“Did you remember to tip the masseuse?” Marcella asks.

“Hah, hah, it took three scrubs to get me clean and my hair still feels oily. Here, touch it.” I grab her hand in an attempt to show her.

“Nope!” she takes her hand back. “Nice to see your energy recover. We have a visit to the armory ahead, a visit to medical, then food in your room and some more of me talking, but this time about long term.”

As we start walking, I tap the mapping app on my phone and have it track my route so I can input our destination and know where the hell to go in the future. This place is so big I could fall over and be in a different state. It’s hard to believe there used to be enough people in Vegas to fill a dozen of these buildings. The War of Warlords ended around the time of my earliest memories, seven to eight years ago, but many places stabilized within two years after the start of the war period. Others places still smolder with conflict, which the nuns said was common in the pre-System Period.

“Kenneck! My Protegee needs gear!”

“Jaesus, ya banshee. I don’t see why you come to my range for this, Fontaine.” He sneers, but walks over to a rail with a variety of armaments laid out. He assesses me for a second then turns back to Marcella. “What’s her combat weight going to be.”

“Sixty, sixty five kilograms.” The man whistles as he processes the difference between my current weight and my target weight.

“Well, I’m going to start you on a .38 special and a .308, 40 grain load for a long gun. I will not be fitting you for assault rifles at this time.” I like that he’s talking to me, but I don’t know what those numbers mean. He makes a similar assessment while I continue to stare at him with a lost expression.

After half an hour we’re both frustrated with pistols, and when we switch to rifles, Kenneck was spot on in guessing I’m a .308 girl. It nestles into my frame like a familiar hay-stuffed sack and while the kick is a little much for me, it echoes down the length of me instead of kicking my weak points like the pistol does.

“Fontaine.” Kenneck says seriously, “I can’t let her carry a side arm. Best I can do is knives until she gets strong enough to wield the weapons.

“This is why I came to you. I presume you have a set of knives set aside?”

The man sighs, but nods his head. “I have a few blades that I would prefer over her pig sticker for trade craft, one that I would prefer for killing, and then a jack of all throwing set that does a decent job at everything a knife does, but is not exceptional at any of them.”

I grab one and immediately hate it.

“Don’t grimace at me girl, it’s a training set designed to piss you off until you figure out what you want!”

“I know I don’t want this.” I speak up. “I’ve been stabbing things for six or so years, and these are not it. I’d toss a switchblade over these abominations. Got anything in two-sided throwable and combat with a line-ripper?”

“What in the seven hells do you need a line ripper for?” He gestures his frustration, but also searches through his collection for what I asked.

“Tendons, Kenneck. They’ll catch and keep a serrated top, but a line-ripper comes out every time.”

The man pauses to consider, his disbelief fading into professional curiosity. “Huh, with your lower strength, that would be an issue. I take it you use the pig sticker to turn itself through the spaces between ribs?” I nod at his assessment, my opinion of him raised. “one more question, do you spin or flick?”

The corners of my mouth turn up in satisfaction. “Spin, my good man.” And for the next ten minutes I’m holding and throwing knives like I’m on vacation. If it wasn’t already my birthday, it would feel like my damned birthday.

In the end, I pick a double edge with a finger hole in the base for sure-er drawing and the choice of treating it as a pseudo punch dagger. Solid weight, long as my palm, expert craftsmanship. I love them and Kenneck gives me a leather bandolier for the blades that hooks onto a gun belt he also gives me for a pistol he won’t give me--yet.

We spend much less time talking about combat armor needs as we already discussed my target shape so he recommends acquiring older gear not attached to sets to get the protection I need. That sounds like a bunch of shifting and awkwardness, and decide that even if Marcella goes through with a set, I’ll hide it in the corner and hope to never wear it.

I know we’re going to the doctor next, and as much as I’d like to avoid the whole thing, It’s important to my training. “So, mentor of mine, from a scale of none to Pervert, how much touching will there be?”

