Page 125 of Legacy Ascended

"Right," he announces. "Food."

"I'm not hungry."

"You said that at breakfast, and then you didn't eat lunch." He steers me by the shoulders toward the stairs. "You're going to eat, and then you're going to sit down, and then you can tell us all about mandatory butter."

Chapter twenty-four

Jessica

The dress has been in the back of my wardrobe for over a year.

I take it out and lay it on the bed and look at it, and it's exactly what it was: burnt orange, clean lines, a long neckline, a skirt that moves.

The color of a crest in an old illustration with a scraped-clean blank where its name should be.

I didn't know that the first time I put it on. A stylist in a room Jon had filled with racks told me nobody had asked for that shade in longer than she could remember, that it was an old color, that you don't see it anymore, and I thought she was being nice about my complexion. Then I sat in Faris's lecture two weeks later and watched her point at an empty space on a wall, and I went back to my room and opened the wardrobe and stood there for a while.

"You're going to wear it," Freya says from the doorway.

"I'm going to wear it."

"Good."

Sophia arrives a few minutes later with a case of things she has no business owning and immediately takes over my bathroom, and my bedroom.

"Sit. Not there, there, the light's better. Freya, hold this. Jessica, stop touching your face."

"I'm not touching my face."

"You were about to. I could see it forming."

It takes two hours and it's the best two hours I've had in weeks. Sophia does my hair with a running commentary on every single person who will be in that hall, most of it slanderous. Freya sits on the end of the bed with the shoes in her lap and adds one devastating sentence about every eighth person. Somewhere in the middle of it Sophia puts music on and we stop being efficient entirely.

Last time we did this in a room somebody else arranged for us, wearing clothes somebody else paid for, terrified of four forks.

This time it's my room and my dress and Sophia's hands and Freya telling me to hold still.

"Up or down?" Sophia says.

"What do you think?"

"Up. Off the neck. All the way up." She's got pins in her mouth and she does not take them out to talk. "Because of the shoulder."

I look at her in the mirror.

"I'm not hiding it," I say.

"I know you're not. That's why up." She sets a pin. "Down means it's peeking out from under your hair like you're embarrassed. Up means you meant it."

So we do it up.

The scar comes over the top of my left shoulder, a groove about the width of my finger where a bullet took the muscle and Bergström irrigated it and left it open for weeks. It's gone from red to a shiny pale pink. It'll never be anything else.

I look at it in the mirror for a long moment.

"Leave it," I say.

"Obviously," Freya says.