined up in winter, a garden Gran threatened weekly and never touched, and a wind-chime I had built at eight still hanging off-key from the eaves, because none of us had taken it down. Hard to believe I had been back here not that long ago. I still took in those details every time I came home. It was not a rich house. I had spent ten years in places that would have swallowed it whole, and I would have burned any of them to the ground to keep this one standing.

Gran sat at the table pretending to read. Ellara kept crossing to the window.

"She's here." Ellara's voice carried the pitch of a weather warning.

"Cale. Cale, she's here. That cannot be hers." I came to the window. The MMV turned down our lane low, quiet, and wrong for the street. Dark green over brushed silver, a shape some wind mage working a tunnel had argued with and lost. Between the retired officers' sedans and the professors' honest little runabouts, it moved like a predator that had wandered up from a richer part of the food chain. It made no sound worth the name.

It came to rest at our sagging front step, and the whole lane seemed to shrink around it.

"That's hers," Ellara said, to no one.

"Well, I knew she was rich. I didn't know she was that rich." The door lifted rather than opened. She rose out of it in emerald satin that held her from shoulder to knee and then gave way to a slit that ran up one leg and settled a question the evening had not known it was asking. If there's any question that Siobhan Morrigan had nice legs, well, she answered it with the slit in her dress.

She stood up, tossed her hair, and smoothed down her dress as if there was a wrinkle upon it, then came up our uneven path in heels she had no business managing on those stones, crossed a garden that had never hosted anything grander than Gran's tomatoes, and knocked on a door that had never once been knocked on by someone dressed for a premiere. I opened it and lost the sentence I had been assembling. Her hair was down, red and loose and curled, none of it tamed. This close, the satin finished the argument.

I have stood across from things built to kill me and kept my heartbeat where I left it. I looked at her and the discipline of years wandered off without me. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Ellara had reminded me that I needed to compliment her. No problem with that.

"You look striking," I said, because it was true, and because nothing better survived the trip to my mouth. She took the word, turned it over, and set it down where she wanted it.

"I know." The smile came slow and mischievous.

"But keep saying it; I like it when it comes out of your mouth." I gave her a playful smile. Sure. Something drifted at her shoulder, a construct the size of a plum, matte and seamless, turning to hold her in frame. When my attention crossed it, it tipped toward me and held. An old habit stirred, the one that had kept me breathing for ten years by keeping me out of frames, and then I ran the math and let it settle.

The people who could tie Cale Arcanus to the Ghost had already done it, and none of them were going to announce it in a girl's comment section. A scholarship student on a date made nobody's headline. The reflex was only a reflex. Which left preference, and I preferred not to be the show.

"The lens," she said, ahead of the question.

"Broadcasting. A great many people, right now, watching me stand on a stranger's step. Greet it, or don't."

"Point it at you," I said, easy about it.

"You wear it better than I would." She held on me a second, the attention she would give a stance across a training green, reading for what the ease was sitting on top of. Whatever she found there, she filed. The corner of her mouth moved.

"Noted," she said, and she meant it as interest, not agreement.

"Oh, leave the thing running." Gran, from the kitchen, delighted and shameless.

"Do not mind him. Let an old woman watch her grandson be fussed over for once. It is the most that has happened under this roof in a month." Gran, you old bitty. You just want to watch the date. Don't think I don't know what you're thinking. Of course, I couldn't say that to Gran. She'd probably murder me right there, especially if I said it in front of company. So the only holdout in the house was me, caught between my grandmother's entertainment and my date's whole trade, and I did not have much of a case for it.

Siobhan's head turned toward the kitchen, and the performance settled into something with weight behind it. She stepped past me, into a house she had not been invited into yet, on the accurate read that the person worth winning here was not me. I shut the door and followed the pair of them, which is how I ended up watching Siobhan Morrigan meet my grandmother. Gran set the book down and looked at the little construct with open appetite, the same look she gave a pot she had every intention of lifting the lid on.

Siobhan solved my problem before Gran could enlarge it. She reached up and turned the lens until its eye faced her and not me, and she did it without effort, because it cost her nothing. The evening was always going to be pointed at her. That was the spectacle. I was a detail she happened to like the look of.

"You get me tonight, loves," she told the feed.

"All of me. The gentleman keeps his face out of it. Grieve in the comments." She looked back at me on the last of it, and under the show sat something plainer, a woman who had decided a man who kept himself to himself had earned the courtesy of not being made an exhibit. Coming from her, I understood the size of it. It should have settled there. Gran had opinions.

"Now hold on." She folded her hands on the table.

"Some of him goes on. Enough. A grandmother would like to watch her grandson's handsome face while he still has the sense to use it."

