Yael fit his hands around my waist, pulling me off my feet as he jumped up the stairs after Aros, setting me down again at the top. Coen and Rome were pulling ahead again, since I was holding the other three up, but they paused at the archway leading outside, waiting for us to catch up to them.
“And thirdly,” Yael pushed low on my spine, encouraging me to move faster, “it’s not like we tied you down and ripped all your clothes off. You chose to be naked. It’s your thing. You have something against clothes.”
“I do not!” I countered, falling to a stop and holding up my hand to catch onto Coen’s shirt so that he wouldn’t immediately go bounding off again like the most annoyingly agile giant in all of Minatsol. “And you might as well have tied me down and ripped my clothes off! You should have stopped me. I’m not the responsible, intelligent super-sol around here. I make bad decisions. I’m a dweller. We have flawed minds like that.”
“What the hell are you four talking about?” Coen groused, gripping my wrist and untangling his shirt from my fingers.
“Can’t remember,” Siret said, completely deadpan. “My mind is stuck on that last visual.”
“Pact,” Rome grunted, flinging out an arm and punching Siret right in the stomach.
Pact, I thought derisively. Now I was angry again, because they’d reminded me of the stupid thing, and because they were talking about it right in front of me, even though I wasn’t supposed to know a thing about it. It made me wonder how many other things they spoke about right in front of me, assuming that I was too dumb to understand. Which … actually would have been pretty accurate, because I hadn’t picked up on any other hidden meanings yet. I realised that they were all staring at me, then, and I squared my shoulders, yanking my wrist out of Coen’s grasp and striding right past him. He grabbed the back of my shirt as I swung my leg out, ready to take another defiant step, and I glanced down … at the staircase. A staircase I definitely would have tripped down, because I hadn’t noticed that there was yet another one right there in front of me.
“Why the hell is there a staircase going down?” I muttered, like it was the staircase’s fault that I’d almost fallen down it. “We just climbed up, and now, immediately, we’re going down again? This academy makes no sense. This is a stupid academy. You’d think with how blessed it is and how all the best and most sacred sols come here, and what with the gods visiting and everything—”
“Can I kiss her just to shut her up?” Rome grumbled, brushing past me.
Nobody answered him, which was good, because I would have been forced to punch them in the face to defend my honour—if honour was a thing that I had. I would have punched Rome for saying it in the first place, but I didn’t want a broken hand. It was bad luck to break your hand before a kick-ass mission. See? I was learning so much already.
“Come on, Rocks,” Yael re-captured the wrist that I had freed from Coen, his tone sombre, as though he had taken Rome’s question as a threat of some kind.
Evidently still on Willa-duty, Yael pulled me down the stairs and we were running again—except faster, this time. Rome led us to a small, cobbled pathway which wound a crooked path along the side of the academy, eventually leading us to the very front. To the courtyard where I had first encountered Coen and Siret. The memory seemed … odd. I couldn’t quite piece together the version of me who had dropped to the ground a mere click before a bolt would have pierced her chest with the version of me that was now running alongside the five arrogant sols who had become, somehow, the most important people in the world to me.
Not that Emmy wasn’t important. Emmy was family. But those Abcurses? They were … they were the missing piece. It was like coming home. I wouldn’t call them family, the way Emmy was family, but I belonged with them, and they belonged with me. It was that simple. We were six shades of weird, all stitched into the same cloth, and without even one of us, the whole thing would unravel.
But … I still had to file away a reminder in the back of my mind that it ended there, as per their preference. We weren’t ever going to be anything more. Not that it would even be possible. Not with one of me and five of them. And I was thinking about this again … why?
We passed through the courtyard and started down the long line of steps that led back down to the water. I almost expected the giant, floating platform to come and take us away, but instead, Coen turned off to the side, following a wooden boardwalk that edged the water.
“We’re not taking the platform?” I called out.
Siret, a few steps in front of me, snorted. “The barge? No. They save that for dwellers and bullsen.”
Wow. Ouch.
“Wait, how are we getting across the water, then?”