“Swear to me you won’t tell the others about this,” he groaned as he continued to entrust his weight onto Aria’s arm. In answer the girl only looked around at him, hesitated, then made a quick motion with her eyes he recognized even before her NOED flashed briefly.
“Did you just take a picture?! What the hell?!”
Aria laughed. “If you’ve got breath to yell, you’ve got breath to walk. Come on, gimpy.”
Rei grumbled, but allowed himself to be led on, mercifully distracting from the betrayal of his body for a moment, which he suspected had been Aria’s intention.
In a silence broken only by his occasional groans and curses the pair of them cut across the darkness of the campus together. It was past midnight, which meant the evening patrols were out and about, but fortunately they were lucky enough to make it to the Arena without running into anyone. It wasn’t like Rei expected them to get into any trouble, but he didn’t fancy the idea of having to call up an already-exhausted Ameena Ashton to have her explain why two cadets—one of them arguably only partially-dressed—were walking arm-in-arm across the campus in the middle of the night.
It was with no small measure of relief, therefore, when Kanes finally came into view along the path. The squat dorm was mostly dark except for a scattering of lit windows that marked late studiers and the like, and as they approached Aria said that she would let Catcher know that they’d made it back. Sending off a message through her neuro-optic, Rei saw the reply arrive quickly, but was taken aback when Aria stopped short some yards away from the dorm doors.
“What is it?” he asked with difficulty. “Did he find her?”
“No, but…” Awkwardly, Aria turned them around, looking back in the direction they had come. Rei was about to demand what was going on when he saw a figure hurrying towards them at a jog, coming along a south branch in the path they’d crossed. It took him a moment, but as the person passed under one of the solar lights suspended over the pale stone of the walkway, he recognized a sweating Catcher.
“I take it you didn’t happen to run into her on the way here?” the Saber gasped, breathing even more heavily than Rei as he met up with them.
Aria frowned. “No, but where were you looking? Wouldn’t she be in the dorm?”
Catcher shook his head, leaning over to hold himself up against his knees in an attempt to catch his breath. “Yasiin Najjar from 1-D told me he saw her leaving with Logan Grant and a few others shortly after I got back. I went to the suite first, then checked every hall of every floor before I asked Najjar. He’s a Duelist too, so he recognized her. We must have crossed paths.”
“She left with Grant?” Rei demanded, not comprehending. “And ‘others’? Was it Selleck and the rest?”
Catcher’s face was glistening, and it was obvious he’d been looking non-stop since he and Viv both bolted from the hospital. “I assumed. I didn’t waste time asking, after hearing that.” He groaned, and eased himself down into a squat to lift his head and look up at them in distress. “What the hell is she doing? Was she planning to take them all on at once?! I ran to the East and West Center to see if they’d booked fields to make it all at least semi-official…”
“And Najjar didn’t say if she looked like she was being forced to go with them?” Aria asked, sounding worried.
Catcher shook his head again. “No, but I feel like he would have noticed that, right?”
They were quiet for a moment, each contemplating their own fears. Rei could feel concern and anger bubbling together to make an ugly mess of his thoughts. If Grant helped Selleck and the others, then Viv was likely to end up in even worse shape than he’d been left in.
No. That couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t let that happen.
Ignoring the pain it caused him, he tried to ease his arm out of Aria’s. She started to fight him stepping away, holding on more tightly and giving him a sharp look, but Rei met her fiery gaze evenly.
“We need to find them,” he said as firmly as he could manage, standing tall and pushing down the throb this caused his liver in particular. “I’m not much use, but I can push through for now.”
Still Aria hesitated, clearly not keen on the idea of leaving him on his own in his given state. Eventually, though, she relented, and let his arm go.
“Thanks,” Rei told her quietly, then looked between his two friends both. “If they weren’t at one of the training facilities, they’ll have gone somewhere with no cameras, like the elevator lobby. Any ideas?”
“Arena locker room,” Catcher offered at once.
