Scorpio

Chapter V

When I opened my eyes the next day, it was still dark outside. Reason: it was barely 3 am. I groaned and put my phone away after checking the time. My head felt hazy. My elbow was a little creaky from yesterday's ambush. My knee, though, was curiously okay.

I turned on the lamp next to my head. Then, I sat up and pulled the leg of my pajamas above my knee. By the weak light, the skin looked exactly as it had been before I had been roughly pushed down. I passed my hand over the site of injury. There was no scarring or scabbing.

Thanks to a magic diamond. So, I hadn't made that up on an acid trip. It had been real. Real inexplicable.

After another three-ish hours and some ibuprofen, I was on the bus with Claren—no attackers today. Maybe the gang didn't want to get screwed over again.

I was working on finding the 2-D area of a cardioid when Claren spoke up.

"Are you better?" He sounded concerned.

"Eh, the swelling in my eye is going down," I replied nonchalantly. "I don't have PTSD. My scrapes are healing. I'd say so."

I didn't tell him about my leg because I figured it would freak him out more than seeing the wound had. Because the nasty cut had made sense: falls create bloody injuries; I fell; ergo, I got a bloody injury. The rapid healing made much less sense: an ambidextrous artist gave me a crystal bead; I took it after speculating whether it might have been LSD; ergo, my leg is all better now.

Yeah, a lot of lemmas and corollaries would be needed to complete the proof of that theorem.

"Good. If I knew who those guys were," he growled, "I'd give them a piece of my mind."

I tried to shush him. "Relax. I don't think that getting into a three-on-one is a very good idea."

I thought for a minute about the anti-derivative of squared cosine.

"Also," I cautioned him, "I don't think it's a good idea to go around looking for trouble." Goodness knows we all have enough problems of our own to deal with.

"They went around looking for trouble."

"Are you still recruiting for Psyche?" I asked him.

"Yes, of course."

"I have a not-so-good feeling about that club."

"What? Why?"

"I don't think those people have limits..."

The limit of e to the power of x as x goes to infinity does not exist. Plus infinity. What if you flipped it over the x-axis? Minus e to the power of x? Negative infinity. That was a direction I did not want to be going down.

"I have to get out of wrestling," he said with a dejected shake of the head. "You have no idea."

Why was he so bent on getting out of the sport he had been recruited for? Something must have changed—not just teamwork and brotherly comradery anymore.

Should I tell him about my suspicions about the Psychos? But friends should be supportive, right? And I had no evidence, just an unsettling hunch. It was better to encourage people to chase their dreams. I bit my lip and wrote the limits of integration instead.

"Just be careful, Claren," I said at last. "Since neither of us knows much about that world."

"Says the girl with a black eye," he said in an attempt to lighten the mood.

I played along and mock laughed. "Ha, ha. And maybe, I'll give you one, too, with this book of Greek mythology."

He held his hands up and smiled. "Whoa, no need to turn violent. This was supposed to be strictly PG-13."