Page 276 of Slashed Bonds

And I’d do it again. That’s the sick part. I’d sit in that chair tomorrow.

The signs were there. I’d like that admitted, on a floor, to a toilet. The pickles. The sleep, nine hours of it, a woman who hadn’t slept five in a row for five years going down like a stone and staying down. The yawn in a ballroom with my ex-pack walking at me. The way the room at Vicious Ink had smelled too strongly of green soap. The way my own scent had gone somewhere new under the cherry and plum, warmer, rounder, a note I’d filed as the ink or the taper or Cassian and never once as the other thing.

Because the other thing wasn’t on the list. The other thing was a word a doctor said through a curtain. You don’t check for a door you’ve been told is a wall.

Because the high was grand. Four days of feeling like I’d been handed a second set of lungs. And because, God help all four of us, we’re already on Val and Dox’s list for the next round. Cassian put our names down before the swelling went out of his finger. They say tattoos are an addiction you can’t tame. You get one, and then another, and then you look down one day and there’s no skin left that’s only skin.

The door bangs.

Heels and boots, running and not running, and then the stall door’s opening because I never latched it and Maddie’s pink face is above me with a bottle of water and a hand already going to my forehead.

“Oh, babe.”

She’s in Blackridge black tonight. No pink anywhere, hair dark, the way she dressed for a funeral, and I understand with my face over a bowl that she dressed for war tonight the way she dressed for grief, and that on her they’re the same color.

Viper’s behind her. Leather. Gloves. And in the gloved hands, a small zipped case I’ve seen a hundred times at Bellwether and never once asked about, because you don’t ask Viper what’s in her hands.

Thank God for best friends. Thank God it’s her face and not his.

Because this isn’t how I’d want any of the three of them to find me. They’ve held my hair before. They’ve sat outside bathroom doors through a taper. But not tonight. Not thirty minutes before, with my face in a toilet bowl and the red on my mouth half gone and a semifinal on the other side of a wall.

By the time Maddie’s got the water into me and Viper’s shut the outer door and leaned on it, I know without a doubt that I’m not going on that ice.

I feel like true shit. That’s the finding. There’s no version of this where I skate a shift.

“Sorry, babe.” Maddie, crouched, her hand flat on my forehead and then the back of her hand and then her wrist, like she’s checking three different thermometers. “But you’re sick as a dog and your temperature’s up. I can guarantee Cassian looks at you and it’s an immediate ban.”

“How delightful.” I groan into the porcelain. “Thirty minutes before the start of the game. Kill me now.”

Maddie’s already got her phone out. Not filming. Texting, thumbs flying, and I know who without asking because the tone that answers her is the one I set for Cassian and it comes through the wall.

“I told him you’re sick,” she says. “I told him stay out. I told him I’ve got you and if he comes through that door before I say so I’ll put it on the internet that he cried at a dog video.”

“Did he cry at a dog video?”

“He will if he comes through that door.”

She’s holding the line for me. The pink one. In black. With a phone. Against a captain.

“He said two minutes,” she adds, reading. “He said he’s sending someone with electrolytes and if it’s not you walking out it’s him walking in.”

Two minutes. I put my forehead back on my wrist and I breathe, the way Nikolai breathes in a crease, and I try to find the still, and the still isn’t there, there’s a stall and a fever and a semifinal and a girl with a braid.

“Killing you would be a double homicide.”

Viper.

From the door, arms crossed, in black, with her green contacts out and her gray eyes doing the thing they do when she’s finished a calculation and is waiting for the room to catch up.

Maddie and I look at her.

Both of us. Me from the floor and Maddie from her crouch, with the exact same face, because that doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make any kind of sense.

“Bitch.” Maddie, slowly. “I love how smart and intelligent you are. But I know that doesn’t make any sense.”

Viper doesn’t answer.

She never carried tests for herself. I know that now, on a floor, the way you know things late. Four years I’ve watched her unzip that case for other people, at Bellwether, in a hallway, in a van with a hook in the ceiling. Pills. Strips. A thing that reads a pulse off a fingertip. And a sleeve of white sticks she’d restock every few months with a face like she was restocking batteries, and I’d never once asked who they were for.