EIGHTY-SIX: One Word

86

Alden slept like a baby.

Going to bed physically tired and emotionally drained on the night you’d found out your missing friend was okay turned out to be the perfect recipe for rest. When his alarm woke him early in the morning, he turned it off and hugged his pillow tighter.

Bed is amazing. I’m going to sleep until noon.

He was on his way to doing it, too, when someone turned on all his lights and yanked his blankets off with a businesslike brusqueness that was almost as cold as the air in his room.

“No,” Alden moaned, bringing his knees up to his chest. “Why??”

“Because you have school. You ran out on your first day. You can’t skip your second. Your new teachers will think you’re a flake,” said Boe, reaching over to yank the pillow away, too.

Alden clung to it. “It’s not real school. The first week was optional. I haven’t even moved into the dorms!”

“But you showed your face, and they all know you don’t have anything better to do now. So you’ll make yourself look bad. Go to school. Make nice with the other Avowed.”

Alden tightened his grip on the pillow. “That was the best sleep I’ve gotten since February,” he hissed.

“You were that relieved to see me, huh?”

“No! How can an empath be such a heartless monster?”

Boe rolled his eyes. “Did you really want to sleep all day?”

“I guess not. But I didn’t plan to go to school either. I planned to stay here with you.”

“Thanks,” said Boe. “But I stayed up all night maintaining my barrier and sorting out my own return to life, so I’m going to sleep all day. And you can go to school. And then we can hang out all afternoon.”

He ripped the pillow from Alden’s grip.

Alden groaned.

“You can go late and skip the science lecture you hated,” Boe said placatingly, tossing the pillow at the foot of the bed. “It was a giant class, right? Nobody will miss you there. ”

That wasn’t a bad idea, and…Alden checked a blinking message. “Natalie wants to come over to deliver my last few meals.”

“That’s fine. I’ll just hide out in here. Why are they your last meals?”

“She’s not going to have time to prep for me as often with her classes. Maybe every now and then, she said.”

Boe raised both eyebrows at him. “I’m not reading you right now, but you sound mournful.”

“You tasted her food.”

“I did.”

“How am I going to survive without her?”

“Judging by the number of messages you left me describing various condiments, not too well. Can I borrow more of your clothes?”

Alden waved at the closet then rolled out of bed.

[Come over. I’m running a little late this morning, so if you’re heading up to Apex early again I won’t be able to go with you.]

“I texted her,” he reported. “Stay out of sight.”

A couple of minutes later, he received a notification that Natalie was at the door, and he went to open it.

“Hey!” She glided past him into the kitchen. She was wearing a pleated skirt and a pastel blouse with a pattern of rabbits and radishes on it. Her arms were full of containers, and the smell of vanilla and cinnamon followed her into the apartment. “Don’t be upset with me. I know you’re going easy on the sweets. But I finally got the cinnamon rolls right, and they’re fresh out of the oven, so I just had to bring them over!”

He shut the door and breathed deeply. “Natalie, I miss you already.”

“We’re going to the same high school.”

“I’ll starve without you.”

Natalie giggled as she set everything on the counter. She opened the fridge. “The campus has so many options! You’ll find something. How was your first day? Are the teachers nice? What about the other students?”

They chatted briefly, and the cinnamon rolls made an appearance. She’d even managed to make something that tasted so much like real cream cheese frosting that Alden was going to need to find a way to send one of these things to Gorgon.

“I know you said you were running late, so don’t mind me,” Natalie chirped. “I’m just going to have my coffee in your living room with Victor. There’s my precious boy! Who’s a good kitty?”

Victor was rubbing his head against Natalie’s ankles.

Alden swallowed an enormous mouthful of sticky, sweet roll. “Um…yeah. That’s all right.”

He glanced past her at the door to his room. It was opened a crack. He definitely hadn’t left it that way.

“I’m going to go change out of my pajamas. Be right back.”

The second he entered his room, he was met with Boe sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed, polishing his glasses on the hem of his shirt. He put them on his face, and gave Alden a double thumbs up.

“What were you doing poking your head out?” Alden whispered. “What if she’d seen you?”

Boe grinned. [There are certain things a person has to experience for himself.]

Right. We can text.

[What’s that supposed to mean?]

[You can’t just casually mention in one message that your personal chef put all her freely selectable S-rank points in Appeal and then never describe what she looks like at all. What kind of a friend does that?]

