Chapter 79: Five Women, One Hotel Room, And The Thermostat Filed A Complaint?!

The official with the clipboard had let the mole stay, mostly because there was no form for sending it home.

That was how Soren ended up walking into the tournament hotel with a snoring earth-beast under one arm and a problem he could already feel forming behind him.

The semifinals ran two more days.

Vasquez Sr. had staged the late rounds at the Central arena across the city, far enough that the academy bussed the surviving classes out and put them up near the venue instead of running them back to the dorms every night.

That was the official reason.

The real reason was that a man who’d built a tournament to dissolve Class Z in public had no interest in giving them the comfort of their own beds while he did it.

The problem was the room.

Lodging got allocated by class standing, and Class Z stood where it always stood.

One room, because Class Z always got one of whatever there was the fewest of, and the budget that paid for it was the same budget that put Soren and Selah in a shared closet back home.

◆◆◆◆

Soren counted the bodies before he counted the beds.

Yara as the wolf, already a low dark weight, claiming the shadow under the single bed the second the door opened, which was established territory and not up for discussion.

Selah took the left side of the mattress and set her bag down to mark the edge of it.

Maren took the right and put hers down harder.

Dani folded herself into the one chair by the window with the moth settled on her knuckle and said it was fine.

It was not fine. Dani had her own room to share with some of her classmates, but still decided to be here.

Joan stood in the doorframe with her Bureau coat still on. "I’ll sleep in the transport."

"The transport’s a two-seater," Soren said.

"I’ve slept in worse."

"It’s parked under a floodlight."

Joan looked at the floodlight situation through the window, then at the room, then back at the hallway, calculating an exit that did not exist. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

She stepped inside and shut the door.

That was as much surrender as Joan did in one motion.

That left the floor.

◆◆◆◆

Soren put Mona, the mole, down by the radiator and Mona immediately dug a shallow trench in the carpet and went to sleep in it, which was going to be a charge on the room.

"Everyone takes a corner," Soren said. "We sleep, we will fight tomorrow. This is not complicated."

It was immediately complicated.

Selah’s frost had crept off the left side of the bed and across the centerline in a thin film, testing.

Maren’s heat was already pushing it back so the air over the mattress shimmered, the temperature unable to decide what it was.

"Your side’s freezing," Maren said.

"Your side’s a sauna."

"Because you keep icing the middle."

"Because you keep cooking it."

The thermostat on the wall clicked, struggled, and clicked again, trying to read a room that was twenty degrees colder on one half than the other.

The thing about the room was that nobody was actually sleeping, and Soren could feel all of it.

Selah lay rigid on the left, tracking the temperature with her whole body, because the moment Maren’s side got warmer than hers was the moment she lost.

Maren lay on the right with one ear up, listening for frost.

Yara under the bed wasn’t asleep either.

The shadows in the corners had a tension to them, the wolf monitoring every body in the room through the dark.

Dani in her chair had her eyes closed and the moth was not closed at all, its wings reading the emotional weather off four other people and feeding it back to her.

And Joan, who’d taken the floor by the door with her coat for a blanket, had her Bureau-trained hearing pointed at all of them and was getting no rest because a room with five threats in it does not let an investigator sleep.

Nobody trusted the dark enough to go under.

◆◆◆◆

"You’re all awake," Soren said, to the ceiling, from the floor, where he’d ended up with his back against the bed frame.

"No," said four voices, at four temperatures.

Joan was the one who broke first, which surprised him. She propped up on one elbow by the door.

"Does he always run this hot and cold at once," she said. To the room. To the women. Not to him.

"Only when they’re both in the room," Dani said from the chair, eyes still closed.

"The wolf’s the worst," Maren said. "She doesn’t even pretend to sleep."

A low sound came from under the bed that was not quite a growl and was definitely a comment.

"See."

Joan almost smiled in the dark. Soren caught it, the first time she’d let herself be in the dynamic instead of beside it, lying on a hotel floor trading complaints about him with the rest of them like she’d always had a corner here.

He let it happen. It was the first thing all night that felt settled.

◆◆◆◆

The diplomatic incident occurred at some hour after Soren stopped tracking.

Mona, asleep in her carpet trench, dreamed of digging, and dug.

The mole tunneled in her sleep, blunt nose first, straight under the bed, and surfaced directly into the established shadow territory of a shadow deity.

The dark under the bed went very still.

There was a pause that Soren felt, the specific quiet of a goddess deciding whether the small clumsy thing that had just breached her floor was a threat or an idiot.

Mona snored.

Yara decided idiot.

The shadows relaxed by one degree.

The wolf shifted, made room, and let the mole sleep in the corner of her territory, which from Yara was nearly diplomatic.

"Did the mole just annex the wolf’s spot," Maren whispered.

"The mole has diplomatic immunity," Soren said. "Go to sleep."

Nobody went to sleep.

◆◆◆◆

Gray light found the room a disaster of crossed borders.

Frost had won the left two-thirds of the bed in the night, which meant Maren had migrated to the floor in protest and was curled against Soren’s side.

Selah had the whole mattress and the cold smugness of someone who held the field.

Dani was asleep in the chair at last, the only one of them who’d gotten any real rest.

Joan was awake by the door, coat on, already upright, looking like she’d decided several hours ago that she’d lost this particular operation.

And the wolf was on top of the bed now, not under it, having migrated up in the night to a clingy position, with Mona the mole asleep across her shadow-dark flank.

The two of them had reached some kind of arrangement.

Soren sat up.

Five women, one room, a thermostat that had quietly given up, and a beast on his ankle and another on the wolf.

"Nobody slept," Selah said from the bed, accusing.

"I noticed."

"This is your fault."

"How is the room my fault?"

"You’re the room," Maren mumbled into his shoulder, not opening her eyes. "The whole room is you."

[DING! — Territorial dispute logged. Recommendation: larger accommodation.]

[DING! — Obsession Index: minor cross-flux, all bonds. Trigger: sustained proximity, no resolution. Status: unresolved.]

Soren read the recommendation.

He thought about the budget Class Z ran on, which was none, and the room they’d be assigned next, which would be the same size, and he closed the notification.

Then Mona woke up, looked at nothing with eyes that didn’t work, mistook Joan’s face for high ground, and went to sleep on it.

Joan went rigid in a way that Bureau training had not prepared her for.

"Kane," she said, very evenly, with a mole on her face. "Get this nasty beast off me."

He took his time about it.