Page 42 of Knottingley Ever After
I can confidently say, I am not embarrassed of Iris O’Shea, in private or in public, and at some point in the last six hours that has stopped being a position and started being a fact about me.
Dangerously.
“Why will it not work?” she asks, soft, eyes still on mine.
“North Star is a closed network.” I make myself sit back, just enough to let us both breathe. “Carrier service is blocked on most of the campus footprint. It is how they get the freshmen.”
“How they get the freshmen?”
“The school has its own provider. Branded plans. Branded handsets. You enroll, you pay, you are issued a device that works on the elite network they have constructed, congratulations, you are a North Star citizen.”
Her face does something complicated.
“So I need to scuff up for a new phone.”
“In the polite terminology, yes.”
She blows out a breath, taps the dead screen once more, and shrugs.
“Fine. I can probably find a side hustle around here. Tutoring, equipment laundry, whatever. Save up a few weeks, sort it out.”
There is no whine in it. No bid for sympathy.
The shrug of a woman who has been solving her own logistics since she was old enough to lace skates, and the matter-of-factness of it makes a small protective thing flare hot in my chest that I am, again, going to have to file for later.
I let it sit a beat.
Then, casual, because she will scent a heavy question coming and shut it down.
“You have a lot of people back home? Friends, I mean. Outside the team.”
She laughs. Short. Surprised.
Not a happy sound.
“No, not really. Just the team, mostly. None of them have even texted to check in since I landed.” Her thumb taps the dead phone. “Most people in this sport don’t love Omegas. If I disappear, that is one less spot at the top to fight over.”
My jaw works.
“Pinky. That is an ego problem on their end. Not a worth problem on yours.”
Her head comes up. Slow. Storm-grey full on me, surprised again, and then softening at the edges in a way I am almost certain she has not consciously approved.
“Okay,” she says, after a moment. Just a singke word.
She rises before either of us can do anything else with it.
We head out through the main concourse.
I let her walk in front of me because that is the basic geometry of a corridor, and because I have learned, in one day, that putting myself ahead of Iris O’Shea without a reason is the fastest way to lose her cooperation.
The afternoon class shuffle is in full ugly bloom.
Students pour out of the lecture halls in two opposing tides, hockey bags and backpacks and figure skating girls still in their warmups, and the corridor narrows at the choke point past the library into a packed, shoulder-to-shoulder push. Cologne, perfume, wet wool, vending-machine pastry, burnt cafeteria coffee, all laid over the unkillable hum of too many Alphas in too small a space.
I watch her square her shoulders and wade into it, watch her get bumped twice in the first ten steps, and I let that happen exactly that many times before I move.
My hand finds hers without ceremony. Fingers slotted between fingers, my grip firm, hers startled and then accepting. I draw her gently past me into the lead position and step ahead, putting my shoulder where the next bump was going to land.