“Uh,” Marcella stops, “like, maybe a six. Give me all of your weapons and your belt.”

“Miss Fontaine . . .”

“Kimber, we need an assessment, and I need him to sign off on your treatment.”

I unconsciously snarl at the idea of a male doctor touching me. It doesn’t just make my skin crawl, it’s making my hand twitch. I might need therapy. Marcella pins an eyebrow as high as it goes and keeps that eye on me while she spends a minute in her menus. We spend a few minutes outside of the office with “Dr. Renfroe” on the door until some seriously big boys walk up in some sleek looking suits.

“Marcella?”

“Kimber, these men are here to protect you and the doctor. Just, try not to get triggered? We don’t have many doctors.”

The large black man with hands the size of my torso looks at me with confusion, then rolls his shoulders in a shrug . . . or preparation, it’s hard to tell, that’s a lot of meat to move.

“Miss Fontaine, you know how I detest delays. If it weren’t for your surprise Protegee, I would be on time.” He scoffs at me in my gym clothes. “no smock? Get her out of those impeding clothes. I have data to take.”

I look down and see form fitting clothes on my narrow ass. What the hell is he talking about.

“I don’t have time for this.” He grabs my arm and spins me.

I refrain from raging, but everything in me tenses, becoming hyper aware of where my exits and potential weapons are. He touches the zipper on the back of my neck and all my restraint evaporates.

“Pervert” I seethe before the tension in my body springs into me bending in half and spinning while I grab the pen on his clipboard and aim it at the pervert’s neck. I’m a hand-full of centimeters away when I feel a bus slap me aside and a giant mitt catch my head before my body crumples against the opposite wall.

The shaking of my brain has me confused and a little vomit prone. “Don’t, don’t move. I’mma puke if you do.” The man palms my head and drags me to a trash can, where I vomit.

Nooo. I’m wasting fooooood!

“Fontaine! We were not warned she was Talented for speed!” Renfroe sounds panicked.

“She’s barely fourteen Jack, how the fuck would I know!? I added these two protectors for that reason.” Marcella defended.

“Some good they did! I won’t be in the same room as that animal!”

“Jack Renfroe,” Marcella said in a low, threatening tone. “You were impatient, and I warned of a Pervert trigger. You ignored me and tried to undress her. Now you’re wasting my time. This time, you will take the time to explain why you need her to do things, or I will let her kill you.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Marcella looks around the room to see if anyone else had opinions, and the two large men that she invited hold their hands up in concession.

“Good. Now Kimber, I’m going to give you a water and you’re going to fucking behave.” My eyes go wide and I nod. “Doc, start explaining.” She flings his pen back at him.

The Doc takes a second to look around to ensure that he was alone if he wanted to disobey. “M-miss Novaro. The extra tension in those compression clothing will mess up my calculations for your growth, and our estimates for your hormone therapy load. Additionally, we need a few baseline calculations that need measurements that clothes interfere with.”

I take a breath, and seven more, then two more. Then I nod. “sounds reasonable, but I’ll do it this time.” My compression top and my yoga pants come off and I’m feeling awkward in a sports bra and essentially black bathing suit bottoms.

Renfroe takes some calipers and pinches my skin in various places, I snarl reflexively a few times and his hands retract at near-light speed. I get a sick sense of satisfaction that I put the fear of ME in him, but I try not to show it for an engagement as short as this.

Marcella marches me out of the office more quickly than I can follow, so she’s mostly dragging me. She basically throws me into the elevator, swipes her arm and smashes a button. I should pay attention to what floor, but I’m more worried about the anger in her face. Is this rollercoaster how this is going to go? One minute she seems cool, the other she’s treating me like a hassle.

“Marcella, what the hell is with the manhandling?”

She sneers at me and slaps her hands against the elevator on either side of my head. “My sister used to act like you. You’re not the only one that gets triggered, Kimber. I almost watched that man kill you for trying to kill the doctor. It would be a lot easier if you didn’t remind me of someone I care about, but it’s too late to fix that.” She huffs, straitens herself and talks again. “Just, please, don’t commit suicide by negligence? Please.”

