Limitless Evolution As a Snake

Bridget made me sit still while she checked my dressing, then accused me of planning something when I tried to look unusually interested in the ceiling.

The ceiling had never been interesting enough to support that performance. She knew it, I knew it and Old Mate immediately abandoned me to enjoy the failure from a comfortable private distance.

[System: Should’ve picked the window, mate. At least there’s a chance something outside deserved that much bloody concentration without also explaining why your tail’s pointing at the exit.]

I hadn’t moved toward the exit, and I resented being judged for potential crimes before completing the paperwork.

She finished checking the burn and sat beside me on the bed. Her hand had a small dressing of its own where the broken glass had caught her, a detail I found much harder to joke about than my own impressive collection of damage.

I took her fingers gently and kissed the uninjured part. She told me it was a scrape, not a tragedy, but let me keep her hand while we talked.

Lyra and Cherry had returned to Twawi that afternoon through the ordinary visitor route. They wanted to check the casino after the false collection attempt, and they told us when they arrived rather than becoming convenient distant voices whose location changed whenever a fight needed help.

They still shared the skills. Distance didn’t remove that link, but it also didn’t put their bodies in the apartment or let us borrow their ready cooldowns by wishing.

Bridget asked whether I intended to go aboard the auction vessel alone. I told her yes, because the case was mine, the listing was bait and I wanted to approach through a route that didn’t require a group pretending to be invisible together.

”You knew Horass expected you,” she said. ”Calling it bait didn’t make walking into it clever.”

”I knew, sweetheart. I also knew he expected me to arrive angry at the front, and I’d prefer to start somewhere less useful to his launcher.”

She didn’t mistake that for a promise of safety. She asked for the berth, the route, the time I expected to call and the name of whoever would wait outside if I needed to leave quickly.

Lukas had arranged a licensed tender with a dry cabin and a loading cradle. He would stay off the main vessel, handle the controls and leave climbing, heavy work and heroic swinging to idiots whose doctors hadn’t specifically banned them.

I sent Bridget the details before asking her to trust me. It felt better than making a speech about independence while hiding the practical information that might keep me alive.

We had time before the evening loading window. I used it to call the depot, settle another hundred for Dazza’s next holding day and check that his feeding tray had been operated on schedule while the club dealt with the attack.

My private balance fell to fifty-one thousand eight hundred and twenty. The operator promised to keep the pen sealed and told me Dazza had pushed a bowl against the door when my voice played through the speaker.

That hurt in a different way from the burn. I promised the teeth thing another proper visit after the boat, then set the phone aside before the guilt could become an excuse to make a second rushed plan.

Bridget leaned against me when I returned to the bed. She said the point of keeping people and creatures close was eventually learning that coming home mattered as much as leaving to do something impressive.

”I wasn’t planning to impress anyone tonight, love. I’d settle for theft, a rude message and coming back with all the parts you seemed attached to.”

”I was attached to the annoying parts too,” she said. ”You couldn’t leave those behind and claim you’d followed the instructions.”

I laughed, then kissed her because there wasn’t a clever reply that would improve the moment. She pulled me nearer carefully, mindful of the sore side, and I followed her pace instead of trying to turn affection into another thing I needed to win.

We kept the room private for a while. The auction, the cameras and the man with the koala obsession stayed outside the door while we gave each other the time we had chosen to protect.

Later, she rested against the pillows while I checked the departure message. Lukas had reached the tender dock, the main vessel had started taking its final cargo and the public sale page still listed me as available for purchase.

No extra EXP appeared for the quiet interval. I remained at two thousand five hundred toward one hundred thousand, with two hundred and thirty IP and a body that needed me to remember its actual limits.

Bridget helped me secure a small waterproof pouch for the storage receipt. I didn’t need a handheld phone or a new magic inventory to carry one folded document where it wouldn’t become pulp the moment I entered the water.

At the service exit, she kissed my forehead and told me to call before doing anything that would make the return plan useless. I promised, then added that she was allowed to be furious afterward provided she remained there to deliver it.

She told me not to make the promise difficult to keep. I took that with me through the guarded access route and down toward the tender’s collection point.

Lukas confirmed the case remained sealed in the loading photo, giving us some reason to hope the fish had survived their unwanted holiday.

The auction vessel rose above the water like a floating hotel whose decorator had mistaken greed for a color scheme. I slipped beneath its loading side, found the marked service intake Lukas had photographed and eased toward the narrow entrance.

Warm water suddenly rushed out of the pipe directly into my face. Somewhere above me, somebody had started flushing the vessel’s maintenance system, and my carefully chosen stealth route began to smell like a terrible personal decision.