“Too many eyes in and out of the place. At this time of night there would be no mistaking them coming and going.”
“Bathroom somewhere,” Aria said next, but shook her head. “No. Same issue…”
“It’s got to be on the grounds then, right?” Catcher posited with a contemplative look. “There’s cameras in every building, but there’s got to be blind spots on the campus greens…”
It was a good suggestion, but had Rei’s stomach tied in knots. If they were going to have to search the entirety of the premises for every quiet nook a small group of students could have gone to brawl, they wouldn’t be at it until morning and then some.
It was Aria who alleviated a little of his worry.
“They won’t have gone far. Grant wouldn’t want to risk getting caught by the evening patrols. They’ll be nearby.”
“Which means they’re probably already done…” Catcher muttered gloomily.
“You don’t know that,” Rei told him quickly, unwilling to consider the prospect as he shoved an image of a beaten and battered Viv laying in some random hedge row somewhere from his mind. “Viv’s quick, and she’s smart. I’ll bet she’s got a plan up her sleeve, if she left with them all so willingly.”
Catcher nodded slowly, elbows on his knees as he looked at the ground.
“Regardless, we should get moving.” Aria’s eye was bright, and Rei thought he could make out the pattern of a map on her frame. “There’s not much available space between Kanes and the east wall. Rei, you check that, and call if you need help. Catcher, you go north, and I’ll go west. South is mostly campus, so it’s the last place we should check.”
“Agreed,” Rei answered, turning at once to start heading for the grass area to the right of the dorms. Behind him he heard Aria take off in the other direction, but before either had gotten far Catcher yelled after them.
“Wait!”
Together Rei and Aria whirled around again. Catcher was standing once more, and looked to be reading a thin line of text off his NOED with wide eyes. Before either of them could ask what the holdup was, he blinked the frame away.
“That was Cashe,” he said a little breathlessly. “She says Viv’s already back in 304. And she’s not in good shape.”
*****
The first thought to pass across Rei’s mind as the three of them burst through the door of the suite and rushed into the common room was that he regretted casting aside his pride to let himself be half-carried, half-dragged by Aria and Catcher. As they came together to a screeching halt on the hardwood floor, they took in the oddity of the scene before them with utter astonishment.
Chancery Cashe sat on the couch closest to them, looking around in alarm at the sound of the entrance banging open followed by the pounding of running feet. She was dressed only in a plain white shirt and black boxer-shorts, and the disheveled state of her silver hair told Rei she’d most certainly been asleep at some point in the night already. On the smart-glass wall, a scattering of articles on “Connor Galt”—a User who’d been tried several years prior for war crimes and desertion—were projected, and Rei could only imagine Cashe must have been having trouble sleeping and gotten up to study. He only had eyes for the Lancer for a moment, however, his attention sliding quickly instead to the girl next to her, who’d only partially glanced around at their arrival.
“Not in good shape”, it turned out, was a matter of perspe
ctive. Viv’s perfect curls looked untouched, the skin of her face and cheeks unblemished. There wasn’t a speck of dust on her uniform, much less any rips or tears, and where Rei had expected blood and bruising he found nothing more than some faint cuts on the knuckles of her right hand that looked to have already been cleaned.
Viv was—on the other hand—trembling.
“Viv!” Aria hissed, leaving Rei’s weight to Catcher in favor of moving around the couch to quickly take a seat on Viv’s other side. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Silently, tentatively, Viv nodded once.
“I-I kinda found her like this,” Cashe tried to explain, looking between all of them nervously. “I woke up when something broke in the kitchen. When I came out to see what had happened—” She paused suddenly, staring at Rei for a second as her face drained of all color. “Ward! What happened?!”
Rei was confused for only a moment.
“Aria didn’t tell you your face looks like the ugliest side of an old eggplant?” Catcher tried to joke, his smile too strained to manage the humor.
