Raven Chapter 34 Promises and Perfect Moments 428 #2
“It’s a wee emotional support supercomputer,” Kieran explains, beaming. “We’ve been away from the penthouse for a bit, and ye’ve been extra stabby lately. Figured you might be missin’ yer Cold War comfort machine.”
Em’s head snaps up, and the temperature in the room seems to drop a few degrees. I slowly make my way back to my seat.
“The Cold War,” he says, his voice flat and dangerously quiet, “was a theatrical farce concocted by geopolitical idiots to subvert autonomy through the illusion of binary opposition. It was marketing. Fear sold wholesale to the masses to consolidate power.”
He sets the tiny MORDRED down on the table with a soft click.
“Do not,” he continues, staring at Kieran with that unnerving intensity I seem to always get from him.
I’ve discovered it’s a lot more scary when he’s doing it to someone else, “ever compare MORDRED to something so intellectually bankrupt and aesthetically devoid again.”
A beat of tense silence passes as Ki-ki stands perfectly still, the smile still frozen on his face.
Then Em leans forward, peering at the little metal replica.
“However,” he mutters, his tone shifting to something more clinical.
“The scaling is admirably precise. But the 6AK5s here,” he points a slender finger, “wouldn’t have been used adjacent to the power supply in that configuration.
They’d overheat and cause a cascade failure in the reel-to-reel buffer.
And the blink pattern on the front panel is for a diagnostic subroutine MORDRED hasn’t run since 1992. ”
He picks it up, “Overall, it’s not a terrible interpretation.”
Kieran blinks, his smile getting impossibly wider, “See?” He turns to us. “He loves it.”
Em just raises a brow, and Kieran ignores him, making his way to the seat next to me.
Both Dre and Anik are still hovering around me like mother hens, and I glare at them, determined to show them I won’t break.
Sure, I went all incorporeal for a few minutes, but that’s no big deal.
Em even said so. I was recalibrating. Or that is what I’m choosing to believe because nothing is going to ruin today for me.
“So what’s on the agenda?” I ask, reaching forward and taking one of whatever is in front of me. “Oh, what is this?”
Anik relaxes at that, taking the seat on my other side. “Breakfast strata with croissants and caramelized onions.” He leans over, plating a cinnamon roll and sliding it to me.
I look around. “Where is Miriam, anyway?”
“Her, Selena, and Izzy’s team have gone out for the morning to give us some time,” Dre answers, still hovering. He moves to sit across from me when Kieran’s elbow flies out in a not-so-subtle hint. “They’ll be meeting us this afternoon for the second part of what we have planned.”
“Planned?” I ask, my gaze automatically finding Forrest.
He nods like he’s proud I’ve come to associate him with plans, “This morning we are going to have breakfast and… take it easy.”
Well, that statement didn’t sound forced at all.
“So you’re not going to work?” I ask, unable to help myself.
His eye twitches, “The morning is for everyone to do what relaxes them. Can work not relax me?”
I roll my eyes, “Ro-ro if work relaxed you, then you wouldn’t be walking around so tense and uptight all the time.”
Dre cuts in again, “He won’t be working.”
I look between the two, suspicious. “Ookay so what will we be doing?” An idea hits me, and my eyes widen, “Are we watching the next movie? If so, I’m down.”
“Family night.” Forrest says simply. “I believe you are due for a family night. Or, in today’s case, family morning.”
I will not cry right now.
“That… that sounds great,” I say, definitely more watery than I expected.
I can practically feel Em panicking at the end of the table because apparently, the man doesn’t know what to do with tears, so I try to switch up the subject.
“What are we doing? Movies? Games?” I ask, choosing to let the excitement beat back the happy tears.
“Your choice, Wisp,” Kieran says, his smile softening. “We’ll do whatever ye fancy.”
Almost an hour later, I’m staring at a table containing a colorful sprawl of little hex tiles. I’m hoarding sheep with absolutely zero plan. I just don’t like that the guys aren’t appreciating the sheep. There’s no way they’ll take care of them as well as I will.
Forrest is building an efficient and somehow morally righteous network of roads, while Kieran is trying to trade enough materials for a settlement in exchange for one sheep.
I know what he’s doing, he’s trying to get me to build a settlement on the open harbor space that would allow me to trade two sheep for any one material.
The issue is that it means giving up my sheep, and I’ve named all of them already.
Berta and Greg just had a marriage ceremony.
What if my other sheep decide to find love, and I just rip them apart like some sort of cruel sheep god?
I’m nothing like those assholes, so I keep refusing.
Dre, meanwhile, has the resource cards fanned out like he's about to perform a magic trick. He hands them out as needed, playing in a way that doesn't step on anyone's toes.
I have no idea what Em is doing, but he hasn’t made a single trade because, according to him, he views trading as a suboptimal reliance on volatile external variables .
He’s also freakishly still, and his focus barely leaves the game. He only moves to place a piece or collect cards. I’m pretty sure he’s somehow making this game a lot more complex than it needs to be, but who am I to judge? I’m emotionally attached to little cards with sheep on them.
My gaze is torn from Em as Kieran slides a sheep card to me. “For you, my wee Wisp. A fluffy sacrifice for your flock. That one doesn’t have a name yet, so next turn, I’m willing to trade you for settlement materials.”
There's a glint in his eye, and I'm starting to realize it's been working in my favor. He's been feeding me stories all morning—little tidbits about the guys, things I couldn't have learned just by watching.
Some of it I already knew. Forrest's favorite color is gray.
Boring. Predictable. Anik's favorite food is potatoes because they're versatile.
Of course it is. The man loves efficiency.
