Chapter 138 | I Know All The Exits Too

Recognition flickered across his face. The kind that said he’d watched the news or read a forum or maybe both.

"Belmont. You’re, um, Badge 138. Field Three." Percy’s frown deepened, not with hostility but with the specific quality of someone whose brain had flagged a piece of data and was now cross-referencing it against everything else in his head. "You ran the assist strategy. Set up the plant guy for three kills and covered the slime girl in sector seven."

"They released footage?"

"No. I, uh, I was in Field Three." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"Class 1-B?" I asked.

His eyebrows went up. "Yeah. How did you..."

"Lucky Guess. I’m in Room 204"

"Room 205."

Percy’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "So we’re, um, we’re going to be in the same class. And we’re neighbors. In the same building." His hand went to his notebook again, this time pulling it out and flipping to a page where I could see a hand-drawn floor plan of what was clearly the 1-B residence hall.

He’d mapped the entire layout from the housing packet and annotated it with notes in handwriting so small it was barely legible. Room numbers, common areas, distance to the nearest exit.

He caught me looking at the notebook and his face went red. "It’s not weird. I map things. It helps me process spatial information when I can see it laid out and I already knew my room number so I started plotting the common areas and the distances between major points of interest because understanding the space helps me, like, exist in it."

"It’s not weird," I said. "It’s smart."

"Really?"

"How many exits did you count?"

"Seven. But two of them are maintenance access that I’m not sure students are allowed to use, so functionally five if you’re trying to leave the building in under ninety seconds from any interior point."

I liked this kid. His brain worked at a frequency most people couldn’t hear, and instead of turning that down to make other people comfortable, he’d just accepted that he was going to mutter and map and overanalyze his way through the world. There was something genuine about that.

Something that reminded me of the forum posts I’d read from AspectlessWonder, the Unmarked hero who’d passed the exam on their fourth try by learning to cheat better than everyone else.

Percy Mendoza didn’t cheat. He just saw more than most people did and hadn’t figured out yet that seeing more was its own kind of weapon.

"What’s your Aspect?" I asked.

"Analyze. It’s, uh, Channeler-type. Information processing. I look at something and my brain takes it apart into components and tells me how it works and what’s wrong with it and what would happen if you changed one variable." He said it the way someone describes a chronic condition.

"The problem is the information comes in faster than I can talk about it, so by the time I finish explaining what I see, the moment’s already passed and whatever I was going to recommend doesn’t matter anymore."

"That’s something that would cause anyone to freeze up."

"I had sixteen tactical options ranked by probability of success and I couldn’t pick one fast enough to actually execute before you showed up and just said do the thing."

Do the thing?

"So what you needed was someone to give you a deadline."

Percy blinked. His frown changed from processing to something that looked alarmingly close to realization. "I... yeah. That’s actually, um, that’s a really good way to put it. Nobody’s ever described it like that."

"Lukas."

Diane’s voice came from the front of the store. I turned to find her standing beside Marina, who had returned with a tablet displaying what appeared to be the Halloran apartment floor plan. Diane’s hand was on her hip in the pose that meant hurry up without requiring her to say the words.

"One second," I called back. I looked at Percy. "You picking furniture too?"

"My parents are coming later today. I’m, uh, scouting. Getting ahead of the spatial assessment so I can make informed recommendations about layout optimization when they arrive." He paused. "That sounded weird."

"Sounded efficient." I pulled out my phone. "Give me your number. If we’re going to be neighbors I should know who’s on the other side of the wall."

Percy stared at my phone like I’d handed him a live grenade. His mouth formed the beginning of at least three sentences before settling on a fourth. "You want my number."

"That is what I said."

"Like, for texting. And communication. Like people do."

"Just like people do."

He recited his number with the careful deliberation of someone who had been asked for it so infrequently that he wanted to make sure he got it right. I typed it in, sent him a text that read this is lukas, room 14, i know all the exits too, and his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, read the message, and smiled. Not big. Not performative. Just a small upward movement at the corners of his mouth that suggested something had landed in a place that didn’t usually receive deliveries.

"Cool," he said. "Um. Cool. I’ll, I’m going to go look at desk chairs now. For, you know. Sitting purposes."

"Solid plan."

He wandered toward the seating section with his notebook already open, pen moving across the page before he’d taken three steps. I watched him go and felt something settle in my chest that wasn’t quite affection and wasn’t quite strategy and was probably some combination of both that I’d spend the rest of the day refusing to examine.

Room 205. Right next door. A kid with an Aspect that could take apart any opponent’s strategy in real time, who just needed someone to tell him when to pull the trigger.

I filed that away.

"Lukas Belmont, if you do not get over here in the next ten seconds I am choosing your mattress and you will sleep on whatever I decide is appropriate."

I walked toward Diane, who had already commandeered a corner of the showroom and was reorganizing Marina’s tablet display to show both apartment layouts side by side. Sloane appeared from behind a bedroom vignette carrying a pillow she’d apparently been testing by squeezing it against her face.

"This pillow is insane," she said, holding it up. "Feel this."

I felt it. It was, in fact, insane.

"Who was that?" Sloane nodded toward the seating section where Percy had settled into an office chair and was methodically testing the lumbar support while writing in his notebook.

"Percy Mendoza. Class 1-B. My neighbor."

Sloane studied him for three seconds with the same evaluative intensity she brought to sparring partners. "He looks nervous."

"He’s always nervous. His Aspect processes faster than he can talk."

"Sounds annoying."

"Sounds useful."