CHAPTER 31: THE CHAIR AND THE TABLE
Lisa was waiting in the main room with sandwiches.
"Eat," she said, pushing a plate toward the center of the table. "You just came back from dying. Your body needs fuel even if your brain doesn't think so."
I sat down and took a sandwich. Turkey and swiss, slightly stale bread. The echolocation painted the room in sound—Lisa's heartbeat steady, Rachel's dogs breathing in the corner, Alec's phone game pinging softly from the couch.
Brian walked in two minutes later. He took the chair across from me, not next to me, and the distance was deliberate.
"We need to talk about protocols," he said.
"I know."
"No. You think you know. But apparently it didn't stick the first time, or the second, so I'm going to make this formal." He leaned forward, hands flat on the table. "You disobeyed a direct pull-back order. You separated from the formation intentionally. You died on a scouting mission that didn't require casualties."
Rachel looked up from her dogs. Alec's game sounds stopped.
"If you want to die on your own time," Brian continued, "that's your business. On team ops, you follow orders. Period."
I didn't argue. Couldn't argue. He was right about the protocol violation, even if my reasons were sound.
"Understood," I said.
"Is it? Because I've heard you say that before, and then you do exactly what you want anyway."
"I understand. It won't happen again on team ops."
Brian's eyes narrowed. "'On team ops.' You're already carving exceptions."
"I'm being precise. I can promise you compliance during missions. I can't promise I'll never die strategically again."
The silence stretched. Lisa watched us both with the intensity of someone taking notes.
"Fine," Brian said finally. "Precise is fine. But understand this: the next time you break formation without clearance, I bench you. No missions, no cuts, no team access until I decide you can follow basic instructions."
"Understood."
He held my gaze for a long moment, then pushed back from the table and walked toward the back rooms. His footsteps faded, and the tension in the room shifted rather than dissipated.
Lisa waited until he was out of earshot.
"That went well."
"Did it?"
"For a confrontation about dying? Yes." She picked up a sandwich. "He didn't punch you. Progress."
Rachel returned to her dogs. Alec went back to his game. The loft settled into its normal rhythms—or tried to.
I stayed at the table, working through the sandwich without tasting it. The echolocation picked up Brian's pacing in the back room, his footsteps tracing tight circles.
Lisa sat down across from me.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"Dangerous."
"Always." She folded her hands on the table. "About your deaths. The pattern."
I kept chewing. Said nothing.
"Lung. Oni Lee. A random ABB gunman—that one seemed accidental. Hookwolf. Stormtiger. Cricket." She ticked them off on her fingers. "Three of those are E88 capes. Two are ABB. And every single one gave you something."
"That's how my power works."
"No. That's how you use your power." Her eyes were sharp, analytical. "You don't die randomly. You shop. You evaluate targets before engaging, position yourself for specific confrontations, and accept deaths that maximize your fragment yield."
The turkey sandwich turned to sawite in my mouth.
"Which means," Lisa continued, "you have a method for assessing value. You know what you'll get before you die." She leaned forward. "Your power has a system component you haven't disclosed."
I swallowed. Set down the sandwich.
"Lisa—"
"Don't." Her voice was calm but firm. "Don't deny it. My power's been piecing this together since the bank. You react to cape encounters like you're running calculations—not survival instincts, not combat assessments, but value propositions. You're measuring what each death would cost against what it would return."
Brutus padded over from Rachel's corner and put his head on my knee. The dog's breathing was slow, steady—pack member in distress, animal response. I scratched behind his ears with hands that still remembered Cricket's kama blades.
"What are you going to do with this?" I asked.
"Nothing. Yet." Lisa leaned back. "I'm not your enemy. But I am going to figure out what you're hiding, and when I do, we're going to have a conversation about whether the team should know."
"The team doesn't need to know."
"That's not your call to make." She stood, gathering her laptop. "I've given you time. I've watched you prove yourself. But the secrets are stacking up, and eventually the weight breaks something."
She walked toward her room, pausing at the doorway.
"Think about it. Controlled disclosure is better than forced revelation."
The door closed behind her.
I stayed late cleaning the loft.
Nobody asked me to. The dishes from lunch, the scattered gear from the Cricket mission, the general disorder that accumulated when five people used the same space—I worked through all of it. Methodical. Thorough.
It wasn't penance. It was communication. The kind Brian would understand without requiring words.
He passed through the main room around 10 PM, headed for the exit. Stopped when he saw me wiping down the counters.
Neither of us spoke. The echolocation painted his posture—shoulders less tense than this afternoon, breathing slower.
He nodded once and kept walking.
The silence was less hostile than it had been at noon.
I finished cleaning and pulled up the news on Lisa's abandoned laptop. Police scanner feeds, local alerts, the background noise of a city that never stopped bleeding.
ABB activity spiking across the Docks. Three incidents in the last six hours. A name surfacing in the chatter that made my stomach clench:
Bakuda.
The mad bomber. Lung's newest lieutenant. The woman who'd hold the city hostage with exotic explosives and threatened escalation.
I checked the date. May 5th.
In my meta-knowledge, Bakuda's campaign didn't start until May 8th. Three days from now.
Three days early.
The butterflies were multiplying.
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