Dre knows the medical history of every SI employee and leaves care packages on their desks when they're struggling. He also lets them think it's Forrest.
That tracks.
Emerson once rebuilt a vintage motorcycle from memory after seeing it for five minutes, just to prove he could. That didn't surprise me either.
But then Kieran hits me with the weird stuff. Anik used to have a cat that wandered into his gym as a kitten, cold and half-dead. The thing hated everyone but him. Which is so on brand it hurts.
And Kieran? He was a session musician in a psychedelic rock band in the '60s. Got kicked out for being too distracting. I believe it.
Then there's the poetry. Dre writes terrible, angsty poetry about his long existence and immediately burns it. Except for the one time he didn't, and Kieran found it. Dre's face when Kieran told that story? Worth the whole trip.
“Och, tell our Wisp about Verdun, gramps.” He turns to me and raises his brows conspiratorily, “The man got shot in the arse just to get a holiday.”
Em doesn’t even bother to look up. “It was a superficial graze, and it wasn’t a vacation. It was a calculated entry into the medical logistics stream. The field hospital was an information nexus.”
Forrest pauses while placing a settlement, “Your medical file from the 369th said you were discharged for ‘nervous exhaustion and classical mania.’”
A slow, barely there smirk touches Em’s lips.
He finally looks up, his gaze distant. “They tried to send me to a rest camp. I recited the Iliad backwards to the evaluation board in classical Greek. Told them the forward version was too predictable. They decided I was incurable and let me go just to be rid of the noise.”
I drop the sheep card Kieran gave me. "Wait, back up. You got out of a war by being too annoyingly smart? What war? Also, does it bother you that you and Kieran have something in common? Getting kicked out for being annoying? Also, why did you purposefully get kicked out?"
Kieran snorts. “Ach, annoyingly smart’s his default setting. And we’re talkin’ the Great War. World War One. Trenches, mud, and pure bloody madness.”
Em’s gaze shifts to me, “I was a runner. It was the optimal position.”
Forrest clarifies his dry, factual way, respect clear in his tone.
“Runners carried messages between command posts and the front lines. Through active artillery barrages, sniper alleys, and no-man’s-land.
Life expectancy was measured in days, sometimes hours.
It had the highest casualty rate of any non-combat role. ”
My stomach drops. “And you chose that?”
Em gives a slight, stiff shrug, like he’s answering the obvious. “I liked being alone. The trenches were a cacophony of poor hygiene and even poorer strategy. But the runs were a set route, a clear objective, and silence. Other people just slow me down.”
Kieran cuts in then, his playful grin turning into something slightly more serious.
"Our mad genius here didn't just run messages.
He had a side gig—trackin' down the worst of the worst. The ones who thought war meant they could do whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted.
The ones who hurt civilians. Who took what wasn't theirs to take. "
Em's expression doesn't change, but something in the air does.
"He'd find 'em. Wait 'til they were asleep. And then—" Kieran draws a finger across his own throat.
No one speaks.
I look at Em. He meets my eyes, not denying it.
"They weren't soldiers anymore," Em states. "They were monsters. I just cleaned house."
Dre, who has been quietly dealing resource cards, speaks without looking up. "He signed up for all of it. Could have used his intellect in a hundred safe, strategic roles. He chose the one that guaranteed solitude and maximum personal risk. Then he left that to stand alone behind enemy lines."
Kieran continues, his voice lighter now. "Not before getting shot in the arse, doing his party piece for the medics, and getting himself discharged."
Em's lips thin into a sharp, disapproving line.
"The front was a meat grinder of predictable, idiotic tactics.
A waste of resources. The real architecture is always behind the lines—command, supply lines, railways, field hospitals.
" His voice lowers, taking on an intense rasp. "I simply helped as I could."
“A train loaded with artillery shells, destined for the German assault at Verdun, developing a critical scheduling error is more than a simple help.” Forrest says, then turns to me, "The entire shipment ended up in the hands of the French along with a ranking general."
“He would intercept medical supply manifests. Replace orders for morphine with vials of saline while the real morphine would find its way to Allied field stations via ‘captured’ supply drops.” Dre adds.
“Coal shipments meant for U-boat ports were diverted to French towns freezing through the winter.” Anik adds as he picks up the robber token and sets it down on Em’s prolific iron mine. “Your turn.”
Em picks up the dice, his gaze distant. “The most elegant hack was the communiqués between generals. A delay of forty-eight hours could turn a stalemate into a rout. A single, perfectly forged letter could lure two divisions and their supply train into an ambush of their own design.” He rolls the dice, and I can practically see his brain clicking back into the game as he finishes, “Chaos is just order waiting to be revealed. I identified critical stress points in the machine. Swap the grease for sand, and it will seize itself.”
He’s back in the game now, but I’m just staring at Em, the game forgotten.
He didn't escape the war. He hacked it. Turned the loneliest, most terrifying job into a solo crusade. Then got out so he could go behind enemy lines and rewire the whole broken system from the shadows. All because the inefficiency offended him.
Yeah. I get why Forrest hired him. Even if his moral compass points somewhere most people's don't.
Give the man a machine and he'll make it perfect. You just have to point him at the right one.
I glance at Forrest. He gives me a grim nod. He took Em in to make sure his brilliance and his lack of a moral compass got pointed in a direction that wouldn't hurt innocent people.
And now I'm sitting here, weirdly turned on, realizing I'm falling for a man who's basically a gothic cathedral—stunning, terrifying, probably haunted—while another is a fortress with a hard outside, a soft inside, and an annoyingly well-defended heart.
At least my instincts about Forrest being squishy on the inside were right. Now I just need to figure out how to vault over that fortress wall and bury myself so deep he'll never get me out.