"You are not actually going to watch her Lattice Stream," I said. (Fun fact: I just learned about those from Ellara.)"Cale." She said my name with the patience she kept for the very slow.

"You may protest to your heart's content. My aged backside is most certainly going to watch her Lattice Stream. How else am I to approve of the manner in which you treat Miss Morrigan?" She let it sit.

"You would not want to upset the Dire Bear. A triple-S Adventurer, is he not, Miss Morrigan. Arriving on my lane to end my grandson over poor table manners. The last thing this house needs. A reasonable woman keeps an eye on these things." Siobhan's laugh got out before she could dress it up, bright and unguarded, the first sound she had made all night that owed nothing to the camera.

"He carves," she said, delighted.

"My father. He would want a good angle on it."

"There. A sensible girl." Gran turned back to me, serene, having routed me down to the baggage.

"Some of you on the feed. Miss Morrigan will pick the flattering side." Siobhan tipped the lens a few degrees back toward me, a compromise she slid into place without seeming to touch it. Gran's disappointment from a moment ago turned out to be a bargaining face. She had let Siobhan shield me, then collected her toll: some of her grandson, on her own terms, somewhere she could watch.

"Sit down, Miss Morrigan. You have a few minutes before I let you take him anywhere. And I'd love for this old woman to serve you a cup of tea," Gran said.

"Old woman, my eye. You're pretty enough to be Cale's older sister."

"Oh, what a nice thing to say. Bless you, child."

"Your sister's in my seminar." Ellara hovered by the counter, caught between hostess and fan.

"Sorisa. She talks about you constantly."

"She would." Siobhan folded herself onto the bench, comfortable in a room she had entered ninety seconds ago.

"I am a great deal to live up to. How is she finding the lattice defense theory? She used to weep at it."

"Top of the section."

"Good." Something genuine crossed her face and she gave Ellara a wink.

"I will tell her I heard it from a reliable source and let her pretend she does not care." Gran poured tea nobody had asked for, which was how she ran an interrogation. She put three ordinary questions to Siobhan and listened to the shape of the answers instead of the answers. I had watched her do this to a Vanta and a Yamato. Siobhan noticed it happening and let it, and handed Gran enough enthusiasm that I thought she might be telling the truth.

"I can see your Aura from here, child. You're a fighter," Gran said. Not a question.

"I will. Adventurer track. I sign after Capstone." Siobhan turned her cup once on the wood.

"My father wants me to be certain. I think he keeps thinking I'm going to change my mind, but unfortunately I have been certain since I was nine."

"It's good to have certainty in life, especially about important decisions. So tell me, Miss Morrigan, what else are you certain about?" Ellara went quiet by the counter. Siobhan met the old woman's eyes without flinching, which few people managed twice.

"I am certain that your grandson is the most interesting thing to cross this island in the four years I have stood on it," she said.

"I'm certain that I like his face. And I am certain that I am going to show him an amazing time tonight. The rest I have not decided. I intend to enjoy deciding." Gran held her gaze a moment longer, and then something in her face eased, the look she wore when a thing turned out sturdier than she had let herself expect.

"Well," she said.

"That is honest. I will give you that." She picked her book back up.

"Have him home at a reasonable hour, Miss Morrigan, or do not. He is a grown man and I stopped waiting for him when I realized how much of a man he was. Plus, he could use a little scandal in his life. Especially in the form of a beautiful woman. Come now, Ellara, we have Love Island Orthodox version to watch and get caught up on. I think they're gonna kick out Michaela this evening."

Siobhan rose, collected her dead little lens off the counter, and inclined her head to Gran with a courtesy she did not perform for the room. At the door she pulled Ellara into a one-armed embrace that left my sister lit up, said something low I did not catch that made her laugh, and stepped back out into the evening. The lens woke the moment we cleared the garden gate, lifting off her palm and swinging wide to take us both.

She let the car roll to the restaurant slow enough to be seen, which I understood, a beat late, was most of the point. The place stood out over the water on a stone spur of its own, all glass and low gold light, the basin beneath it black and scattered with the reflection of everything above. Warm even lines ran the length of the causeway to the doors. People had gathered where it met the shore, held back by nothing firmer than a shared sense of where the line sat.

They kept their voices down and their hands to themselves. These were the ones who had learned that on the right evening, at the right door, someone worth seeing stepped out of a car like this one. When she stood up out of it, the murmur along the shore climbed. None of it was for me. I was the undeclared nobody in the fitted jacket my sister had chosen, and I was content to be scenery. She looked back at me over one bare shoulder.

"Try to keep up," she said.