The pleading in her tone settles me and convinces me that she’s not just mad that I disobeyed. “I’m sorry Marcella. I don’t know why I react this way. I have since I started talking again. I’m betting related trauma that I can’t remember, but I obviously can’t be sure.”

“Jesus, Kimber. You’re not making me want to murder people less. Ugh, we should relax over food, but I don’t want to go back down to the Cantina or I might stab another Officer. We’re going to splurge and get room service, but don’t get used to it.”

I have no idea what she’s referring to, but room service sounds like someone is going to bring us food, and I’m all for that. We get out of the elevator and I see numbers that start with twenty seven. It doesn’t take me long to figure out that we are on the 27th floor of this building, and I am now higher above the ground than I have ever been in my life.

She keys into room 2722 and I move to follow like I have all day and she hip bumps me back into the hall. “I am not sharing a room with you. But you do have a roommate. I’ll let you get acquainted. Lunch in forty minutes.”

I nod and back over to the room next door. I scan my arm on 2723 and the door lock goes green and the latch clicks open. The first thing I see is an open living space with couches, chairs and a large screen, and behind all that? Floor to ceiling windows of the open sky. I rush over to the windows and slide my face along the whole length in amazement, before a part of the glass pushes out under my weight and leads me to a small balcony with a pair of chairs and a small table.

I stand and stare at the horizon so long I wonder if I missed lunch. I walk back in and see a small kitchen, a bar-top transition with stools and a sink, a small room with a closed door and Maribelle with a room and a large bed behind her.

Maribelle with a bedroom behind her?

“Maribelle?! Uh, why are you in my room?”

Her smile is bright and bashful—I almost forget what I was thinking about.

“I’d, uh, prefer if you called me Belle? We’re going to live together, and part of my work includes helping you stay stable.” My knee jerk is to spout indignant rage. “Before you say anything!” Belle rushes out, “I’ve wanted to get to know you for years. Jamie was just really hard to get past.” I snort at that, agreeing with the sentiment and the difficulty.

“It’s not that I mind being your roommate, it’s just . . . all of the change.” I chuckle and shake my head while staring at the floor. “As much as I’d like to think I don’t need your help, the last month and a half have been trying.” I take another deep breath and try to deflect the conversation away from myself for a moment. “Since you already have a job, does that mean you also have a sponsor?”

“Mm?” She says, distracted by something before looking into my eyes again. “Not as of yet, but I do know what department I’m working for. So when miss Fontaine asked for emotional support and behavioral therapy, mister Dunn thought I would be a good fit. Truthfully, I was relieved to hear I’d be helping you and staying with you. I haven’t been alone my whole life, and having a familiar face around is really nice.”

“Wait, wouldn’t all of the faces be familiar?” She smiles as though I’ve asked a thoughtless question. I’ve seen her use it on the grubs dozens of times.

“Kimber, one orphanage is not enough to feed an organization this large. There are more than a hundred new people, or that’s my estimate that took a series of tests with me this morning.”

“Eww, tests. I’ll take exercise to exhaustion over a test any day.” She giggles at me and my sour face.

“It wasn’t that bad. They set us in front of tablets and we answered questions and played with them for a few hours. That’s when someone from personnel services introduced themselves and asked what I was interested in doing. I described what I liked about working with the other kids at the orphanage, and she suggested I should work toward trauma support and other wellness activities.”

Huh, that’s a perspective I don’t think I could have looked at Our Lady Luck from. Hating the circumstances, but loving working with the kids. I suppose I could say the same, liking to go out of scavenging missions, protecting, and seeking justice for the kids that were harmed and abused. I should probably talk to Marcella on what morality ideals we’re working under.

“So tell me what you’ve discovered about our rooms”

“The furniture is the nicest I’ve ever seen, and most of the cabinets and closets are locked. Oh, and the bathroom has a huge tub with hot and cold running water!”

