Chapter 362: Leaving The Atlantic Theatre
I was genuinely considering stepping out of the hall entirely. Give Maribel the space, the silence, the four walls to herself for a few minutes. Whatever she was feeling right now, the embarrassment, the disorientation, the rawness of a first time that hadn’t exactly happened under normal circumstances, I doubted my presence was making any of it easier to process. She hadn’t signed up for any of this when she decided to follow me.
So I stayed at the back of the hall, sat down in one of the rear seats, lowered my head, and gave her the time she needed without making a thing of it.
I used the quiet to deal with my own side of it, which was less straightforward than I would have liked to admit. Control had always been something I could rely on. It took a few minutes, but the edge of it settled, and I let it go.
And by control I meant control over my lust to say it bluntly.
About ten minutes passed before I heard the soft rustling of fabric, her cargo pants going back on, the quiet sounds of laces being pulled through eyelets, the small ordinary motions of getting dressed. Sounds that carried a strange weight in the silence of the hall.
"I’m done."
I looked up.
She was already moving through the rows, torchlight sweeping across the seats, rummaging methodically through the space between armrests and along the floor beneath them. I caught the slight stiffness in her gait as she moved, said nothing, noticed nothing, filed it away and left it there.
She wanted to move forward. The best thing I could do was move forward with her.
I stood up.
"What are you looking for?" I asked, though my voice clearly sounded hesitant.
"Romero took the battery," she said, not looking up from the row she was checking. "But if that Starakian actually set this place up as a trap, if he spent real time preparing it, then the battery probably wasn’t the only thing he stashed here."
I stopped.
She was right.
I looked around the hall properly, running through it. Zakthar had chosen this specific building, this specific hall, with a specific purpose, lure Emily in, contain her, strip the Symbiote, leave her with nothing. That kind of plan didn’t get built around a single asset. He would have come prepared for a Symbiote Host, prepared for resistance, prepared for the possibility that things didn’t go cleanly.
Which meant he’d had weapons here. Starakian weapons, the kind designed specifically to work against Symbiote physiology, the kind that regular firearms couldn’t replicate. He’d lost his original cache when his plan to bring Emily down had collapsed at the worst possible moment, with Gaspar and Callighan’s people arriving and everything unraveling at once. Some of what remained he’d passed to Marlon, a last measure, a way to give them some protection against a Host if things turned hostile.
But this place had been his ground. His preparation. There might be something left.
I crossed to the right side of the hall and started working through it while Maribel took the left, checking under seats, running my hand along the undersides of armrests, looking for anything that didn’t belong to a cinema. We worked in silence for the better part of ten minutes, thorough and systematic.
Nothing.
I straightened up and looked across the empty rows.
No Starakian weapons. Just the hall, the screen, the dark, and the smell of a building that had been sealed for too long.
In some ways the trap had already shown itself fully, the Hybrid, the sheer density of Infected. That had been Zakthar’s work as much as anything hidden in a seat cushion. The building itself was the weapon.
But thinking about it more clearly, thinking about Emily being led here, about what Zakthar had been planning to do to her once she was inside, the anger came back in a quiet yet dangerous wave. I knew what they were planning. Kunta confirmed it herself. But standing in the room where it was supposed to happen made it feel more real and more reprehensible in a way that didn’t sit well.
Strip Dullahan from Emily. Which meant killing her. Dressed up as science, as necessity, as the survival of something larger, but reducing it to its simplest form, that was what it was.
And now he was working with Callighan. Lending his knowledge and his technology to a man whose methods I’d watched firsthand.
I thought of Kunta. She was different, I believed that. A girl who’d followed someone she cared about across an incomprehensible distance and ended up somewhere she hadn’t chosen, trying to do what good she could with what she had. The Matrix box she’d brought was support technology, not a weapon. Her intentions read as genuine.
Zakthar was something else. He’d come here with purpose. With a plan. And the fact that his stated goal was saving humanity didn’t automatically make him trustworthy, not when his methods included building traps for people who hadn’t chosen what they were, who’d simply had the Symbiote forced into their lives the way the rest of us had things forced on us by this world.
If their civilization was as advanced as the technology suggested, they knew enough to understand that Symbiote Hosts weren’t a monolithic threat. That some of us were just people who’d been caught in the middle of something vast and weren’t given a choice about it.
Knowing that and acting anyway said something I couldn’t ignore.
I didn’t want him dead. But I wouldn’t turn my back on him either.
"Here."
I looked up from the empty row I’d been checking.
Maribel was standing near the far end of the left section, holding something up in the beam of her torchlight. Small enough to fit in her palm. From across the hall it looked like a watch, a smartwatch maybe, the kind that had been everywhere before the world stopped caring about step counts and notification alerts.
I crossed the hall toward her.
Up close it was clearly something else entirely. White, not the off-white of aged plastic but a clean, particular white that didn’t exist in anything manufactured on this planet, a color that seemed to come from the material itself rather than sitting on top of it. The surface was smooth and seamless in the way Starakian objects always were, no visible seams or joins, like it had been grown rather than assembled. A screen where a watch face should have been, pale and blank. I pressed my thumb against it. Nothing happened.
"Is it Starakian?" Maribel asked, watching me turn it over in my hands.
"Yeah," I said. The material confirmed it before anything else did, the weight of it, the texture at the fingertips, the quiet sense that whatever it was made of had no equivalent in anything human-manufactured. "You’re right, it is."
"It doesn’t seem to work though," she said. "Dead battery or something?"
"Possibly." I turned it over one more time. The Starakians ran everything through Nexon energy, it was the foundation of all their technology, the thing that made it function at a level so far beyond conventional power sources that the two weren’t really comparable. If this had been sitting here untouched for weeks, whatever charge it carried might have simply depleted. "Kunta would know what it is. She’d probably know how to get it running again too."