“Oh. That. Don’t worry about it.” Rei waved Cashe’s alarm aside nonchalantly, disengaging from his friend to limp towards the kitchen. Sure enough, a puddle of water in the middle of the white tiling was littered with the shattered remnants of what must have been a glass. Taking it in only briefly, he turned back to the couches, putting one hand on the wall and the other on his side as his liver protested again. “Viv. What happened? Someone in the lobby said they saw you leaving with Grant and his friends. Did they do something?”
A pause, then a quiet shake of Viv’s head.
“You can tell us the truth…” Aria said softly, a shift in her shoulder telling Rei she’d put her hand on Viv’s. “You had us really worried. Catcher’s been looking everywhere for you…”
That seemed to bear some fruit, because Viv lifted her head slowly and looked around at Catcher.
“… Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m really sorry… I’m okay, though. Just… Just a little shaken…”
“By what?” Catcher asked, getting heated. “Viv, if Grant did something, I’ll—!”
“He didn’t do anything,” Viv cut across him, almost desperately. “Anything, I swear.” She looked back down at her hands. “… He didn’t do it at all, actually…”
There was a confused exchange of looks between Rei, Aria, and Catcher.
“Viv…” Aria spoke gently. “What do you mean? What do you mean he didn’t do it.”
Viv took a shaking breath, still not looking at any of them. “We messed up… I messed up, actually. He didn’t do it.”
It was at that moment, at last, that Rei understood.
“It wasn’t him,” he translated, and Aria, Catcher, and a very confused-looking Cashe all turned to him. “The ambush. It wasn’t Grant.”
A pause, then another nod of Viv’s head.
The others, then, appeared to catch on as well—with the exception of poor Cashe, that was. They gaped at Viv, Aria from beside her and Catcher from behind.
Fortunately, in the presence of her friends, Viv seemed to be calming down enough to find her voice little by little.
“I-I found him,” she explained. “I didn’t have to pound on more than two doors before someone told me what room he was in, on the fourth floor. When I reached it, he must have been the first one to wake up, because he answered.” She swallowed. “I punched him. The instant I saw enough of his damn face to know it was him.” She lifted her right hand for emphasis, showing off the injured knuckles.
“She was bleeding when I came out of the room,” Cashe told them all, still confused but obviously keen on helping now that even this meager explanation was in process. “I thought she’d cut herself on the glass, so I helped her clean up. There’s more, though.” She looked at Viv pointedly. “Show them.”
Immediately, however, Viv shook her head.
“Arada, show them,” Cashe insisted.
“Show us what?” Aria asked when Viv didn’t answer this second request at all.
Rei, though, had already noticed. As she’d lifted her hand, her sleeve and CAD band had slipped down. They covered most of the skin of her wrist, but not all of it.
Ignoring the protesting scream of his body, he pushed off the wall, crossed the floor in three quick steps, took Viv’s hand firmly in his.
“Wait! Don’t—!” Viv tried to stop him, but even her Speed wasn’t enough to prevent him from wrenching her sleeve down for all of them to see.
Aria hissed, and Catcher swore in fury.
Under her uniform, Viv’s wrist was blue. It wasn’t broken, but it didn’t have to be.
All Rei needed to see was the distinct imprint of fingers over pale skin, where a big hand had wrapped itself around Viv’s slender forearm and squeezed.
“I’ll kill him,” Rei seethed, letting Viv tug the limb free to cover up the bruise again. His own agony was utterly forgotten, eaten away by the heat of his anger. “Where is he, Viv? What room?”
“I’m not telling you,” she said quietly.
“Why not?!” Rei thundered, feeling himself start to shake. “Why the hell not?!”
Viv didn’t answer.
“Viv…” Aria started slowly, though Rei could hear rage barely hidden in her own voice. “He can’t get away with this. Why don’t you—?”
“BECAUSE I ATTACKED HIM!”
Viv’s yell had them all jumping, and Cashe positively jerked away, even further when Viv shoved herself to her feet and whirled to look them all in the eye at last.