[You risked prison to see how pretty she was???]

[Yeah. And it was very worth it.]

“No it’s not,” Alden mouthed at him.

[She’s a masterpiece. The System has outdone itself. And I barely caught a glimpse of her face. Are her eyes gold, or am I imagining it?]

Alden had spent some time pondering the eye color since it was Natalie’s most impossible-looking feature. [I think they’re as gold as they can be without falling over the edge of fascinating into the uncanny valley.]

[She must have been stunning to start with. I don’t think even S-rank Rabbits get enough free points on their first affixation to do that well. Did she choose some trait that boosts her appearance on top of it?]

[I’m not going to ask her that. Just sit here quietly. I’ve been letting her and the other girls from her apartment hang out when they want. I couldn’t think of how to tell her no without it being unusual. She probably won’t be long. I’ll throw up the Do Not Disturb as soon as she’s gone so they can’t get in for the rest of the day.]

[It’s fine if she stays. I’m jealous of Victor. Listen to all the nice things she’s saying to him. Even her voice is worth it.]

Alden rolled his eyes.

********

“Okay, three things,” Boe said a short while later. He was in the fridge, opening all the containers Natalie had brought and sniffing them.

Alden was boxing up a cinnamon bun and trying to figure out the best way to get it to the Chicago consulate.

“Number one— Alden, you’re friends with a teenage supermodel! Strong emphasis on the super. And she cooks. And she’s sweet. I did not see your life going this way.”

“I’m going to have some cereal delivered to the apartment so that you don’t eat all of my magic meals.”

“Cereal?”

“You like cereal.”

Boe inhaled deeply over a container full of soup. “I do. But you’re really asking a lot of highly processed breakfast food if you think it’s going to beat this.”

“Cereal and whatever else you want.”

“Sandwich-making supplies will be fine. Number two—and I’m not joking around with this one—you know you’ll be in huge trouble if anyone finds out you’re harboring an unregistered, don’t you? At the very least, you would get expelled from your new school.”

Alden turned to him. “Don’t get caught.”

“I don’t plan to. If anyone who isn’t you comes through the door, I’m catspacing myself. But you need to seriously consider how risky this is. Do you want me to go ahead and leave?”

“No. Also, how would you leave?”

“Again. Catspace. I disappear; you send Victor to Jeremy. My time sense isn’t good there, but if I try to do it fast I’m sure I’ll be in and out within a week or so.”

“Or six years later. Or never. That skill sounds dangerous, Boe.”

“I think the riskiest thing about it is the chance that I end up appearing without my clothes in front of Jeremy’s sister. Sarah would beat me to death with a wind instrument before she stopped to realize who I was.”

“It might not be Sarah. It might be his new girlfriend. She carries a tennis racket.”

“Oh we need to talk about him and Kimberly Martinez at some point. He’s dating an older woman. And he didn’t even have to work for it! She asked him out at lunchtime in front of a hundred people. When he was wearing the wiener dog shirt.”

“The dachsund-frolicking-with-a-ketchup-bottle shirt?”

Boe nodded. “That’s the one.”

“His taste in clothes…” Alden trailed off.

Then he looked over at Boe’s taxi driver, who was lying in the spot on the sofa Natalie had just vacated. “I don’t want to jinx Victor, but has it occurred to you that he’s a pretty old cat?”

“You’re age shaming him as well as fat shaming him now?”

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“I’m being serious like you asked,” Alden said. “You be serious, too. What happens to you if the creature you’ve attached yourself to dies? Do you know?”

Boe was quiet.

“Oh my g…you don’t know, do you?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I like to think there would be some kind of emergency eject, but it’s not something I can test.”

“And you’re mad at me for being reckless?”

“Mine was a last resort,” said Boe. “To keep me from going insane. Or doing something I would regret until the end of time. Yours was some kind of ‘Alden feels like he has to throw himself at danger because’—no. It’s over. Never mind. About the cat…you have to admit that if I’m just planning to be gone for a week or two, the likelihood of the cat dying right then isn’t that high.”

Alden tossed the cat a diet treat from a jar on the counter. “You’re awesome, Victor. I hope you have nine lives and live to be twenty in every one of them. But, Boe, if you have to use your escape plan, shouldn’t you attach yourself to something sturdier? One of those tortoises that wander around gardens eating lettuce for two hundred years. Or a young human being.”