Chapter Nineteen
Carter
I let the beer sit in my mouth longer than it should have, until it was lukewarm and flat. I swallowed it down as though having just realized it still lingered there.
Yun slept in her room, with Kenyon having risked picking her up to take her to bed.
And it was a risk, given her history and reputation. It seemed the nickname Blizzard sure suited her, after all.
Kenyon had assured us that she was healthy—just overwhelmed and exhausted. It seemed the girl truly had no sense of her limits, having guided until she could no longer keep her eyes open.
The fool.
“We need to keep her.” Ingram spoke that as though it were an obvious and forgone conclusion.
Which I struggled to argue against.
Still, devil’s advocate and all… “She’s not a thing to be owned. She’ll stay or not—it’s up to her.”
He shook his head, already on his third beer. Alcohol didn’t affect espers as much as humans, so that wasn’t enough to loosen his tongue. “You’ve felt it. Her guiding’s like nothing else. I’ve never felt this good, not once in my whole fucking life. Whatever it takes, we gotta keep her.”
“She’s good,” Kenyon offered, a soda in his hands. He didn’t like drinking much, so usually went for something without alcohol. “It feels like back when I first became an esper, before the corruption started to build. I’ve never even heard of this being possible.”
“None of the other squads reported anything like this,” I pointed out. “Why is it like this now but not before? If she guided like this, do you really think the other squads would have let her go?”
“Maybe we’re different,” Ingram said. “Fuck, I don’t know, but isn’t like, compatibility a thing? What if she just fits with us?”
I offered him a chiding look. “That sounds like some romantic bullshit that little girls believe.”
“Yeah, well, argue with the results, then. You explain it.”
I leaned back on the picnic table, staring out at the dark ocean. The beach was closed this time of night, but that didn’t stop us.
Espers didn’t really follow the normal laws, and cops around here knew us on sight. They pretty much let us be.
What human was stupid enough to want to take on an esper, especially for something as trivial as enjoying the beach after hours?
Not one who lived very long, that was for sure.
“She won’t let you touch her,” I pointed out.
“She’ll change her mind.” Ingram reached down and grabbed his groin, adjusting himself, his erection still there. I nearly reminded him that after four hours he should go to the ER, but why?
That man lived with a hard-on. If it hadn’t fallen off by now, he was probably fine.
Besides, worrying over his cock was hardly my job.
“What if she doesn’t? You okay with having a guide long term who you can’t fuck?”
Ingram waved off the concern, the beer bottle hanging between his fingers, the liquid inside sloshing but not spilling. “So she’s a little gun-shy? I’ve dealt with virgins before. Trust me, that girl’ll warm right up with a little time.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but couldn’t get the words out before Shear spoke, him sitting on the table, his legs crossed in front of him, a water in his hand. “She’s not going to just get over it.”
“Oh, did you maybe take a little trip through her mind?” I asked.
“You say that as though you hadn’t expected exactly that.”
I didn’t bother to deny it—he knew me better than to believe that. Instead, I took a drink of my beer and shrugged.
“She’s been inside a dungeon.”
That drew all conversation to a rapid and abrupt stop, like slamming a car headfirst into a wall.
It was like saying a kid had been in the middle of a war zone.
It wasn’t supposed to happen.
“That isn’t in any records,” I said, my tone careful. I’d scoured through every file on her I could find—and there hadn’t been much—but nothing had hinted at anything like that.
“There haven’t been many cases of guides inside dungeons,” Kenyon offered. “The few that happened, the guide was killed almost immediately. If she’d been inside one, there’d be a record of it.”
“Her history since turning into a guide is well documented. She was found in The Pitt ruins, living there alone, and taken to the Guild for training,” I said.
“I saw it in her memories. She was in a high-level dungeon and a monster attacked her.” Shear spoke with his usual confidence, the sort that said he knew his skills and trusted them.
“If she was attacked by a monster, she wouldn’t be here. Certainly not in one piece.”
“And yet she was. As I’ve said before, I can’t explain how something happened, but I can tell you it happened.”
I frowned as I tried to piece together the things I knew. I didn’t doubt Shear—I knew him well enough to believe that if he said it, no matter how unlikely, it was true. That didn’t mean everything, though.
If I accepted that she had been inside a dungeon at some point, and further acknowledged that it wasn’t feasible for it to have happened after she joined the Guild, it had to be before she turned into a guide, right?
“The Guild keeps track of civilians rescued from dungeons,” Ingram said, as though he followed along with my line of thoughts.
“So if she’d gotten rescued, it would have been recorded.
They offer them therapy and run blood work on ’em.
No fucking way that could happen and there wouldn’t be a paper trail. ”
“What if a rogue saved her?” Kenyon asked.
“Rogues aren’t known for being that helpful.”
Rogues were espers who refused to join the Guild, often ones who hid their skills to fly under the radar. Some worked odd jobs, using the skills for personal gain, while others tried to fit in with humans.
Either way, they weren’t the type to rush in and try to save trapped civilians. The cowards left that to us.
“Still, it’s the only thing that makes any sense. Civilians don’t just escape dungeons on their own. The only logical way that happens is if an esper clears the way and helps them out. If it were someone from the Guild, they’d report it, but there’s nothing in her history.”
“It was a high-level dungeon. At least A, if not S.”
I tapped my finger against the glass of the beer bottle, trying to work that out in a way that made sense.
Dungeons sprang up all the time, but few were high level. Some opened and collapsed so fast that no one ever noticed them.
That had to be it, right?
A small, higher-level dungeon opened, trapped her, and a rogue esper got her out?
It sounded absurd, but still less crazy than any other option.
No worthwhile esper would fail to report a rescued civilian, not when we knew what could happen with them.
Many took their own lives eventually, both due to corruption infection and because of what they saw and experienced.
Human minds weren’t designed to come back from that sort of thing, not without extensive help.
“So what does that mean?” Kenyon asked. “We still don’t know anything about her, really, so what do we do?”
I wanted to tell them an exact plan, wanted to say that I knew what we needed to do, how to resolve this, but I just didn’t have enough information.
“We figure out the truth,” I said, hating how vague it was. “Having her around is good for us, right? Well, in that case, we’d do well to get her to admit to whatever happened. It would help us interact with her better and increase the odds that she decides to stick with us.”
“With the joint Guild events coming up…” Ingram said.
I waved him off. “I know. Now’s not the best time to be trying to work through this, but it’s not like we can just ask The Pitt not to open.
It’s going to happen no matter what we do, and we’re not going to be able to just sit it out this time.
It means it’s best that we get this handled before that happens, so we aren’t pulled in too many directions. ”
I turned my gaze to Shear, expecting him to be paying attention to me—he usually was—but instead found his gaze locked elsewhere.
Yun.
He stared at the large glass sliding door to her room, up on the second floor, the night sky reflecting off the sheer surface.
I didn’t know what went on in his head, but I suspected it was similar to my own, to the chaos there, the desire for a clear understanding, for some sort of path forward among so many unanswered questions.
I told myself we’d been through worse, that we’d handle this as we had so many other things, but I wasn’t sure if I actually believed it.
Something about this said it might just end up being our most dangerous battle.