She tossed me the jade slip, then started sorting through the new loot.
The raised script for Cloaking Your Level and Spirit Affinity bumped against the pad of my thumb. I felt a little bad for not telling her that I was getting help from Hungry Ghost, too, but she and Rali didn’t really trust the skull stone, and I needed all the help I could get.
Picking up on my thoughts, Hungry Ghost sent me a feeling of smug agreement.
I ignored him and pressed the jade book to my forehead. Immediately, the information rushed into my brain. I sort of punched a mental Skip button to zoom past the legends of immortals cloaking their levels, the practical history of cloaking, and why you’d want to hide your affinity.
When it finally got to the how-to portion, I slowed down. I’d already read this part three times tonight, but obviously I was still doing something wrong.
With a series of deep, cleansing breaths, focus on the essence of your Spirit. Guard it as jealously as a lover, as a dragon hoards its treasure, placing a cloak between it and the world, hiding it from all senses.
I groaned in frustration. “I thought I was doing that.”
“Rali should’ve come out here for this,” Kest said, frowning. “Cloaking is so...vague. I bet he’d instinctively know what to do. I don’t know how to help besides to tell you to do better.”
That made me laugh. “That’s a pretty Metal thing to say.”
“That’s why it should help,” she said, throwing up her hands. The cinnabar arm moved slightly slower than her real arm, like maybe she had to tell it what to do separately. “Metal’s the most practical Spirit type in every situation.”
“That’s weird, because I heard Death Spirit was better,” I joked.
With a grin, she reached across her body and shoved me with her real arm. I dropped onto my butt on the concrete walk and scooted up against the wall with her. My bicep was up against the place where the cinnabar met her stump. Maybe because the metal was in contact with her skin, it felt warm.
Her stick hand was the closest to my hand. I wondered if it would be weird for me to, like, pick that up and hold it.
When Kest saw me looking at where our arms were touching, she pulled away, kind of turning the stick arm’s elbow joint in a little.
“Sorry,” she said. Thin black lace trickled down into her cheeks where a human would blush. “I didn’t mean to jab you.”
I shrugged. “It was fine.”
The cinnabar retreated up her shoulder, dropping her HUD into her lap, and turned into a necklace hanging around her throat.
“It was probably uncomfortable,” she said.
“Nah, it didn’t bother me.” My pulse picked up the second I decided to go for it, so before I could chicken out, I swallowed and said, “I was actually thinking maybe I’d see if you wanted to hold hands, but I didn’t have the guts to ask you right then.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at me.
“Because I thought you’d say no.” I faced out at the rain so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes. “What I didn’t count on was you looking at me like I was crazy...and not saying anything...like, at all.” I stood up and wiped my hands on my rain-soaked pants. I wished there was some kind of take-back button on this universe. That would’ve been great. “Never mind. I should get back to cloaking. That’s why you came out here. To help me figure that out.”
I turned to head back down the hill, but Kest grabbed my hand and stopped me.
“You’re serious?” she asked. “This isn’t just because you feel bad about the gang riot and my arm, is it?”
“I don’t care about your arm,” I said. Then I shook my head. “I mean, obviously I do, like, a lot. But even before that, I would’ve wanted to hold your hand.”
She squinted into my eyes like she was trying to decide if I was full of crap.
“Use your HUD,” I said, remembering how she’d checked whether I was telling the truth when she and Rali first met me. “Ask me again and use the lie detector to measure whether I’m lying.”
The lace in her eyes shifted between thick and thin.
“What if you don’t even know?” she asked. “The HUD could give out a false positive because you believe what you’re saying.”
I raised my eyebrow at her. “How is that different from me liking you?”
She frowned at me for a second, then stuck out her stump, the black script tattoos holding the skin and muscle tissue together glaring up at me.
When I realized that she was testing me, daring me to touch it and prove it didn’t bother me, a pang of something halfway between sympathy pains and freaked-out shot through the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to hurt her if the end was still painful, but I also didn’t like being basically called a liar.
There wasn’t an intuitive place to hold onto, so I put my hand around the folded-over skin where her arm ended, kind of cupping it. The skin there was really hot, and I wondered whether that was because it was still working on healing.
I wanted to say something cool and a little harsh, like “Your move,” to show her I could play that game, too. But what came out was, “Does that hurt? Should I do it different?”
“No.” She shifted a little, her boots making a scritching sound against the concrete. In a smaller voice, she asked, “Is it gross?”
“No. Your skin’s really soft.”
Instead of letting go or shifting my grip long enough to turn around and sit beside her, potentially giving her some kind of signal I was lying about being okay with this, I sat down facing her. Icy rainwater dripped off the eave onto my back, so I scooted in a little farther.
After a second, Kest scooted closer, too, and
