CHAPTER 31 #2
Edmund hooks two fingers into a tiny divot in the rock, barely a crimp, and commits his weight to it with ridiculous confidence.
“If you got arrested tomorrow,” he says, “none of your classmates would glance twice at your empty locker. And that guy you helped yesterday? He’d watch the Coppers zip you up, then go grab lunch. ”
I follow Edmund higher, trying to mimic the same move, my fingers searching for the small, precarious hold his hand just left warm.
“I didn’t give those civil credits away because I thought anyone would return the favor.
But if none of us ever help anyone—if we all stand by and watch each other get marched off to the guillotine—then what are we?
I want to treat people the way I hope they’ll treat me, even if they won’t. ”
Farther up the route, Dickie has abandoned the rock face entirely and is sitting on a boulder, hunched over and panting as he orders his Pinkie to bring him his canteen.
“Need a ride on my back?” Edmund calls to him.
“The devil I do.” Dickie takes a long drink and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re the one slow-rolling it. If you had any more of my dust on you, you’d be part of the mountain.”
Edmund lets out a loud laugh as he pulls himself higher, then glances back at me. “The system doesn’t reward people who do what you’re doing. Keep giving away civil credits like that, and you’re not going to get anything out of it, except maybe your name on the expulsion list. Or worse.”
I squint up at him, still half-blinded by the sunlight.
He’s crouched on a narrow ledge above me, one hand palming the wall for balance, the other ready to catch me if I slip.
I choose not to rely on the tiny pocket he trusted with his weight.
Instead, I reach sideways for a sloping jug that seems safer yet feels less stable under my fingers.
“Do you think your grandfather would agree with you?” I ask.
Edmund’s expression hardens, and a small frown forms behind his sunglasses. There’s a flash of hurt, quick and unguarded, then something darker settles over him, like a shadow passing through sunlight, vanishing as fast as it came.
“Watch that pocket, Miss Waldsten,” he says as my knuckles scrape the gritty inside of the hold. “There’s nothing to bite on.”
Then he pulls off his sunglasses and slides them over my stinging eyes, his fingers brushing my cheek, and continues upward. Regret floods in as I watch him through the dark lenses. Why the hell did I have to open my mouth so wide?
Edmund doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the climb.
Instead, he banters with Dickie as he moves, always a little ahead of me, always within reach if I fall.
For the rest of the route, I’m convinced he’s angry.
But the next day, he shows up to drive me to the first-year Lecture Hall and opens the hovercar door for me with a smile, as if the conversation on the slope never happened.
That night, shortly past midnight, Edmund invites Charlotte and me to join him, Jack, and Dickie for surfing.
It’s outside our scheduled time, but Charlotte agrees because the Jolt I only know the injuries disturb me in a way they never did before.
Edmund, meanwhile, seems to have forgotten the scratches are there. He grabs two surfboards from the sand and presses one into my arms, his eyes already lit as if he’s somewhere beyond the breakers.
“It’s cold,” he says, “but it still cuts less than the Luminescent Lake.”
I tuck the board under my arm, surprised. “How do you know I go there?”
“I saw you once.”
“Saw me? From where?”
Edmund glances up at the sky and grins. “My jet.”
Then he turns and heads into the water, leaving me to wonder what long-range tech could enable him to see my face from that height.
The night is so dark that the beach seems to bleed into the ocean, erasing the boundary between sand and surf.
I activate the night-vision app on my Bond before paddling after Edmund.
The app is designed to process thermal data and overlay it as a live visual feed, but the processor lags, and the algorithm struggles to separate moving heat sources from static ones.
Near the shore, the thermal glare washes out the waves, and farther out, the images are darker than if I had no night-vision at all.
I keep misjudging the distance between my board and the break, toppling headfirst into cold, salty water that leaves me shivering inside my wetsuit.
Jack is faring better, laughing wildly as he and Edmund shoot each other off their surfboards with stun guns.
“Last shot wins,” Edmund shouts, hauling himself back onto his board after Jack knocks him into the water. “And that doesn’t include whiskey.”
“I’m not drinking tonight,” Jack yells back.
“Really? You’re sober?”
“Sober enough to keep lighting you up.”
Jack fires. The stun beam crackles past Edmund as he kicks out of the wave and pops back onto the shoulder.
They’re still laughing when Jack catches the next set, builds speed along the face, and raises his gun again, only to clip a submerged rock lurking beneath the break.
The impact jars the board to the side, shearing the center fin clean off before Jack spills headlong into the whitewater.
He resurfaces with a curse, drags the crippled board to shore, plants it upright in the sand, then hunkers down beside Charlotte and Dickie at the fire pit.
Now, it’s just Edmund and me. I lie belly-down on my board, watching in bewilderment as he drops into the pocket of a wave and carves up the face with seamless rail-to-rail transitions, as if he’s surfing in broad daylight.
When the wave closes out, I paddle up beside him. “How are you surfing so well?”
Edmund laughs and sits upright on his board, water sliding off his shoulders. “You want to see?”
I nod before I understand what I’m agreeing to.
He sends a Bond link request, and when I accept, my vision changes.
The ocean around me floods with light, as if a hidden sun burns beneath the waves, casting the water in a soft, ethereal blue.
Shapes I couldn’t see before now shine in flawless detail, from the ridges of coral beyond the reef to the flick of a fish’s tail as it breaks the surface.
I blink, dazed. “What kind of app is this?”
“You’re not seeing through my Bond, Miss Waldsten,” Edmund says, and for the first time since I met him, he sounds a little shy. “You’re seeing through my eyes.”
I go quiet, trying to take in the sight without slipping off my board.
I didn’t realize Blues could see in the dark like this.
I know they have more genetic enhancements than we do, but it’s easy to forget how far they’re engineered to surpass us.
Now it makes sense why Jack always has to nudge Edmund to turn on his headlights when he drives, and why he walks through the shadows as if they’re familiar hallways.
Minutes pass, but Edmund keeps the connection open, letting me borrow his sight and see the night as he does, for as long as I want.
When I dip my head below the surface, I’m stunned to find I can see all the way to the ocean floor, where hundreds of seashells are scattered like gemstones across the sand.
I lean off my board, arm extended toward a pretty pink one, but it lies too far beyond my reach.
When I finally lift my head out of the water, I disconnect from the Bond link. My vision shrinks back to its limits, and everything dulls in the pale wash of moonlight… except Edmund.
But he’s the only thing I want to look at anyway.
Every part of his face is familiar by now, from the proud set of his brow to the slow blink of his wet lashes to the way his finger absently grazes his eyebrow.
And yet the longer I stare at him, the harder it is to look away.
Even in silence, even at rest, there’s something inside him that’s always moving, as if he swallowed fire once and it never went out, just settled deep in his chest and burns there, constantly.
I don’t realize how long I’ve been staring until Edmund looks up and catches me.
Our eyes meet for a moment before I turn away, too obvious and too fast. My board jerks sideways with the movement, and Edmund reaches out to steady it.
I grab the rails, working to regain my balance as the nose dips and rocks beneath me.
All the while, I try to ignore the wild pulse in my gut.
“Miss Waldsten, you all right?” he asks.
“Yes, I—” I scrub at the gooseflesh on my arms, furious at it, at myself. This has never happened before, and it shouldn’t be happening now. “I’m just cold. There was a seashell down there that was pretty.”
Edmund nods, as if he only heard the first part, the part he can fix. “If you’re cold, we can head back.”
“It’s fine,” I say, still rubbing at the gooseflesh. “I’d rather be cold than stuck studying for Cloning Theory. I’ve got a quiz tomorrow.”
“You don’t like it?”