Page 35 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Good.

“Yeah, don’t do that,” Gurlien mutters to her. “It’s not a threat.”

“You just go around with people laughing at you?” Ambra asks, and they’re next in line, thankfully.

Walking is easier than standing still on her legs, and this static line makes her knees quake.

“I’ve had people laugh at me in public since I was a child,” Gurlien replies. “It’s far, far better if you ignore it.”

“Why would they laugh at you?” Ambra raises an eyebrow at him, making sure to do the up and down glance that makes humans uncomfortable. “Aren’t you the most statistically normal type of human?”

He glares down at her over his glasses, then back to the line. “People will be cruel.”

With Johnsin now dead, Ambra knows it the best, so she stands there, almost idle, as Gurlien rattles off an order and gets awarded with a tray full of food.

He nods at her to follow, and thankfully, he leads her past the hordes of teenaged humans, into a table that’s almost tucked away in a corner, out of the oppressive bubble of noise.

She gratefully lowers herself into the hard plastic chair, gritting her teeth.

“They just expected you to move on from all this pain, didn’t they?” he asks, placing an overly large salad bowl in front of her. “Did the stasis chamber take it away?” Precise, he gives her a fork, as if this is some routine of his.

She takes it; it does her no harm to protest that sort of movement. “Nope,” she says, and he scowls at her like it’s her fault. “You heard Johnsin, I’m not a person.”

It comes out surprisingly bitter, so she stares down at the salad instead.

The human body always puts inflection on things she’s not meaning to, and it’s awful.

The salad itself is so covered with other things that the lettuce the body loved so much is barely visible. There are grains, fruit, some sort of meat, a bright vivid raspberry red dressing, and even something she only vaguely recognizes as cheese.

“You’re going to make me eat all of this?” Ambra asks, pointing with her fork.

“Do I need to show you more texts from Axel?” he answers instead, and the interest must’ve shown in her eyes so he shakes his head. “Forget I said that, no.”

She grins at him and he leans back, startled.

“Yeah, still unnerving,” he mutters. “Here, put these on,” he says, pulling out something from one of the bags and sliding it across the table.

It’s a pair of glasses, the round lenses tinted green. Not as fully opaque as the sunglasses she’s seen before, but still colored.

Wrinkling her brow, she slides them on her face, and immediately, the headache building behind her eyes lessen.

She blinks up at him, and with just that small amount of dimming, the lights in the crowded food court are way more tolerable.

He’s studying her, intent.

“Good, they mask the eyes,” he says clinically. “Green cancels out the red.”

She takes them off, and the headache immediately returns, so she crams them back on her face. “These would’ve been great in the stasis chambers.”

This seems to startle him again.

“The lights always hurt,” she supplies. “They never varied and they were always just the same bright white.”

This seems to stump him again, his jaw tight, before he rubs between his brows and grabs one of the shopping bags instead of sitting. “I’ll be in there, actually putting on something that fits me.”

That’s why he sat them where he did, right next to the bathroom.

It’s only a few feet away, less than the distance of the other room he was in the night before, but he’s already striding away when she’s nodding.

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