Page 70 of Legacy Ascended

"I hate you."

"You called me," he points out, "which means at some level you wanted to be told the obvious by somebody who's known you since before you had a collar."

I sit there for a second.

"Come and visit," I say.

"What?"

"Come out here. See the place. I'll show you the arena, and the mountains, and the dining hall where they serve a gray pie that has to be seen." I'm talking too fast and I don't stop. "Bring Alex. Bring all of them. Dalton, Gray, Jake, Jim, RJ — the whole thing."

Leo's quiet.

"You remember that night in the dining hall," he says. "When Jon told us he was coming back here, and I said we'd visit when he was set up."

"And I said sure."

"And I said that didn't include you."

"I remember."

"Well." I can hear him smiling. "It includes you now."

"Leo—"

"I'll talk to Alex," he says. "She'll want to come, and if Alex is coming then everybody's coming, and Jim will end up running it and RJ will complain about how Jim's running it and then Dalton will take over."

"That's what I'm counting on."

"RJ'll want to know about the place before he agrees to anything. Actual information, Mateo. Not vibes."

"I can do information."

"You cannot do information."

"Jessica can do information."

"Now that's a promising development," Leo says. "Right. Go and talk to your instructor. And Mateo—"

"Yeah?"

"Tell him I said you're a lot of work."

"He knows."

"Tell him anyway," Leo says laughing at me.

Jessica comes at eight with wet hair and a bottle of something Declan pressed on her on her way out, and she's barely through the door before she's asking about Leo.

"Tell me about him. Everything. Immediately."

"Why?"

“Because you never talk about your friends.” She drops onto the end of my bed. “I know you here. I want to know what you were like before you came to Luftis.”

So I tell her about Leo. The theories. The way he'll build an entire case out of nothing and then defend it. The fact that he talks constantly and then, once every few months, says the single most accurate thing anybody's said to you all year. She laughs so hard at the theories that she has to put the bottle down, and I sit there watching her laugh at my friend and something in my chest goes stupid.

"He's coming," I say. "Maybe. He's asking Alex."