Page 124 of Legacy Elite

Could she kick a puppy? One puppy. Just to help me out.

She finds me at the break.

I'm at the window pretending to check my phone, and she comes over with two of the small pastries the academy puts out when there are visitors, and hands me one without asking whether I want it.

"You're being watched by pretty much all of the people," she says pleasantly.

"I'm aware."

"You're doing it well. The trick with your phone is good. It gives you a reason not to have a face." She takes a bite. "Also your left sleeve is up."

I look down.

It is. It's ridden up somewhere in the last hour and there they are, all three of them, clear as anything against the inside of my wrist.

Linnea Vane looks at them.

She doesn't pretend not to. She doesn't do the thing where you snap your eyes away and both people have to live with it. She looks, once, for about a second, and I watch her count exactly the way that girl in the coffee queue counted.

And her expression blanks.

And then it’s gone so fast that if I weren't watching for it I'd have missed it.

"Sleeve," she says.

I pull it down.

"Thank you."

"They'll be talking about it anyway. You may as well make them work." Linnea turns so she's facing the room instead of me, which puts us side by side, which I understand about four seconds later is deliberate — because now nobody can see either of our faces. "Are you all right?"

"That's a big question."

"It's a small one. I'm not asking about the Council." She eats the rest of the pastry. "I'm asking whether anyone's checked on you this week."

My friends have, but my friends are supposed to.

"That's a horrible thing to do to a person," I say.

"What is?"

"Being kind to me. I was doing extremely well hating you."

"Oh, don't stop on my account," Linnea says. "I'd hate me. I've had the easiest possible run at everything and I'm standing at the back of a room where nobody has to explain anything to me. It's genuinely infuriating."

"It is."

"Yes."

We stand there for a second.

"Linnea—"

"Don't," she says. Not sharply. "Not because I mind. Because you'd be apologizing for something you didn't do, and I'd have to be gracious about it, and I've been gracious for about four hours today and I'm running low."

And then she smiles at me, and goes back to work, and I stand at the window and think, God, this would all be so much easier if she was a bitch.

I hear it on the way to the cloakroom.