Chapter Three #2
“I won’t change my mind. I’ve been a guide with the Guild for almost ten years, and I’ve never once changed my mind. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you, thinking you were different or something. You’re not.”
Ingram snorted. “You say that now. Give it a few weeks and we’ll see what tune you’re playing. Don’t worry, little snowflake, when you change your mind, I’ll be more than willing to fuck you.” He drew his lips into a lopsided smile. “Until then, feel free to use the goodies I left you.”
I should have figured it had been Ingram, given the little interaction we’d had so far. It seemed like something he’d do.
“Goodies?” Kenyon asked. “Did you leave some for me, too?”
Ingram snickered. “I don’t mind sharing.”
Kenyon peered at me, his smile wide and stupid and hopeful.
“Trust me, you don’t want any.” Even as I said that, I thought about how hilarious it would have been to show Kenyon what Ingram had stored there. Of course, dumb or not, Kenyon was an esper, and given what he’d said earlier, he wasn’t as innocent as he might have seemed.
Kenyon pouted but went back to his food, seeming easy to distract, which worked perfectly for me.
“How do you keep in touch about missions?” I asked. “I have to make sure I prepare if we’ll be traveling or anything.”
Kenyon tilted his head like a confused pup while Ingram snickered. Shear didn’t even acknowledge my question, but Carter pointed toward the fridge. “There’s a whiteboard.”
I frowned as I looked in the direction he’d gestured to find a small whiteboard attached to the front of the fridge door. The sight was so absurd that I couldn’t help it before I got up from the table and went over to the fridge.
If I tilted my head, sure, those could almost appear to be words written on it? Maybe it said Tuesday, January 64th?
“This is your method for keeping track of jobs?”
Carter sounded almost hurt when he responded. “Hey, that’s kept us on track for years!”
“We have a board?” Kenyon asked as he scratched his head.
“I thought it was a grocery list,” Ingram said.
“That explains why Carter never buys the yogurt I keep adding to the list,” Shear said.
“Yogurt? I thought that said yoga. I wondered why I kept going to that damn yoga class every week by myself,” Carter huffed.
I couldn’t even bring myself to respond as I stared at these four men, wondering if stupidity was contagious.
These were espers, right? I wanted to yank all four of them down to the Guild and get them retested right now, because at the moment, I found it hard to believe such a thing.
They seemed far too chaotic and dumb for me to even consider how they’d enter dungeons and fight monsters.
They were idiots.
I rubbed my hands over my face. “We need to have a way to schedule and communicate,” I explained, wondering how I became the esper whisperer all of a sudden. Normally, the squads I’d worked with all ran smoothly. They had someone in charge and they all fell into line.
Sure, they were people, which meant they made mistakes, they let loose, but they took their jobs seriously.
These men seemed to take nothing seriously.
“We have a group text,” Kenyon said, turning his phone around to show me.
And just like that, I wished we had eye bleach. The thread appeared to be nothing but gifs—ones of cats from Kenyon and mostly porn from Ingram.
This was how they got anything done?
That explained why they got nothing done. How could anyone complete anything in this mess? The only thing in order that I’d spotted so far was the weaponry cabinet.
Then again, I guess having guns lying around was probably a pretty bad idea and a step too far for these fools.
Carter handed me something, and it took a moment to realize it was a cell phone. “You’re in the group text already. Don’t worry.”
I stared down at the phone, the thing nicer than anything I’d had in…well, perhaps forever. I tried to hand it back. “I don’t need this.”
He folded his hands behind him, a sure sign he didn’t plan to take it back. “Sorry, those are the rules. You’re in this squad, we need to communicate with you. Think of it as a perk.”
I sighed, hating the feeling of owing anyone anything.
Worse, something about the surprisingly large and light phone felt like a collar, like a tether holding me to them.
Still, they weren’t wrong. Wasn’t I the one complaining about how we needed to be able to plan, to know our schedules?
How was that going to happen without a phone?
And I certainly wasn’t in a position to get one myself. Being a guide had its advantages, but some of the downsides were that we didn’t really have credit scores or documentation to sign contracts on our own.
So I set it on the table and took my seat again, a quiet awkwardness in my chest that I couldn’t shake. I muttered out a sullen ‘thanks’ before focusing again on my food.
“We’ll work on a schedule,” Carter offered, tone soft as though trying to appease me. “But we don’t do a whole lot to worry about.”
“How many jobs do you take on a month?”
“Four, maybe? Usually local stuff. We get called in if a dungeon opens close by, but only in emergencies. Otherwise, they leave us alone for the most part.”
I shuddered at the mere mention of a dungeon. It was difficult to hide that reaction, even after all these years.
Funny, given that was what everyone talked about around me. What else did espers have to say? Still, it never failed to conjure up horrors I’d rather not ever think about again.
I pushed it aside, relegating those feelings to the darkness reserved for my past. “You’re all S-Rank. Why aren’t you called into more dungeons?”
Carter lifted one of his dark eyebrows. “You really don’t know much about us, do you?
” He let out a dark chuckle. “We’re S-Rank, sure, but we aren’t the good ones, you know, the ones they put on television that play up for the cameras real well.
Plus, we aren’t huge fans of doing dangerous work, so we usually hang back.
If it’s bad enough, they’ll call us in to help mop up around the entrance, but that’s it. So don’t expect a ton of travel.”
And, boy, didn’t that make my day…
I’d managed to avoid most dangerous work as a guide. Some guides, the flashy ones, they got stuck right outside a dungeon, helping the espers who needed guiding during large-scale operations. I’d never been one of them, so I’d gotten to stay back to help after my squad arrived back to their place.
It served me just fine. I saw no reason to put myself into danger any more than I had to.
Still, it made me glance around the table at the four men here.
No, not men, but espers.
I’d dealt with lots of them over the years, all different types, different ranks, different ages, but they were similar in their need for approval, in their desire to prove themselves.
Sure, they had pressure on them. I wouldn’t pretend like they had it that easy or anything—I wasn’t that short-sighted—but they’d always struck me as show offs.
Espers and squads tended to battle for top rankings, wanting to see themselves on the news, wanting to prove themselves. In fact, it was so bad near the top that people threw each under the bus just to get ahead.
Which was why I had no idea how to take these four who didn’t give a fuck about those sorts of things. It went to explain why they had such a bad reputation, didn’t it? They really didn’t care about doing anything, so maybe they deserved all that hate and ridicule, after all.
At least, that was how they seemed.
I ate slowly, unsure how to put that together, how to understand or interact with these men. Normally, I knew what espers wanted, could tolerate them, could control them just by understanding them. I never enjoyed it, but it at least felt safer because I understood it.
These four, though, they didn’t follow any of the rules I was accustomed to.
It made me uneasy, had me watching them with a new wariness.
Espers were dangerous, sure, but they’d been easy to predict before.
If these four didn’t do as I expected, if they didn’t follow the trends I knew of, how was I supposed to deal with them?
How was I supposed to stay a step ahead?
The answer escaped me, so I focused instead on my food. I’d need to pay attention, to learn the new rules, because I knew better than most that my survival could depend on it.