Chapter 32: You May Kiss Me
Chapter 32: You May Kiss Me
Liora crossed the room in one step and wrapped both arms around me.
The hug drove the air from my lungs. I laughed for half a second, then the pressure reached the wound beneath my ribs and the laugh became a grunt.
She released me instantly.
Joy vanished from her face as she examined me properly. Her gaze moved over the bandages, the hollows beneath my eyes, the rifle, and the knives at my belt. She lifted my shirt, saw the dressing around my ribs, and lowered it again.
Her ears flattened.
"Explain."
She sat me down and rewrapped both wounds while I told her everything.
Her nearly healed leg folded without difficulty as she knelt. The scar on her thigh was pink and tight, and bruising remained faintly yellow along the hip. Days had passed for her since our first meeting. She had spent them recovering, then testing the injury until she trusted it again.
"You went back to training immediately?" I asked.
"After eating, sleeping, and being shouted at by my sister."
"You have a sister?"
"You have known me for half an hour in total. I possess many facts you have failed to uncover." She pulled the dressing tighter. "Continue."
Eastbridge’s soup, blanket, and medical care. The six-hundred-and-seventy-credit debt waiting by morning. Twenty-two credits for general labor, sixty for hazard work, daily charges that prevented anyone from catching up. The wristband and the lies told about every person who tried to leave.
Then Aria. The B-grade roll. A knight ripped from a last stand without warning, wounded and furious, who agreed to help only after hearing the truth. I described the pump room, the flood channel, and the three guards waiting where two should have been. I told Liora how Aria put me inside a refuse container, took a bullet through the shoulder, and cut through the gunfire and the gate with a crescent of flame.
I continued through the tunnel, Aria’s farewell, the bone-eating scavenger, and the walk to this building with a knife in each hand. Four hours with a bow drill. The patrol stopping downstairs and leaving because the previous survivor’s remains made the place look occupied by something worse.
Liora’s hands remained steady. The rest of her became frighteningly still.
When I reached the part about Aria returning to the exact instant of an unfinished battlefield, Liora understood immediately. Her own first return had placed her back in the training room where the Call had found her without any origin-world time passing. The healed wounds and days between our Calls belonged to the ordinary time after that instant.
"So the knight went home injured," she said.
"Stronger than when she arrived. Still injured."
Liora’s expression tightened. Whatever jealousy came later, she respected someone returning to an unfinished fight.
"Eastbridge," she said. "How far?"
I braced for her to climb out of the window and begin solving my debt with knives.
Instead, she closed her eyes for a moment.
"If I attack, they see what protects you. They begin looking for a Night-Tail woman as well as a runaway. Three days is time, but Eastbridge has walls, guns, and numbers. I would spend your luck on my anger." Her jaw tightened. "I can hate them while walking in the other direction."
The restraint surprised me enough that she noticed.
"Stop looking at me like I learned a trick," she muttered. "I am capable of thought."
"You once proposed murder because a man charged too much for canned food."
"He was very unreasonable."
Her tail lashed once, but the worst of the cold left the room.
Then she looked at me with an expression I had never learned how to defend against.
"You escaped a place designed to keep people. You reached Level 7. You made fire with damaged hands, rationed food while hungry, and stayed hidden when fear wanted you moving." She tied the bandage and sat back. "You survived without pretending you were stronger than you are. That is difficult. You did well, Adrian."
Praise should not have been more uncomfortable than the wound cleaning. Somehow, it was.
I changed the subject.
Unfortunately, I chose Aria.
"You should have seen the gate. She was already shot, and then her eyes lit up. The fire condensed around her sword and went straight through the bullets. It kept going through the guard and the barrier. I think I became a fan before the gate finished falling."
Liora’s wagging tail stopped.
"How attractive was she?"
"What?"
"A practical question about another asset. I am not jealous." Her tail struck the floor once. "How close did you become?"
"She held a sword under my chin for the first few minutes."
"That describes distance, not intimacy. Did you kiss her?"
"No."
"Hm."
"She was busy saving a gate in another dimension."
"People find time."
"Do they?"
"Competent people."
"You spent our first meeting bleeding on a supermarket floor."
"And still requested a kiss before leaving. Thank you for proving my point."
Liora turned her head and tapped one finger against her cheek.
"Finding the same woman twice among entire dimensions deserves a reward."
"It was a minor priority and extraordinary luck."
"You may kiss me."
"That sounds like a reward for you."
"I came back, didn’t I?"
I sighed, though the smile had already betrayed me. Seeing her again had loosened something in my chest that three days alone had pulled painfully tight.
I kissed her cheek.
Her ears lifted. Her tail resumed wagging and struck the wardrobe twice.
Desire: 97 → 98
Trust: 28 → 35
Resonance: 6% → 7%
She glanced at the silent windows only I could see, caught my expression, and smiled with unbearable satisfaction.
"The numbers changed," she guessed.
I had never told her the values. Seeing my face was apparently enough.
"You’re impossible."
"And yet the impossible Call chose me twice." She leaned closer. "Remember that when you speak about your knight with shining eyes."
"Now," she said, collecting her knives. "Show me every patrol you watched. We leave Eastbridge behind before I go home."