"That Starakian, the one you’re keeping? I haven’t seen her around," she said.
"We’re keeping her presence quiet. Most people there don’t know about her and I’d like to keep it that way, so if you could not bring her up around the others I’d appreciate it." I glanced at her. "Finding out there’s literally an alien living alongside them would not go smoothly."
"That woman leading the community knows?"
"Margaret and a small handful of others. That’s all." I pocketed the device carefully. "That’s how it stays for now."
She considered that for a moment, then turned toward the door without further comment. "We need to go. We’ve been in here too long already."
She was right. I picked up my hand axe, followed her to the door, and pulled the steel rod free from the handles as she pushed through.
The corridor outside was manageable. I moved up beside her and dealt with the Infected as they appeared, clearing the path quickly, and we made our way toward the stairs Paul had pointed out on his way out. I kept half my attention on the building around us and the other half on Maribel.
She was moving fast. Keeping herself forward-facing, conversations clipped to the minimum. I understood it completely. I didn’t push against it.
But I had something to tell her and telling her later would be worse than telling her now. I knew that. I’d been carrying it since we’d left the hall and every step I waited made the words harder to find.
We came out of the theatre into the open air. It was afternoon and the sun was burning. Maribel was already several paces ahead, moving at pace.
"Maribel."
She didn’t slow down. Didn’t answer. But the set of her shoulders shifted slightly, she was listening. That was enough.
"There’s something else I need to tell you. About the Symbiote and what comes next." I kept my calm, matching her pace from a few steps behind. "The transfer worked... you’re safe, the infection is clearing, and I didn’t lie about any of what I told you. But your body now has a Symbiote fragment in it, and that means the next few weeks it’s going to go through changes. Your strength, your healing, your physical limits, all of it will begin shifting as your body adjusts to carrying it. That’s normal. That’s what’s supposed to happen."
She was still walking.
"The thing is... that adjustment process needs to be managed. Your body needs help accepting the Symbiote and integrating the changes properly, otherwise the process becomes unstable. And an unstable integration..." I paused, choosing the next part carefully. "You saw Emily. When we found her."
That made her stop.
She turned slowly, not quite facing me directly, eyes somewhere between my face and the middle distance.
"Why did she end up like that," she asked frowning slightly. "You saved her didn’t you?"
"I saved her life, yeah. But I made a mistake afterward... I wasn’t there to help her stabilize. The Symbiote I transferred to her was too much, too fast, and without someone to help regulate the process her mind and body started fighting each other instead of working together. What you saw when we found her... that’s what happens when integration goes wrong and there’s no one there to anchor it." I held her gaze steadily. "I had to stabilize you so you don’t end up like her. Your body and mind won’t survive the burden otherwise...I have to stabilize you..."
She repeated the word quietly, almost to herself. "Stabilize."
Her expression was unreadable for a moment, working through the shape of what I was building toward. She was smart enough to be getting there already.
I pressed forward before the silence could stretch any further.
I waited a moment before gather the courage and burying my shame I spoke up seriously.
"Stabilizing the Symbiote requires the same kind of contact that transferred it. Not once... several times, over the coming weeks, until your body has fully accepted it and the integration is complete." I said it plainly, no softening it, because she deserved the plain version. "I know that’s not what you wanted to hear. I know the timing of telling you is terrible. But you needed to know now rather than later."
The street was quiet around us. Somewhere distant, something moved through the ruins.
The silence stretched out long enough that I thought she might have simply decided not to respond at all, to file it away somewhere and deal with it later, or never if possible.
Then it landed. I could see the exact moment it did, her eyes widening slowly, her lips parting.
"W...what?"
"You heard me," I said quietly. "It won’t be just the once. Your body needs time to fully accept the Symbiote fragment and the integration won’t complete on its own, it needs to be stabilized through the same process that started it. A few more times, spread across the coming weeks. You’ll start feeling the discomfort within a few days as your body begins the changes, and when that happens you’ll need it." I felt like almost desperate in my tone as I tried to explain to her the necessity and that I wasn’t just screwing around. "That’s not something I can manage around or find a substitute for. That’s just what it requires...."
She was still staring at me speechless.
"I should have told you before," I said. "Before when I told you how its orks. You deserved to know the full picture before you agreed to any of it and I held that back because I didn’t know how to say it and I was running out of time and that was a bad call on my part. I’m sorry for that..."
I meant it. However necessary the sequence of events had been, she’d made a decision without the complete information and that wasn’t fair to her.
But would it have changed something I wonder...
If she knew she had to have several times sex with me, maybe she would have refused? But then once again, I wondered if her shame mattered more than her life. If she managed to accept to do it once to save her life, I wanted to believe that she would have accepted as well eventually perhaps more reluctantly, to do it a couple more times to save her life.
Maribel didn’t say anything.
Then she turned around.
"Maribel—"
"I’m going back alone." She cut me off.
"Alright," I said. I didn’t reach for her arm. Didn’t try to extend the conversation or justify anything further. She’d heard everything she needed to hear and the rest of it needed to happen inside her own head without me standing in the way of it.
She walked. I watched her go for a moment.
I stood there in the empty street and let her have it.
She needed the time. Everything that had happened in that building, the bite, the fear, the choice she’d made, and now this on top of all of it, that wasn’t something anyone processed in a single conversation on a grey street corner. She’d come out here following her own instincts and her own stubborn sense of what concerned her, and it had cost her something she couldn’t put back the way it was.
The least I could do was let her walk away without making it worse.
I turned in the opposite direction, choosing to take a small detour, giving her space.