“I attacked him, all right?!” she shouted again. Her face was pale, and while her trembling had stopped she looked to be holding it back only by keeping her hands clenched tightly at her sides. “It wasn’t his fault, it was mine! I punched him, and then I punched him, and then I punched him again! I would have kept going except he caught my arm and stopped me! That’s how I got this!” She reached around to pull the sleeve up herself, this time.
“I don’t care if you came after him with Gemela true-called and an army at your back,” Catcher snarled. “He hurt you. He can’t keep getting away with this!”
“He’s not ‘getting away’ with anything!” Viv answered just as heatedly, letting the sleeve fall again. “That’s my whole point!” She looked to Rei, almost pleadingly. “He didn’t do it Rei. He didn’t. I’m sure of it.”
This, Rei hadn’t expected.
“How?”
“He proved it. After I told him why I was there. Wasn’t hard to get it out of me. I was practically screaming it as I punched him. He dragged me off to gather up the others.” Abruptly, Viv’s fire suddenly winked out, and her face went white again. “Grant went straight to Selleck first, like he knew he’d be involved. Got him to explain exactly what happened. Asshole was smirking the whole time, like he was proud of it. After that, it wasn’t hard to find the others.” She counted them off on one hand all while looking Rei in the eye, unwavering in her conviction. “Truant. Perez. Gathers. Emble. Warren. Was that everyone?”
Rei nodded slowly. Indeed, along with Selleck, that was the six of them, and he hadn’t spoken all their names to anyone other than Aria yet that night.
Viv seemed darkly satisfied. “Yeah… He assembled them like they had business to attend to. I even got worried he was playing me at one point, and they were all gonna gang up on me. But…” She shivered. “Grant seemed… angry. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was like the time he went after you in training, Rei, when you set him off. He kept it pretty composed, right up until he led us all out to a field north of the dorm.”
She paused, here, and Rei could see in his mind’s eye the eight figures all together in the dark of the grassy grounds, out of the sight of any cameras, just as they’d suspected.
“And then what?” Aria pressed gently. “What happened, Viv?”
Viv shook her head slowly, but it was more in awe as her blue eyes appeared to be
looking at something far off rather than any of them.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Not without a called Device. I thought I was good on the combat team, but Grant…” She seemed in awe of whatever she was recalling. “There’s a reason he competed at the Intersystem level. He put half of them down before anyone knew what had happened, including me. The others didn’t stand a chance even all together, and they ended up on the ground too.” She shook her head again, and didn’t finish the sentence.
“Logan Grant took down his own group?”
It was Chancery Cashe who asked, sounding dumbfounded. Rei could appreciate the emotion, given that he was at a bit of a loss himself. That Grant hadn’t been behind the attack on him that afternoon was plausible, if a little hard to swallow. Rei supposed he could believe he and Shido had bred enough bad blood for someone like Mateus Selleck—or even Camilla Warren—to take their own initiative against him and his growth.
But to hear that Grant—the same Grant he’d been warring with since the start of the term—had then turned around and punished those very people…
That was an altogether different matter.
And yet… Here was Viv, his best friend in the world and beyond, practically swearing to that very fact.
What the hell is going on? Rei could only ask himself.
“We… spoke, after that.” Viv had found her voice again. “After he was done. Then he told me to go back to the dorm.” She frowned, eyes still far away. “It was so fast. I didn’t expect it, and by the time I’d figured out what was going on it was already done. I came back here, then, just like he said.” She frowned, as though not sure how she’d ended up following Grant’s orders. “I tried to get a glass of water to help calm down, but…” She waved absently at the kitchen, and the rest of the story fell into place.
“I cleaned her up,” Cashe wrapped in her stead. “That’s when I saw the bruise. Ward,” she looked to Rei, “what is going on? And also…” her purple-green eyes flicked to Aria briefly, “can someone explain to me why Aria Laurent is sitting on our couch?”
Iron Prince: A Progression Sci-Fi Epic (Warformed: Stormweaver Book 1) Page 50