7. The Wrong Joke

Sia’s POV

Around noon, the fuel needle hit empty.

I had a list by then. I’d started it on the last blank page of the diary, in a pen I had borrowed from Jun’s bag without asking, because every good strategist keeps notes.

Coffee. Failed. Minus five.

Be useful. Worked. Zero points. Apparently, saving everyone’s life was just a baseline expectation.

???

Marcus coasted us into a crossroads station that was nothing but one old pump and a cracked sign. There were already people there. Ten of them, in mismatched coats, with pipes and bats and one very rusty shotgun. The man in the middle was thick through the shoulders and had a face like a closed door.

Eli checked his tablet and went pale. “Ninety minutes,” he whispered. “The wind-type’s moving faster than I thought.”

“Hand over the truck,” the big man called. “And whatever fuel you’ve got. Then you can walk.”

Marcus had his hand on his rifle before the engine had even stopped. “You want to try that again?”

“We don’t want a fight.” The man shrugged. “We want the truck.”

There were ten of them and seven of us, and one of us could barely walk. We had ninety minutes and no fuel, and every second of this argument was burning them. I watched Skyler’s shoulders tighten and Marcus’s finger slide toward the trigger, and I thought, ‘this is going to end with someone bleeding.’

Then I thought, or this is my third line.

A crowd. A crisis. Skyler watching.

The chill touched the base of my skull, thin and slow, like a fingertip. It wasn’t coming from the road or the sky. It was coming from the line of scavengers, from the man on the end, a skinny one with a crowbar and his left hand jammed deep in his coat pocket.

I looked at him properly.

His sleeve was wet to the elbow, even though it hadn’t rained in days. A small, dark puddle was growing under his boot, and he was shaking in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

I stepped out from behind the truck door.

“Hey.” I used the voice I’d once saved for clients who were about to sue. “Let’s talk about this like adults.”

The big man looked at me. Behind me, I felt six pairs of eyes drill into my back. What is she doing?

“You want a truck,” I went on. “We want to leave. That’s a very simple problem, and I’d love to help you solve it. But first, I’d like to know how long your friend there has been like that.”

I pointed at the skinny man.

“What friend?”

“The one with the wet sleeve. The one who stopped sweating about an hour ago and started leaking instead.” I kept my voice light. “He’s a water-type. Day one, I’d say. Maybe the second hour of day one. In about six hours, he’s going to flood this crossroads and everyone standing on it, and it’s going to be messy.”

Silence.

The skinny man made a small, strangled noise. The puddle under his boot had become a stream.

One of the scavengers shouted. Another one dropped his bat. The big man spun around, and for one second I saw the exact moment he understood.

Then they ran. All of them, all at once, in ten different directions, leaving the pump, the truck, and the skinny man, who stood alone on the cracked asphalt, staring at his dripping hand with eyes that had gone terrible and wide.

“I’m sorry.” I meant it. “I’m so sorry.”

He ran, too.

Behind me, nobody spoke. Jun was already filling the tank, quicker than I had ever seen anyone move. Eli stared at me with his mouth slightly open. Marcus hadn’t taken his hand off his rifle, and from the look on his face, I was fairly certain he hadn’t been asked to use it.

Skyler studied me for a long, unreadable moment. Then he climbed back into the truck without a word.

I checked the meter on the way past, like a kid checking for presents.

[Affection: -115%.]

Of course. I added it to the list. Useful, twice. Nothing.

But the more I thought about it, the more I could see the pattern. The system had told me that Skyler’s affection followed how I treated the people he cared about. I had been rescuing them, not liking them. Saving someone’s life was easy. It didn’t cost me anything. What I hadn’t tried yet was the harder thing, the part where I was friendly to the people who wanted me dead.

So I took a deep breath and wrote down line three.

Be charming.

We were rolling again, tank full, forty minutes lost and no one the worse for it. For the first time since I’d woken up in this body, I felt almost safe. Light-headed, even. Winning does that. So when Marcus, hunched over the wheel with a scrape on his cheek from the pavement yesterday, caught my eye in the mirror, I smiled my warmest smile.

Charming. Humor builds rapport. Everyone knows that.

“I didn’t know you could fly, Marcus.” I grinned at the mirror. “Nice form, by the way. Ten out of ten on the landing.”

The truck gave the tiniest swerve.

It was only for a second. But Eli glanced at Jun, and Jun looked down at his hands, and Lena set her water bottle down so carefully that it didn’t make a sound. Marcus didn’t look at me again. His knuckles on the wheel had gone the color of bone.

I had the sinking sensation of having stepped on something very small and very sharp.

In the passenger seat, Skyler turned his head, just a little, and found me in the mirror.

He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t spoken. But there was something in his face that hadn’t been there when I was dodging guns or naming safe roads. It was cold and still and very, very tired, and it said: ‘there she is.’

[Affection: -150%.]

Minus Thirty-five points. For one joke.

I stared at the white text hanging in the dusty air, and I understood exactly what had happened. Marcus was one of Skyler’s people. I had made him flinch in front of Skyler, in the one moment I had thought I was winning. I’d spent a whole morning being careful and a whole afternoon being right, and I had undone it with a single sentence because I’d been pleased with myself.

I crossed out line three.

Something scratched at the back of my mind. I had joked about that fall because it was funny. Why had it been so wrong? Marcus’s face when I’d said it. The way his shoulders had folded. There was something I didn’t know about him, something that wasn’t in the book, and I had walked straight into it.

“Thirty minutes.” Eli’s voice cracked.

He was holding the tablet in both hands like it might bite him. “It’s not slowing down. And the others… they’re closer, too.”

I didn’t need the screen. The cold had already told me. It was rising up my spine like water, vast and gray and coming fast, and behind us, the horizon had begun to turn.