I chuckle at the excitement in her voice about the water, “Yeah, I almost melted into the drain of the shower in the locker room from how nice that water felt.”

“The locker room they had us use was not that nice.” Bell says quietly. I arch an eyebrow at her tone, but she shouldn’t have to use that locker room again for at least a year, so I shrug and continue on the tour.

I walk into the bathroom, see the ridiculous amount of space in here, there’s a separate shower stall in the corner? What kind of mad luxury is this? I test it all to make sure it’s not some surreal hallucination and am satisfied when I discover the shower jets are configurable.

I spend ten minutes checking the closets and the locked cabinets. My arm code doesn’t scan green, so maybe this is full of Marcella’s stuff? Wait, she gave me a card with her info on it. I swipe it against the scanner and it beeps, shows a green light and clicks the lock open.

“Ahh, this makes sense. These must be snacks and stuff that we have to pay for.” I check the other cabinets, see a variety of small food items, a small fridge with canned and bottled drinks, and a cabinet full of alcohol? Who in their right mind would give me access to that? Probably too much hassle to set the permissions separately. Maybe a test of “don’t abuse it” too. I could see it being both.

Belle stares at the cupboard of snacks as though she both wanted to raid it and she was afraid of it. Yeah, if it charged my personal account I’d be afraid of it too. Since I don’t have one of those, it’s not near as scary.

A lock on a door I haven’t been through clicks and I dash for my new rifle. I get a round in the chamber as the door reveals Marcella behind a pushcart with food on it. She looks up to see me with my rifle in my shoulder, pointed at the ground in front of her. I stare back at her in surprise. Did she mention something like this? Did she say that our rooms were connected and I missed it?

“Put the gun down and let’s eat. Good reaction time though.” She continues to push the cart to the table behind the couches. “I got a meal for me and Maribelle, the rest of the cart is for you to finish. Since Jack said your system might overload if I feed you too heavy too fast, so we’re going to start with a large meal and some items you can eat throughout the afternoon.”

I crouch to see what the other levels of the cart have to offer. I’ve seen pictures of some of these on the net when I could get the tablet away from the nuns, but no orphan I know would have been able to afford any of this. I pick a thing that looks like a steak with potatoes and some vegetable medley that doesn’t look like it had ever seen the inside of a can.

“This is a lot, Marcella. Like I’m going to have to train to fit this kind of volume in my body. How am I not going to get fat on this?” I stick a bean-looking thing in my mouth and it’s crunchy. Huh, never new they could crunch. I stick a fork in the steaks and start gnawing on the end, except the damned meat is tender, juicy and easy to eat. Holy hells, this is what food is meant to be.

“That’s kind of the point Kimber. It’s hard for your body to add muscle if it doesn’t have mass to convert. So, you getting a little fat on you is a good thing. Maribelle, sit and eat with us. I need to talk with you too.”

She lets us eat in silence for a few minutes before she finishes her chicken-looking meal and while the both of us eat, she starts in again.

“Maribelle,”

“Belle, please, Miss Fontaine.”

“Alright Belle, how’s your work schedule looking? Are you free evenings or are we going to have to work on synching things?”

“From what they’ve told me, my afternoons and evenings are mostly free. I’m to attend to your requests if it interferes with class or study, and they’ve agreed to let me check out a tablet if your demands interfere with my instruction regularly. The only things that might impose on our time, is that I’ve been told to learn to Cook, and to train in massage therapy.”

“That . . . is more caretaker than therapist. I wonder what they’re thinking for you? Sounds good though. First aid should also be on your list. Self-harm and risky behavior are popular with the traumatized. Maybe learn the basics of that before massage therapy.”

She nods at my trainer/mentor. “I will let the counselor know your preference.”

“Is she always this . . . stuffy?” Marcella asks me.

“Nope. She just gets super nervous with authority figures. It’s kind of adorable.” Belle blushes hard and starts hiding her face.

Marcella smirks at my roommate, “This might actually be interesting.”